Throughout the natural world, individual creatures respond to the multiple demands and dangers of their environment with astonishing examples of self-organizing behavior. The rapid coordinated movements of immense swarms of birds or schools of fish are governed by a consummate choreography founded on just a handful of ground rules. As termites build their artistic mounds they are guided not by hierarchies but by hormones. Herds of deer all flee when the majority - not the alpha stag - provide the cue. In a business setting, instead of ignoring or suppressing such forces of self-organization, managers do well to recognize and channel them.

It's a winter evening by a water hole in southern Africa's Okavango Delta. The hippos are lounging eyeball-deep. The sun drops earthward, painting an orange stripe across the horizon, and suddenly a river of small birds comes streaming in, tens of thousands of them packed close together, swerving and undulating like a single fluid organism. Big red-necked falcons dive into the stream, plucking out birds for dinner. At each attack, the flock pulses out to the opposite side. These sudden evasive maneuvers occur, like all the flock's movements, in utter unison.

How do they do it? How does a flock of birds, a school of fish, a herd of wildebeest, or a swarm of insects achieve that perfect choreography? Who calls the tune? Human observers have long assumed that such synchrony requires centralized control, some underappreciated vice president for pitch and yaw, perhaps. Or, given that a school of herring can stretch 17 miles and include millions of individuals, maybe a whole hierarchy of flight controllers, school disciplinarians, ward captains and tail-nippers. But this assumption turns out to be wrong.

The secret of perfect harmony

The individuals in flocks and schools largely figure out what to do next on their own, without anyone telling them how or when. Scientists call it self-organizing behavior: Perfect harmony somehow arises out of thousands of individuals acting independently, often by simply imitating their neighbors. Complex structures get built by animals blindly obeying a few elementary rules coded into their genes. This probably should not be as surprising as it seems. What kind of hierarchy, after all, is quick enough to orchestrate instantaneous synchronized reactions to momentary threats like the dive-bombing falcons?

The problem in the past was that no one could figure out any mechanism, other than central control, to explain this synchrony. The alternative idea that complex behaviors could happen without control, by self-organization, only began to evolve in the 1950s. Scientists started by looking at the ways simple chemical and physical reactions can create complex patterns, like the wind-rippling of dunes, or the array of hexagonal cells moving across the surface of the oil in an evenly-heated pan. Others extended the search for such self-organized behaviors into the animal world, beginning with ants, bees, and other social insects.

One lightbulb moment for popular understanding came in the mid-1980s, when Craig Reynolds, an expert in computer animation of complex behaviors, set out to replicate the way a flock of birds darts and weaves across the sky. Biologists had by then come to think that the individuals in flocks were responding not to some higher authority, but to the movements of other individuals in their immediate vicinity. Reynolds found that he could make computerized bird-oids, or boids, demonstrate all the flight behaviors of a flock by programming them to follow three simple rules: Avoid collisions with nearby flockmates. Match their speed and heading. And stay close. The resulting flocks were realistic enough in their banking and diving, their mercurial and yet seemingly choreographed flashes of movement, to fool even ornithologists.

No blueprints, no supervisors

Self-organizing behaviors have turned up everywhere in the natural world. Termite mounds are among the most astonishing results. They stand, some of them five meters tall, like weird druidic monuments. Each mound rises from a broad pyramidal base, sometimes narrowing into a finger of clay. These mounds are masterpieces of engineering. If termites were the size of humans, their largest mounds would be triple the height of our tallest skyscrapers and almost as complex: Smooth, sculpted tunnels run up through the walls of each mound, from base to tip. They serve as ventilation systems, allowing the mound to exhale carbon dioxide and inhale air. Other tunnels radiate out for 50 meters into the surrounding landscape, providing shelter for the termites as they forage.

Deep within the mound, the central chamber is like the assembly plant of some demented genius in a James Bond movie. The chamber contains a halfdozen clay shelves, where orange, fibrous structures like honeycombs stand on stubby little feet. It's a garden without sunlight. The termites grow a fungus here and use it to pre-digest the tough, dried grass they bring in for food.

