How is it possible for a small number of newcomers to displace a
well-established group of leaders?
That’s not just a question for military organizations wanting to
overthrow governments; it’s a question for political parties controlling national
debates, new products displacing well-established market leaders, and
flocking birds following leaders to new food sources.
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Social scientists have studied the nature of effective leadership
for centuries with limited success. Physicists, on the other hand,
are new to the party, which gives them a chance to nab some
low-hanging fruit. Today, Hai-Tao Zhang at the University of
Cambridge, in the U.K., and a few buddies say that they have grabbed a
particularly juicy piece by revealing a key strategy of effective leadership.
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One way to model leadership (or flocking, as ornithologists call
it) is to create a computer-based swarm of individuals who follow the
average movement of those around them. When you introduce a small
number of leaders who all move in a certain direction–to the right,
say–the swarm tends to follow the leaders.
How, then, can a smaller number of left-moving leaders take control
of the swarm? At first glance, it looks as if they can’t. But Hai-Tao
Zhang and buddies prove otherwise. They identify two new qualities of
leadership that determine the result. The first is the ability to
distribute a leader’s influence to as many followers within a given
time. The second is the ability to be sufficiently persuasive to
change and hold the allegiance of followers who they can influence.
When these factors come into play, the balance of power depends on
the distribution of leaders. What Hai-Tao Zhang and pals show is that
it is possible for power seekers to spread their influence to as many
followers as possible in a given time and to accumulate enough power
to govern these followers. This allows the power seekers to defeat
the dominating leaders solely by optimizing their distribution
pattern, even when they are fewer in number than their opposition.
So the key to seizing power, or at least gaining a significant
foothold, is the effective distribution of a small number of leaders
within a larger group. “A better distribution pattern has larger
influential region and greater clustering factor, which can equip the
leaders with the capability of influencing more followers in a given
period and strengthening the persuasion power on the followers as
well,” says the team.
That’s an interesting idea that may explain the
effectiveness of Internet-based grassroots campaigns, both political and
commercial, which we have seen in recent years. The
take-home point here is that it’s not just what you’re saying that’s
important: it’s how you distribute your message.
This kind of thinking could have a profound effect on everything
from grassroots movements to guerrilla marketing to the way that big
companies are run.
And of course, there may be an interest in the next iteration of
this idea in which established leaders ask how they can maintain a
status quo given the infiltration of a small number of power-seeking
interlopers.