Most companies treat improvement like a compliance program. There, as a leader, CEO or a manager, you may frequently encounter a formidable enemy: the instinct to play it safe. You may make it neat and predictable… and then wonder why nothing changes. Sometimes management and employees immediately hit a wall: “this will never work here.” That’s playing it safe in its natural habitat.
The pursuit of continuous improvement – often guided by methodologies like Lean, Six Sigma, and Kaizen – is an endless quest for workplace perfection.
The ant colony theory
No one wants to get dirty or twist an ankle on something that “might not work”. But let us tell you one thing: to succeed in implementing a continuous improvement culture, organizations must ask themselves: is my organization smarter than an ant colony?
Before we get too comfortable talking about frameworks, roadmaps, and maturity models, let’s zoom out for a second. Nature has been running large, messy, distributed systems for millions of years without consultants, steering committees, or quarterly slide decks. No town halls. No strategy offsites. No approval chains. And somehow, it works.
One of the best examples is right under your feet – ants.
They don’t have titles, managers, or a five-year plan. Most of them are pretty useless on their own. Yet together, they build systems that survive floods, predators, and constant change. Not because they avoid risk, but because they allow small, safe failures and reward better paths when they appear. That simple logic is exactly where most organizations go wrong.
Their power lies in the whole colony. It balances two things at the same time: standard routes and enough wandering to find better routes. Most companies only keep the first half.
So is your organization smarter than an ant colony?
Don’t worry about answering this question right now. We bet you’ve never wondered how an actual ant colony behaves, but in this article you will know. And would be able to apply their behaviour into your organization to stop playing it safe all the time and let your people start a controlled rebellion.
Believe us – it’s worth it.
The peril of following the pheromone trail
In a standard ant colony, ants leave a pheromone trail when they find food, and others follow it, strengthening the trail over time. Similarly, organizations rely on procedures, standards, audits, and process maps to ensure that once a good way to do something is found, everyone follows that same path.
We have observed the pattern in office terms: once a team finds a workable route, they turn it into policy, then into audits, and then into “this is how we do it.” It scales delivery, but it also scales blindness.
While this strategy ensures stability, it is not an optimal strategy for improvement.
Playing it safe means strictly following the known trail, but true innovation requires disruption.
Let the rebellion begin… and thrive
In every ant colony, there are “ant anarchists” or “ant disruptors” who ignore the existing pheromone trail and venture their own way.
That “random search” behavior is the real engine of progress: some ants follow the trail, some go off-script. Organizations often hire “improvement people” and then try to force them to behave like auditors. That kills the point.
By going the same way over and over again, the result will be the same for a long time. Eventually, the source will drain and you will have to lose some time to find another.
Why not reach it faster?
The anarchists play a key role:
- They might find a shorter, safer, or more efficient route to the existing food source. If their new trail is better, it will eventually strengthen and become the default route.
- They might venture to a place no one has gone before and find a far more plentiful source of food, forever changing the colony’s fortunes.
Playing it safe and demanding conformity means missing out on these fundamental changes.
When new ideas hit old habits
Before improvement fails, it usually gets a label. One of the most common ones is “culture clash.” It sounds neutral, almost academic, but in practice it describes a very human reaction. An organization follows its protocols without deviation for years, sometimes decades. Then fresh ideas arrive from the outside, and suddenly even small changes trigger tension.
Try to imagine a company that has not seen outside leadership in a long time. A new manager, all in white, steps in and starts proposing simple improvements. Nothing radical. No big reorganization. Still, every suggestion turns into resistance. “We’ve never done it, is this good enough?” Meetings get tense. Explanations get defensive. The issue is not the ideas themselves, but the fact that they threaten the internal pheromone trail. The way things have always been done feels safer than any improvement, even when the current path no longer leads anywhere useful.
Why most problems come from just a few places
Most organizations love the idea of improvement, until they realize where the real problems sit. This is where the Pareto Principle quietly enters the room. It says that roughly 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of causes. In practice, that means most of your delays, errors, and frustrations are not spread evenly across the process. They pile up in a few places, over and over again.
The uncomfortable part is that those few places are usually well known. Everyone can point at them. The inbox that never clears. The approval step that always stalls. The report that needs three rounds of fixing. Yet teams spend most of their energy polishing the remaining 80 percent because it feels safer. It does not challenge habits or ownership.
