This is a true story that reminds me a lot of DRTV media, and is very relevant for how we might consider strategy in an ever-changing world.

In 2010, Japanese and British researchers published a study in Science with a setup so simple it borders on insulting. They took a single-celled organism called Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold, though the word undersells what it’s about to do) and placed it in a flat dish. Around the edges, they arranged oat flakes in the geographic pattern of the towns surrounding Tokyo. They put a food source at the center. Then they watched.

Twenty-six hours later, the organism had grown into a network connecting every food source that closely resembled the actual Tokyo rail system. A network human engineers had spent decades and billions of dollars designing.

I know. Stay with me.

The slime mold has no brain. No nervous system. No neurons at all. It cannot think, plan, or strategize in any meaningful sense of those words. At the cellular level it is about as simple as living things get.

It solved overnight what took us a century.

Example of slime mold in a petry dish

What It’s Actually Doing

The slime mold isn’t smart. It’s responsive.

It follows two rules with absolute consistency: grow toward nutrients, abandon paths that don’t pay off. That’s the entire algorithm. No master plan. No project manager coordinating the tendrils. Just local responsiveness applied everywhere in the network at once.

What emerges from those two rules looks, from above, like sophisticated engineering. Redundant pathways that survive single-point failures. Efficient connections that minimize distance. Fault tolerance built in not by design but by how the network grew.

Illustration of slime mold mapping versus subway planning

The researchers weren’t only marveling. They were saying, pretty clearly, that Physarum‘s algorithm might be useful to us. That studying how it builds networks could help engineers design better infrastructure and better logistics. Their payment was oat flakes.

The Planning Problem

Every organization over a certain size eventually develops the Planning Apparatus.

Strategy decks. Quarterly reviews. Annual offsites where senior leaders gather to decide, in advance, what the organization will do and how it will do it. The assumption underlying all of it is that complex outcomes require complex coordination, and complex coordination requires someone seeing the whole picture and making deliberate choices about where resources go.

The slime mold suggests this assumption deserves scrutiny.

Planning isn’t useless. Humans aren’t slime molds, and organizations aren’t dishes of oat flakes. Real planning matters when the environment hasn’t formed yet, when regulatory ground is shifting, when the bet is capital-intensive enough that commitment has to precede feedback. But most of what the Planning Apparatus does isn’t that kind of work. It’s the ordinary work of moving an organization through an environment that is actively telling it what to do, if anyone is listening.

Reed Hastings didn’t plan Netflix’s arc from DVD-by-mail to streaming to original content to global media company. He responded, repeatedly, to what the environment was showing him. Amazon’s long-running internal principle of staying stubborn on vision and flexible on details is the same logic at different scale: keep the growth rule, abandon the paths that don’t pay off.

The slime mold would recognize this.

What Gets Built Without a Blueprint

The Tokyo rail network isn’t the only thing slime molds have designed.

Researchers have turned Physarum loose on the geographic constraints of ancient Roman road networks and found the organism builds something remarkably close to what Roman engineers did. Run the same experiment on the US interstate system or the backbone topology of the internet, and the patterns converge again. Efficient network topology has something like a right answer, and responsive systems find it whether or not they’re trying to.

This is humbling for anyone who has ever sat through a three-day strategy offsite. Which is most of us, at this point.

The network that emerges from genuine responsiveness, from paying attention to what’s working and killing what isn’t, often converges on the same place elaborate planning would have reached. Faster. With far less spent on coordination.

Thus, the slime mold doesn’t need alignment meetings because it is aligned with reality.

The Participation Connection

A cleaner illustration at human scale: Encyclopædia Britannica versus Wikipedia.

Britannica was the Planning Apparatus applied to knowledge. Expert editors. Centralized review. Quarterly updates. The structure was defensible on every conventional measure of quality control. Wikipedia was the slime mold. Millions of tendrils, each responsive only to the article in front of them, each abandoning edits that didn’t hold and reinforcing ones that did. No single tendril understood the encyclopedia it was building.

Britannica stopped printing in 2012. Wikipedia is now the default reference layer for most of the internet, including most AI systems currently being trained to replace it.

