The word ‘Death’ is in there with good reason – no ants will survive this. Over time thousands upon thousands of ants join and follow the loop, forming a large, shifting, writhing and spinning mass of legs and mandibles. The ant loops around in a circle and is now stuck in a loop, so are the ants following it and furthermore all of the ants following them. One leading ant, no different from any other, makes an error, it turns off the path and keeps going in a circle until it meets its own stream – and as we all know you should nevercross streams. This is a good system, and it works as every ant lays down a stream of these chemicals so no ants lose the scent, unfortunately things can go wrong. You see, the blind ants cannot navigate back to their colony on their own, so instead each one follows a scent trail which is a stream of chemicals coming from the ant in front saying to the ant, ‘This way!’ They are often found on pavements or other smooth surfaces in Uruguay, Argentina and other South American countries.ĭeath Spirals only affect ants especially dependent on scent trails. Worker ants are manipulated in this manner to evidence the personal worth and self-interested development of senior ants.FACT: Ants are wonderfully strong, durable and efficient creatures, unfortunately whilst the colonies are smart, the individual ants are not, meaning that stupid things such as circular milling a.k.a ‘Death Spirals’ can occur. The worker ants are told “your highly sought-after place in the pile isn’t totally secure but, as it’s all warm and cozy, you would be well advised to keep quiet and get on with it.” When workers question the raison d’être of these senior ants they’re usually gagged. Senior ants fail to support their workers, they fail to brief and train them correctly and they also manipulate statistics and use PR sound bite opportunities for personal gain. Its symptoms manifest themselves in the following manner senior ants keep worker ants in the dark and feed them a constant diet of bullshit, with monotonous regularity. Many ants are ‘carriers’ of the bug, one which tends to proliferate with increasing seniority. The DBS virus attacks the ADC immune system of the ants. This highly viral bug, although carried by individuals, has a profound and debilitating effect upon the group of long-suffering ants. Pretty depressing stuff indeed… Unfortunately, the ‘ADC’ infection is usually compounded by a liberal smattering of ‘DBS’ virus. Maybe you’re an ‘ant’ trudging along within the circle, finding it difficult to break away from the norm but wanting to go and look for that pheromone trail. Because it’s how we do things round here. How often do we unquestioningly follow the ‘ant’ in front and do what we’ve always done, for that reason alone? Because it’s the policy. The powerful and emblematic image of the ant death circle made me immediately think of parallels in conventional performance management – the self-perpetuating downward spiral of targets, binary comparisons, internalised peer vs peer competition, and so on. The ants then blindly follow this circular trail until they die of exhaustion. Each ant then follows the ant in front and the group forms a continuously rotating circle. What happens is that ants sometimes lose the pheromone track laid down for them to follow, and veer off course. On the train to work this morning, a friend told me about a fascinating phenomenon known as the ‘Ant Death Circle’ (also called the ‘Ant Death Spiral’ or ‘Ant Mill’).
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