Applied to continuous improvement, the Pareto Principle is a reminder to stop boiling the ocean. You do not need hundreds of changes to see results. You need the courage to focus on the small number of issues that hurt the most. That focus often creates tension, because fixing the “vital points” means questioning how work really gets done. But once those few constraints move, the impact is immediate and visible.
Questioning the status quo: the Fool Principle
Playing it safe often manifests as resistance to change, underpinned by the belief that “business processes are not like factory processes” and that accurate measurement or standardized improvement is impossible. This is often coupled with the phrase: “that’s just the way we’ve always done it”.
Here’s the time for an uncomfortable truth: sometimes “business processes are different” is just a polite way of saying “we never bothered to measure it, so don’t start now.” Continuous improvement still works in office work, but you need to treat office waste as real waste.
It requires challenging these perceived limitations. The Fool Principle encapsulates this idea: they didn’t know it was impossible, so they did it.
Your experience and knowledge can sometimes be your greatest enemy. You must be willing to question what you think you know, as it may no longer be true.
For example, staff in a scanning team were required to print PDF invoices, slap a barcode sticker on them, and then rescan them, believing the system needed the barcode for processing. Acting as “an act of rebellion,” they uploaded a PDF without a barcode, and it was processed correctly, proving that years of wasteful printing were not required.
Playing it safe prevents these key discoveries because it demands adherence to the rules, even the foolish ones.
Embracing controlled anarchy
To counter the safety-first mentality, organizations must create a culture that embraces controlled anarchy. This means providing different methodologies to address different needs and telling employees it is okay to be an anarchist.
“Controlled” means you don’t let chaos run the business. You set up simple rules that protect customers and systems, while still giving teams permission to change how work gets done.
There are three ways to encourage this “anarchy”:
Kaizen: this tells the whole organization they have the mandate to look at how things are being done and change them for the better, no matter how small the change is. The core principle is: “do what you can, with what you have, where you are”.
Kaizen is turned into a system, not a poster: a registry where a Kaizen is only counted once it’s actually implemented. This distinction is crucial in business processes, where office employees have more control over their daily tasks than factory workers and can often execute changes themselves. To make the culture real, recognition is personal – the highest-ranking leader in the center visits the winner’s desk unannounced to offer congratulations. Since this specific program was developed within an international airline group, the rewards were significant, including flight tickets for two to anywhere in the world for the “Kaizen of the Year”. Over three years, this approach led to 3,500 implemented Kaizens by 1,500 people, saving an estimated 12,000 hours per month. While the total number is massive, the impact of individual changes was often subtle; the median saving per Kaizen was just 1.5 hours, proving that a mountain of small improvements eventually creates a “dead cow” of efficiency.
Lean Action Workouts: addresses specific teams, dedicating three months to a project where every idea is treated seriously, and the team is told, “we are all antarchists”. This offers a chance to fundamentally change the way teams work through a “team-by-team” approach, breaking the “this won’t work here” reflex.
A vital part of this process is Visual Management through daily dashboard meetings. Although these boards often face the most resistance at first, they consistently become the highest-rated tool once the team sees their value in action. To ensure true autonomy, a strict rule is applied: after the first week, team leaders are no longer allowed to run the dashboard meetings – the team must take full ownership of the process to become truly self-managing.
Six Sigma: focuses on the best anarchist ants – those who have already demonstrated an internal drive through Kaizen or Lean action workouts. Rather than using standard, overly academic curriculum, the program was rebuilt to fit the realities of business processes. Because office data is often insufficient for complex mathematical models, advanced statistics were trimmed down and replaced with practical Lean tools that provide immediate value in an office environment. This ensures that the most capable “ants” are equipped with advanced tools that they will actually use to drive even bigger improvements.
Most importantly, implementing this culture requires anarchist ants at the top. Management must “walk the talk,” showing that improvement is a priority even when things are busy. In a culture of true continuous improvement, even a leader with a 12-hour workday will still find 15 minutes to visit an employee’s desk and celebrate a small change that challenges the status quo.
Summary
If you hear someone say, “that’s just the way we’ve always done it,” remember that is your cue to “grab a katana and politely ask why”.
Ready to embrace the real change?