This is the participation principle at its most basic. When enough individual agents are genuinely responsive to their local environment, the system they compose develops capabilities none of them possess individually. The whole gets smarter than the sum of its parts, not because someone coordinated the parts, but because the parts were paying attention.

The brands that function this way, where employees, customers, and communities respond to each other rather than wait to be directed from a central point, develop a similar kind of intelligence. They catch cultural shifts earlier. They adapt faster. They find routes no planning process would have discovered, because no planning process had the local information to find them.

The slime mold doesn’t know what it’s building. But it builds well.

A Wild Time to Build

The Planning Apparatus was always a bit of a fiction. Right now, it’s a fiction nobody is pretending to believe.

Consider the macro variables most five-year plans depend on: interest rates, trade policy, and geopolitical alignment. All of them are volatile enough that plotting five years against them feels like a category error. AI is reshaping entire categories of work on a timeline nobody working inside it can confidently predict, including the people building the AI. Technology stacks that were stable for decades are getting rebuilt on twelve-month cycles. The environment isn’t telling us what to do next year. It’s barely telling us what to do next quarter.

This is a bad moment for the Planning Apparatus but a great moment for slime mold rules.

Grow toward nutrients. Abandon paths that don’t pay off. Run the experiment. Keep what works. Kill what doesn’t. Do it again. Stay alive long enough for the network to reveal itself.

It’s a wild time to build, and probably the best time to build in the history of humanity. Follow the slime mold’s two rules, and you’ll most likely be fine.

The Question Worth Asking

The researchers who ran the Tokyo study weren’t arguing we should replace urban planners with petri dishes. They were asking a stranger question: what can a system with no intelligence teach us about how intelligence works?

Their answer was that intelligence, at least in applied form, might be less about thinking and more about responsiveness. Less about having the right plan and more about having the right feedback loops. Less about someone at the top seeing the whole picture and more about everyone at the local level staying honest about what the environment is telling them.

A single-celled organism with no brain outplanned Tokyo because it never stopped responding to what was actually true.

Most organizations would do well to try the same thing.

NASA’s Artemis program has put the moon back in public conversation in a way it hasn’t been since Apollo. That felt like a reason to pull up something I wrote a while back, an essay about what celestial mechanics can teach us about participation.

The moon has never touched the ocean.

Think about that. The moon is 238,900 miles away. It has never made contact with a single drop of seawater. And yet, twice every day, the ocean moves toward it. Billions of gallons of water, rising and falling in perfect rhythm, pulled by something that has never pushed.

This is gravity. Pull, not push. This is what participation could look like if we stopped trying to force it.

The Doctrine of Push

Marketing has always been a pushing discipline.

Push messages into awareness. Push products into consideration. Push conversions through the funnel. The language is violent if you listen closely: impressions, penetration, reach, frequency. We’re trying to get inside, to break through, to force attention.

This made sense in an era of scarcity. When there were three TV channels and one newspaper, pushing your message into limited space was the only way to be heard. The push doctrine was a response to real constraints.

Those constraints are gone. There’s infinite space now: infinite channels, infinite content, infinite noise. And still we push. Harder and harder, louder and louder, more and more frequently. The budget goes up. The impressions increase. The actual engagement plateaus or declines.

The push model is exhausted. Pushing still works, somewhat. But everyone else is pushing too, and more force doesn’t help when the room is already full of force.

The moon suggests an alternative.

The Physics of Pull

Gravity is strange. It’s the weakest of the fundamental forces, trillions of times weaker than electromagnetism. And yet it shapes the universe. Galaxies form around it. Stars ignite because of it. The tides obey it absolutely.

How does something so weak have such power? Because it’s always on.

The moon doesn’t run campaigns. It pulls constantly, continuously, every second of every day. The force is tiny, imperceptible in any single moment. But it’s relentless. And over time, relentless tiny forces move oceans.

This is the physics of pull: constant presence over force, attraction over intrusion. Not loud. Not pushy. Creating conditions where the natural movement is toward you.

