Concept
Hive Switch
The hive switch is Jonathan Haidt's name for the capacity, under certain conditions, to lose oneself in a group and work for it; in his phrase, humans are ninety percent chimp and ten percent bee.
Haidt sets out the idea in The Righteous Mind (2012) as part of what he calls groupishness. Most of the time people compete for advantage within the group. Under conditions of synchrony, shared focus and a quieting of the self, something shifts: Émile Durkheim's collective effervescence in shared ritual, the 'muscular bonding' the historian William McNeill felt in marching drill, awe in nature, a crowd singing together. For organisations Haidt suggests increasing similarity, using synchrony and creating competition between teams rather than between individuals. Two cautions apply. The evolutionary explanation he favours, selection acting on groups as well as individuals, is contested among biologists. And a hive can turn dismissive or hostile towards outsiders, so the switch is best used for goals people would endorse if they understood them fully.
A real-life example
The head nurse of an emergency department in Antalya replaces nurse-by-nurse workload comparisons with a standing handover for both shifts, one shared weekly waiting-time target on the wall and a friendly monthly comparison with another department. Within two months nurses are covering each other's breaks without being asked.
How to use it
- 1Replace one individual ranking with a shared target the whole team owns.
- 2Add a short ritual done together at the same time, rather than a rare large event.
- 3After a strong team moment, check how the team now treats people outside it.