These incredibly complex structures, each housing a small city of more than a million individuals, enable the termites to dominate the African wilderness around them. The termites eat more grass than all the wildebeests, Cape buffalo, and other savanna mammals put together. But the real wonder is that there is no demented genius running the show: The termites do it all without any blueprints or supervisors.

The snowball effect

To understand how the termites get started, a French researcher named Pierre-Paul Grasse once removed termite workers from the wild and put them in a dish lined with an even layer of soil. Like any new group of humans, the termites went through "la phase d'incoordination", with nobody quite sure what they were doing. But irregularities eventually developed in the soil surface and one pellet deposited by a termite provided "an attractive stimulus for the deposition of yet another pellet", according to Self-Organization in Biological Systems (Princeton, 2001) by Scott Camazine and co-authors. "Once a critical density of pellets rises from the initial featureless plain, a snowballing effect takes control and the coordinated phase of activity ensues with many workers all building in the same place."

The termites still don't know what they are doing, or where they are going. But the workers pile up their pellets mouthful by mouthful, cementing grains of sand into place with their saliva. The saliva contains an attractive pheromone, which causes other workers to come and add to the pile. This positive feedback loop builds into a construction frenzy. Columns of dirt rise up, expand into walls, and get roofed over, and the mound begins to form. The actual shape of different structures arises spontaneously, not from any blueprint, but from the influence of physical and chemical factors, and the size of the termites' bodies.

Scott Turner, a physiologist at the State University of New York, routinely digs into termite mounds in southern Africa and studies how the termites repair the damage afterward. The disturbance causes a change in the atmosphere of the mound, he says, and that change causes workers to rush forward and pile up pellets of dirt on the damaged wall. The initial repair is a "spongy build" riddled with tunnels. But as the tunnels get capped off, the concentration of the workers' own attractive pheromone builds up and the termites pack the area with dirt. A week or two later, the wall of the mound is as solid as if no disturbance had ever occurred, all without anyone ever having said, "Fix this problem."

Democracy beats hierarchy

Even in species with clear hierarchies and relatively high intelligence, animals seem to have a surprising knack for self-organizing behavior. Some researchers call it democracy: For example, red deer generally move not when the alpha stag says so, but when roughly 60 percent of the adults "vote" by standing up and looking restless. Whooper swans signal the urge to fly with movements of their heads, and the group actually takes off when these signals rise to a certain threshold of intensity. Even gorillas generally decide to move based on the calling of a majority of the adults in a group - so much for that legendary autocrat, the 800-pound gorilla.

These species all have clear hierarchies. But research by Larissa Conradt and Tim Roper at the University of Sussex suggests that it's often just too costly for dominant individuals to impose their will on the group. High-ranking animals may sometimes manage to steer group behaviors in a particular direction, or they may exploit the behaviors of a group, but they seldom dictate what those behaviors will be.

And in humans? We also clearly self-organize in certain circumstances. For instance, women who work close together unconsciously engage in a kind of pheromonal conversation, gradually drawing one another's menstrual cycles into synchrony. No one knows why. On a walk, we often match each other's stride so closely that armies traditionally learned to break step when crossing a bridge, lest they vibrate it to the point of collapse.

We are not termites of course. We can think about what we are doing and invent better ways of doing it, sometimes with the help of strong leadership. But in other circumstances, complex products and behaviors seem to emerge with little or no leadership. For example, the Linux computer operating system has evolved from the work of hundreds of independent programmers scattered around the globe.

The delicate interplay between what hierarchies want and what groups are actually willing to do is a fact of life in every workplace. For instance, when people at a meeting begin to rustle their papers, or place their hands flat on the table, this ought to be as clear a message as the voting of a herd of red deer: This meeting has already gone on too long. It's time to move. Managers ignore such self-organizing behaviors at their own considerable peril.