The push marketer asks: how do I force attention? The pull marketer asks: how do I create gravity?

What Creates Gravitational Pull?

The moon creates pull through mass. It’s a quarter the size of Earth, massive enough that its gravity extends across 238,900 miles to shape our oceans. No effort required. The pull is a consequence of what the moon is, not what the moon does.

Brands that create pull have analogous qualities, things they are rather than things they do.

Substance. You have to actually be something worth moving toward. The moon doesn’t create gravity through branding. It creates gravity through mass. Brands that pull have genuine weight: real expertise, real community, real value. The gravity is a consequence of substance, not a substitute for it.

Consistency. The moon doesn’t pull harder some days than others. The gravitational field is constant. Brands that pull show up reliably, present even when they’re not speaking. The pull is ambient, a background force that shapes behavior whether anyone’s paying attention or not.

Patience. Gravitational effects are slow. The tide doesn’t respond instantly. It builds over hours. Brands that try to create immediate pull from a single campaign are misunderstanding the physics. Real pull accumulates. It takes time for the water to move.

Distance. The moon pulls without touching. It doesn’t need to be in direct contact with the ocean to influence it. Brands that pull well understand that some distance is necessary. Too close and you’re not pulling. You’re pushing. The over-personalized notification, the re-targeting that follows you across every tab, the engagement prompt the moment you pause on a post — these feel like reach but they function like pressure. The space between is where the gravity works.

The Tidal Rhythm

The tide doesn’t just come in. It goes out. That’s not a failure of the moon’s marketing strategy. It’s how tidal systems work.

Every pull has a corresponding release. The ocean moves toward the moon, then recedes. High tide, low tide, high tide again. The rhythm is as important as the pull.

Brands that understand pull also understand release. They don’t try to keep customers in constant engagement. They create rhythms: periods of intensity followed by periods of rest. The tide comes in during a product launch, a community event, a seasonal campaign. Then it goes out. Then it comes back.

Constant push exhausts. A tidal rhythm gives people something to sync with instead. They know when to pay attention and when to rest. The predictability of the rhythm is part of the pull.

Entrainment

Living things sync with tidal rhythms.

Intertidal creatures, crabs, mussels, sea anemones, have internal clocks that match the tidal cycle. Even in a laboratory tank with no tidal variation, they continue to behave as if the tide were coming and going. The rhythm is that deeply embedded.

This is called entrainment: the synchronization of an organism’s rhythms with external cycles. We do it with the sun, with work weeks, with seasons, with content cycles. We’re built to sync with environmental cycles.

Brands that create reliable rhythms become entrainment points. Customers sync with the cadence of your communication, your releases, your community events. The rhythm becomes expected, anticipated, part of how they experience the year.

The entrainment creates loyalty that push can’t match. Pushed messages interrupt. Entrained rhythms integrate. You become part of how customers experience time itself.

Predicting the Pull

We can predict the tides centuries in advance.

The position of the moon, the sun, the shape of the coastline: calculable centuries out. We know when high tide will occur in any harbor on any date in 2200. Ships schedule their movements around it. Coastal communities plan their lives around it.

The reliability of the rhythm matters as much as the rhythm itself. Customers who know your cadence can plan around it. They can anticipate, prepare to engage, rather than being caught off-guard by a push they didn’t see coming. Predictability creates the conditions for willing participation.

The Moon’s Indifference

The strangest thing about the moon’s relationship with the ocean: the moon doesn’t care.

The moon isn’t trying to move the tides. It has no strategy, no goals, no metrics for ocean engagement. It’s just there, being massive, and the ocean responds. The pull is utterly impersonal.

I find this oddly liberating for thinking about brand gravity.

The most powerful pulls aren’t desperate. They’re not trying to engage you. They’re just being what they are, substantial, consistent, present, and the engagement follows. The neediness that characterizes so much marketing is anti-gravitational. Neediness collapses gravity. It pushes people away.

The moon doesn’t need the ocean to respond. It will continue being massive whether the tides obey or not. Brands with genuine gravity have a similar quality. They’re doing what they do because it’s what they are, not because they need your response to validate them.

