For a number of years I kept an Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm® in my office. It was just the small size with a few mini modules plugged into it with a length of plastic tubing.  As a typical brooding Systems Administrator, the primary purpose the ants served was to establish my nerd street cred beyond any shadow of a doubt.  Of course if the ants didn’t convince some one that I was more than qualified ...

For a number of years I kept an Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm® in my office. It was just the small size with a few mini modules plugged into it with a length of plastic tubing.  As a typical brooding Systems Administrator, the primary purpose the ants served was to establish my nerd street cred beyond any shadow of a doubt.  Of course if the ants didn’t convince some one that I was more than qualified to make decisions about the fate of their precious data, there were another three dozen random objects scattered around my cube that could suffice in a pinch, but the ants were the main attraction.

I’ve always loved ants.  Just the big harvester or carpenter types however.  When I was a kid we had a huge anthill in our back yard and I would just sit and watch the ants dig and carry seeds for hours.  When my dad started building a swimming pool and dug up the ant hill with a back hoe, I literally bawled for hours.  That said, I loath those little tiny little guys that swarm into your house by the tens of millions the minute it gets cold outside or someone opens a can of soda-pop.  I’ll take a can of Raid to those buggers in a heart beat.

Anyway, the ants in the Ant Farm® would happily dig away, always seeming to know exactly what they were doing. In spite of this perceived coordination, they somehow managed to keep blocking passages that one of their fellow workers had just struggled to open up. Some of the main tunnels appeared to be “off-limits” to any redesign efforts, but others were constantly changing.  I found it amusing to come into work one morning and find the tunnel that had been freshly dug yesterday was now being used to store the sand from the tunnel they had filled up the day before. This seemed to occur on both the horizontal and vertical axis. Needless to say watching them haul sand up and down seemed a lot more difficult than simply schlepping it from side to side.

Time passed and I eventually transitioned from an individual contributor and into a first line manager role.  Still an ant herder, I had restocked farm several times with new occupants over the years.  I was in my office one day stewing over a dilemma that had me stuck in a holding pattern for almost a month.   Another department head and I weren’t seeing eye to eye.   I’d say go right, he’d say go left. I’d say up, he’d say down. Our discussions were simply going in circles. He just didn’t get it. 

I got up from my desk and wandered over to look at the ants.  There they were, back filling a tunnel that they had dug the day before.  Each ant was busily working away, picking up grains of sand, dragging them through one of the main tunnels, across to the other side.  After placing each grain carefully in a particular spot like a tightly fit jigsaw puzzle, off they’d go to pick up another one.  Watching one particular ant make several round trips, it occurred to me that the approach I was taking towards the other department head wasn’t much different:  Back and forth, back and forth, knowing that I’d be doing the same thing again tomorrow.  I went back to my desk and set up an appointment to meet with the other department head that afternoon.

When we met that afternoon, I didn’t bring the usual bundle of justifications for doing what I wanted to do.  In fact I didn’t bring anything… except an open mind and a different take on the conversation.   “Obviously I don’t get it”, I said, “I keep trying to defend my position, rather than try to understand yours.   Show me what you want this to look like when it is all done.”  

  The other manager stared at me quizzically for a couple of seconds, clearly stunned and more than a little suspicious.  He went to the white board and started scribbling a diagram, explaining as he went.  When he was through I asked why a specific item was so important to him.  He said that there were a suite of post processing tools that were dependent on that particular set of data and if it wasn’t available they couldn’t ship product. 

Just like the ants, it seemed like there was a coordinated master plan, when in fact we were operating at cross purposes. Basically my proposal as it stood was the ant equivalent of blocking off one of the main tunnels.

From that point in the discussion, we made more progress in an hour than we had in several weeks.  Instead of us both staunchly defending our positions, I understood his concerns with the project and he in turn began to understand mine.  We were able to brain storm a couple of workarounds which allowed him to keep his business running and me to move forward with my program.  It involved more work for both his team and mine, but the extra effort was well worth it.  

Best of all, we stopped moving the sand from one side of the farm to the other, and ended up with a new main tunnel.