I’m going to do something I think I’ve never done before…I’m going to make a video game analogy. So unless you’ve played Starcraft or Warcraft or some other strategy game, you might want to go watch a YouTube video on the game. Alternatively, I think you can use chess or checkers as an example, we shall see.

Anyway, regarding a game like Starcraft, you have units (or pieces in chess) that make up your army. Now, if in the course of a game, a single zergling or marine is destroyed (or a single pawn is captured) you probably don’t think too much of it. After all, it’s just one unimportant piece. But if you start to lose a LOT of zerglings, or a LOT of marines (or a LOT of pawns) then suddenly you start to get worried.

So, are the individual units or pieces important, or not? I’ve seen ants and bees do things like dig tunnels or collect pollen, and each individual insect only moves like a couple grains of sand or pollen at a time. But when you’ve got 10,000 of them working, suddenly you’ve got an impact.

Every day at work, especially in a large organization, it can be really easy to feel like a single bee, or ant, or zergling, or pawn. Relative to the size of the company, you are only moving a couple of grains of sand. But combined with everyone else and now you have the capability to build and create and do significant things.

However, this only works if everyone does their part, and everything is in sync. The ants can only dig a tunnel if they are all moving grains of sand together, in the same place. A single marine in Starcraft may not be that important but a whole group of them can control an area of the map, but only if they stay together. This is similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma; could you not do your part and wander off and work on your own thing? If only one person does this, it may not have a noticeable impact on the team. But what if everyone decided to not do their part, or wander off and do their own thing? Now your organization is not being effective.

So, in order for all this to work, you need two things. You need 1) the individuals who are working together and doing their part, and 2) a common vision or strategy that they are working on together. As you think about working on those 2 things, remember that the common vision or strategy may not be yours. You might be a leader of a team, but your team still needs to be aligned with the other teams, or you may find yourself trying to dig a tunnel out away from everyone else and not making any impact.