This is different from indifference to customers. It’s more like confidence, a centeredness that doesn’t require constant external validation. The pull is a byproduct of substance, not a performance designed to extract reaction.

Learning from Celestial Mechanics

The moon teaches a few things about participation worth naming plainly.

Push interrupts. Pull accumulates. In the short term, push looks more effective. In the long term, pull moves oceans.

Gravity requires mass. You can’t create pull through tactics alone. You need substance: real value, real expertise, real community. The pull is a consequence of what you are, not what you say about yourself.

Rhythms matter. Tidal rhythms, not constant engagement. High tide, low tide. Activity, rest. Customers entrain to reliable cycles. Unpredictable pushing exhausts them.

Distance is necessary. The moon pulls precisely because it doesn’t push. The space between brand and customer is where gravitational attraction does its work. Too close and you’re not pulling. You’re pushing.

Patience is essential. Tides build over hours. Gravitational effects accumulate over cycles. If you’re measuring pull on a weekly basis, you’re measuring the wrong thing.

The moon never gave a presentation about its engagement strategy. We, however, build decks. It never optimized its approach based on quarterly metrics. It just showed up, massive and consistent, and the ocean moved. Participation followed.

Maybe that’s enough.

Every winter evening over the wetlands of Gretna Green, Scotland, something impossible happens.

A hundred thousand starlings rise from the reeds and begin to fly. Within seconds, they’re no longer individual birds but a single undulating mass; a shape-shifting cloud that wheels, contracts, expands, and flows like sentient smoke. The murmuration (yes, that’s the actual term) moves faster than any individual bird can process. It responds to predators before any single starling has seen them. It makes decisions without anyone deciding.

There is no leader.

No bird in charge. No chain of command. No strategy memo. Just a hundred thousand individuals following three simple rules, and from those rules: coherent, adaptive, breathtaking complexity.

Brands, at their best, work the same way ... or they should. The ones that endure aren’t controlled from the center so much as they’re animated from within.

The Physics of the Flock

In 1986, a computer graphics researcher named Craig Reynolds was trying to animate realistic flocking behavior for film. The problem seemed intractable: how do you coordinate thousands of individual agents without a central controller?

Reynolds’ breakthrough was realizing you don’t. Instead, give each agent three rules:

1. Separation: Avoid crowding your nearest neighbors.

2. Alignment: Steer toward the average heading of your nearest neighbors.

3. Cohesion: Move toward the average position of your nearest neighbors.

“The rules came from informal observation of the natural world, mostly in urban settings, occasionally out in the wild,” Reynolds told befores & afters magazine. “When I worked at [Information International Inc.] our building was adjacent to a large cemetery. Large flocks of blackbirds would forage in the acres of lawn there, occasionally taking flight and providing me with inspiration. I tried to mentally extract out elements of the motion, looking for ‘modular’ properties that were largely independent of each other. I came up with the three rules quickly, and was sure they were necessary, but until I actually tried it I would not know if they were sufficient.”

Three rules. No leader. No global view. Each bird pays attention only to the seven or so birds closest to it. And from this absurdly simple local behavior emerges the global complexity of the murmuration.

Reynolds called his simulated creatures “Boids.” They’ve been used in everything from “Batman Returns” to “The Lord of the Rings.” But Reynolds wasn’t just solving an animation problem. He was demonstrating a principle that nature had figured out long before we did.

Coherence doesn’t require command.

The murmuration isn’t decentralized, a term that implies a center that’s been distributed. It’s acentric. There is no center. There never was. The flock exists only as an emergent property of localized interactions. And somehow, it works better than any hierarchy could.

The 100-Page Confession

Now consider how most brands approach the same problem: getting a large group of people to act in ways that cohere.

How do they do it? They write a 100-page brand guidelines document. Exact Pantone colors, approved fonts, permissible photography styles, forbidden words. Approval workflows with multiple sign-offs. Brand police to catch violations. Every decision that might affect how the brand shows up in the world, centralized in one massive rulebook.

The brand guidelines document isn’t a failure of effort. It’s a failure of imagination. It assumes coherence requires control in that if you don’t specify everything, chaos will ensue. And so the organization makes every decision in advance, leaving its people to execute rather than think. The intentions are good. The underlying belief is the problem.

Specify everything, and you might get something worse than chaos. You get rigidity. Lifelessness. A brand that can’t adapt to cultural moments because every adaptation requires committee approval. Employees who follow rules rather than instinct. A flock that moves in formation but can’t respond to obstacles until the leader gives approval.

The murmuration responds to a hawk faster than any individual starling’s nervous system can process the threat. The collective sees what no individual can. It flows with the air currents and thermals in the most energy-efficient way possible. This is the miracle of emergent behavior: the whole becomes literally smarter than the sum of its parts.

A 100-page guidelines document doesn’t protect the brand. It insulates the brand from the very people who bring it to life.

The Brand Grammar

So what’s the alternative?

The murmuration suggests an answer: simple rules, locally applied.

Think of it as brand grammar rather than brand guidelines. Grammar doesn’t tell you what to say; it tells you how to say things so others can understand you. It creates coherence without constraining content. You can write a love letter or a legal brief using the same grammar, and both will be recognizably English. Both will make sense to the reader.

A brand grammar might look like this:

Alignment: Every communication should move toward our shared purpose. Separation: Every creator maintains their own voice within that purpose. Cohesion: Every piece should add value to the pieces around it.

Notice what’s missing: No approved color palettes. No specified fonts. No list of forbidden words. Those aren’t elements of grammar, though they may seem that way on the surface. They’re restrictions. They test whether you’ve memorized the rules, not whether you understand the language.

The brand manager’s job, in this model, isn’t to direct the flock. It’s to set the physics. Establish the simple rules that, when everyone follows them locally, produce global coherence. Then get out of the way.

The Seven Nearest Neighbors

The part of switching to the “brand grammar” model that makes traditional marketers nervous: in a murmuration, no bird is watching the whole flock.

Each starling tracks only its seven nearest neighbors. That’s the entire scope of its awareness. It has no idea what the flock is doing on the other side of the sky. It doesn’t need to know. The global pattern emerges from local interactions, and only from local interactions.

For brands, this is deeply counterintuitive. We’ve built entire organizations around the idea that someone needs to see the whole picture. The CMO. The brand council. The executive committee. Someone, somewhere, must be watching the entire flock and keeping it coherent.

The murmuration says otherwise. In a murmuration, your seven neighbors overlap with their seven neighbors, who overlap with theirs. Information cascades across the entire system through these overlapping local connections. That’s what makes it so fast: no one needs to route a message through a central hub. Coherence emerges from the quality of local interactions, not from centralized oversight. If every employee is paying attention to the seven people they work with most closely — if those interactions are aligned, separated, cohesive — the organization will cohere.

This is also how culture actually spreads. Not through all-hands meetings or CEO emails, but through daily interactions between people who sit near each other. The new hire doesn’t learn the brand from the guidelines document. They learn it from the seven people they talk to most often. If those people embody the brand, the new hire will too. If they don’t, no document will save you.

Stop trying to broadcast to the whole flock. Start improving the quality of local interactions. Make sure the seven nearest neighbors are aligned. The rest follows.

What Happens at the Edge

The edge of a murmuration is where all the interesting things happen.

It’s where predators strike — a peregrine falcon diving into the flock. It’s also where innovation occurs — individual birds trying new directions, some of which catch on and ripple through the whole. The edge is simultaneously the most dangerous and the most generative part of the system.

Most brand architectures try to eliminate that edge. Everyone safely in the middle, following the same rules, producing the same outputs. Consistency at all costs. But a flock with no edge is a sitting target.

The healthiest murmurations maintain a dynamic edge of birds cycling from center to periphery and back again. Edge-dwellers bring new information into the system. The center provides stability and memory. The constant circulation between them keeps the flock both coherent and adaptive.

For brands, this means deliberately cultivating edge-dwellers. Employees, creators, customers who aren’t in the center of brand orthodoxy but aren’t outside it either. Outliers and extreme cases with weird ideas and strong opinions. They’re the early sensors who notice cultural shifts. The experiments that might become new directions. The immune system that keeps the brand from becoming too rigid to survive.

Red Bull understood this intuitively. Their brand has coherence; it’s unmistakably Red Bull, but the edges are wild. Extreme sports, music festivals, content studios, a Formula 1 team. Each edge venture brings information back to the center. The flock stays coherent because it keeps moving.

The Trick of Letting Go

I train Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Have for over twenty years. One of the trickier transitions in the art is from gi to no-gi. Transitioning from training with the traditional jacket and pants to training in just shorts and a rashguard.

In gi training, you have grips. The collar, the lapel. You can grab the fabric of your opponent’s jacket and control their movement. Hold positions. Force outcomes. The gi creates handles, and handles create control.

No-gi removes the handles. Everything becomes dynamic, fluid, slippery. You can’t hold positions, you can only flow between them. You can’t force outcomes; you can only influence tendencies.

No-gi is the murmuration.

The transition is real. Everything you’ve relied on for control disappears. You feel out of sync, a step behind. But eventually, if you stay with it, something else emerges. You stop trying to control your opponent and start trying to harmonize with them. You stop gripping and start flowing. You realize the match was never a contest between two controllers. It was always a conversation between two adapters.

Brand leaders face the same adjustment. The 100-page document is the gi, full of handles and full of control points. Letting go of it feels like madness. But the murmuration doesn’t need handles. It needs rules simple enough to internalize, applied to the seven nearest neighbors, with trust that coherence will emerge.

The first step is always the hardest: accepting that control was an illusion anyway.

The First Bird Problem

There’s a question that haunts every murmuration model: who was the first bird?

If coherence emerges from local interactions, and local interactions depend on existing neighbors, how did the flock ever start? Didn’t someone have to lead? Wasn’t there an original vision, a founder’s intent, a first bird who showed everyone else how to fly?

Maybe. But here’s what the biology shows: even if there was a first bird, that bird is now irrelevant. The murmuration doesn’t depend on the founder’s continued participation. It doesn’t reference the original vision. It doesn’t even know there was a first bird. The flock has become self-sustaining, generating coherence from its own internal dynamics.

The healthiest brands reach this point. They cohere not because they’re still following the founder’s guidelines, but because the culture has become self-organizing. The rules have been internalized, not merely memorized. There’s a difference. Memorized means you can recite the brand values on command. Internalized means you make decisions the brand values would approve of, even in situations the guidelines never anticipated. Memorized is the test. Internalized is the fluency. And the rules here have been internalized so deeply that no one thinks about them anymore. The seven nearest neighbors all fly the same way, and so does everyone else.

This is the goal: a brand that doesn’t need a commander. A flock that can murmur without a first bird. A culture so coherent that the guidelines document feels redundant because everyone already knows how to fly.

Set the physics. Trust the flock. And fly.

Fun fact: The most sophisticated human organizations consistently get outperformed by brainless insects.

Not in some narrow, specialized way. Across the board. In every imaginable type of complex problem-solving. Ant colonies optimize foraging routes faster than algorithms designed by computer scientists. They allocate labor more efficiently than most HR departments. They build climate-controlled structures that would challenge architects. They’ve been running successful operations for 140 million years.

And they do all of it without putting anyone in charge.

No CEO. No strategy deck. No all-hands meeting. No OKRs. Just millions of individuals following local rules, leaving traces in the environment, and somehow producing collective intelligence that exceeds what any individual ant could comprehend.

The mechanism is called stigmergy. And it’s the oldest participation architecture on Earth.

The Communication That Isn’t

The word “stigmergy” was coined in 1959 by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé, who was studying one of nature’s most confounding mysteries: how termites, with brains smaller than a grain of sand and no foreman barking orders, could construct towering mounds of ventilated chambers, spiraling tunnels, and arched galleries. The term he created derives from Greek: stigma (mark, sign) and ergon (work, action). Literally, communication through the traces left in the environment. Grassé soon saw that the same behaviors were present in both termites and ants.

Here’s how it works: A forager leaves the nest. She wanders semi-randomly until she finds food. On her return journey, she deposits pheromones along her path. These traces evaporate over time. But if she’s found a good food source, she’ll return quickly, doubling up her pheromone markers, and her trail will be strong when the next forager encounters it.

That next forager doesn’t receive instructions. She just encounters someone else’s pheromone gradient and follows it. If the trail leads to food, she reinforces it on her return. If the food is gone, she doesn’t. The trail evaporates.

The ants aren’t communicating with each other. They’re communicating through their environment. The trail itself becomes the message, and the message is constantly updated by the collective behavior of everyone who encounters it.

We imagine communication as something that must be facilitated by active senders and receivers. Speakers and listeners. Broadcasts and audiences. Stigmergy has none of this. There’s no sender, only traces. No receiver, only response. The communication is merged with the medium itself.

The Queen Isn’t In Charge

What about the queen ant, you ask?

Well, she doesn’t rule. She doesn’t command. She doesn’t set strategy or make decisions for the colony. She lays eggs. That’s her entire function. The word “queen” is a projection of human hierarchy onto a system that operates by completely different logic.

The intelligence of an ant colony has no address. It doesn’t reside in any individual, no matter how critical their biological function. It’s distributed across the entire system, encoded in pheromone trails left in tunnels, in the behavioral responses triggered when one ant encounters another’s chemical signature, in the aggregate patterns that emerge from millions of local decisions.

This is what makes stigmergy so unsettling for anyone trained in command-and-control thinking: coordination happens without a coordinator. Strategy emerges without a strategist. The colony adapts to threats, exploits opportunities, and optimizes complex operations through a distributed decision-making system where individual contributions compound into collective intelligence without anyone orchestrating the whole.

This should fundamentally reshape how we think about building participatory systems. Maybe coordination doesn’t require command. Maybe strategy can emerge from traces rather than directives. Maybe the organism that lays the eggs isn’t the organism that runs the show.

The Desire Path

Stigmergy shows up outside of termite mounds and ant hills. One example from the human world is an urban planning disruptor called the desire path.

It works like this: a university builds a new quad. Architects design elegant paved walkways connecting buildings at right angles. Students ignore the paths and cut across the grass diagonally to get to their destinations quicker. Over time, their footsteps wear a trail into the lawn. The path they actually wanted, as opposed to the path that was designed for them.

These paths aren’t confined to campuses, of course. They show up anywhere engineering clashes with expediency. Last year I stayed at a boutique hotel near a surf break in Santa Catalina, Panama. The owners had put real effort into the grounds. Stone paths winding through flowers, carefully designed circulation. But the first thing I noticed were the secondary trails. No stones. No flowers. Just trampled grass cutting between the designed routes. They felt more natural, more direct. I followed them everywhere without thinking about it.

The desire path is human stigmergy. Each student flattens the grass. The next sees it and follows, deepening the trail. No one coordinates. No one plans. The optimal route emerges from accumulated behavior.

This is what brands could be doing but mostly aren’t.

Instead of broadcasting messages at customers (”walk this way, on the paths we’ve designed”), brands could be reading the trails customers are already leaving. Where do they click? What do they search? What do they ask each other in forums? What workarounds have they invented? These are pheromone trails, desire paths in the landscape of your product. They’re telling you where the real value is.

But reading trails requires a different posture than broadcasting. You have to pay attention to the environment rather than filling it with your message. You have to trust that customers know something you don’t. You have to be willing to acknowledge and formalize the paths they’ve chosen rather than insisting on the paths you planned.

Most brands are too busy talking to notice what the trails are saying.

Amazon Reviews as Pheromone

Brands that aren’t ready to use stigmergy to understand customer desires can still benefit from the mechanism in other ways. Consider Amazon reviews, trails of communication that influence buying decisions every hour of every day.

A customer buys a product. Has an experience. Leaves a review. That review sits there in the environment, a trace of their activity. The next customer encounters it, not as a direct communication, but as a gradient. Five stars, good reviews, the trail is strong. One star, warnings about quality, the trail is weak or negative.

No one is coordinating this. Amazon isn’t telling customers what to think. Reviewers aren’t addressing future buyers directly. The communication is stigmergic: traces left in the environment that shape subsequent behavior.

The review system works because it mirrors ant colony dynamics. Good products generate positive trails that attract more buyers who leave more positive trails. Bad products generate negative trails that repel buyers. The system is self-correcting through environmental feedback. Wikipedia works the same way: edits as pheromones, vandalism triggering correction, the encyclopedia emerging from millions of traces left by millions of contributors.

When these systems break, they break like corrupted pheromone trails. Fake reviews are false signals laid deliberately to mislead. Amazon’s endless war against fraudulent reviews is really a war to maintain stigmergic integrity because once the environmental signals become unreliable, the entire coordination mechanism collapses. Which raises a critical question: if these trails are so powerful, why don’t they last forever?

The Conundrum of Evaporation

Ant biologists have long known that pheromone trails evaporate.

This seems like a flaw. Why would evolution design a communication system that destroys its own messages? But evaporation is the feature, not the flaw. It’s what makes the system adaptive.

If trails never evaporated, the colony would be paralyzed by outdated information. Every path ever taken would be marked forever. The environment would become saturated with conflicting signals. The ants couldn’t distinguish between “food was here last week” and “food is here now.”

Evaporation creates recency. Fresh trails are strong; old trails fade. The system naturally weights toward current information. When food sources are depleted, the trails leading to them disappear. When new sources appear, new trails emerge. The environment is constantly updating.

Brand participation has the same dynamic. Customer enthusiasm evaporates. Community engagement fades if not encouraged. The review from three years ago becomes less relevant than the review from last month. Participation needs continuous refreshment or the trails go cold.

This is why “launch and leave” participation strategies fail. You can build a community, seed a forum, create a UGC campaign. But if you don’t maintain the trails, they evaporate. The environment returns to blank. The customers who might have followed the path find nothing to follow.

Ants don’t stop laying pheromones once they’ve found food. They refresh the trail with every journey. Participation requires the same discipline: continuous deposit, continuous renewal, continuous presence in the environment.

The Trail Is the Strategy

Remember that ant colony outperforming your organization? Here’s what its members understand that most brands don’t: you can’t not leave trails.

Every customer interaction deposits a trace in the environment. Every email response time. Every packaging detail. Every support call resolution. They’re all pheromone trails shaping how the next customer will navigate your brand.

The question isn’t whether to create a stigmergic system. You already have one. The question is whether you’re literate enough to read it.

Most brands operate like urban planners insisting students use the rectangular paths while ignoring the desire paths worn into the grass. They debate strategy in conference rooms while the environment outside screams its truth to anyone willing to listen. Reviews, support tickets, forum questions, usage patterns, abandoned carts … all brimming with relevant but overlooked insights.

The stigmergic approach inverts traditional brand strategy. Instead of designing the path and forcing traffic onto it, you observe where traffic naturally flows and formalize those routes. Instead of broadcasting what you want customers to believe, you amplify what customers are already demonstrating through their behavior. The trails become your strategy document, constantly updating, immune to quarterly planning lag.

What would it mean to run your brand more like an ant colony? To let product development follow the desire paths in your usage data. To let enthusiastic users leave trails that attract similar users, creating self-reinforcing loops of engagement that require no ad spend. The mechanisms already exist. In Reddit communities where expertise compounds, in GitHub repos where improvements stack without coordination, in Discord servers where newcomers learn from the residue of previous conversations.

​Your job isn’t to prevent this. It’s to recognize it, enable it, and occasionally pave the paths that emerge.

The colony doesn’t wait for commands from above. It reads the environment and responds.

Maybe your brand should, too.

SOURCES:

Theraulaz, Guy, and Eric Bonabeau. “A Brief History of Stigmergy.” Artificial Life 5, no. 2 (1999): 97–116. https://doi.org/10.1162/106454699568700