There’s a swarm of gnats over my balcony most evenings. A few hundred of them, holding formation over the exact same spot, night after night.
I waved my arm through them once. Then again, a little harder, half sure they’d take the hint and move somewhere else. They didn’t.
They scattered for a second and then drifted right back to the same spot, like nothing happened. They just wouldn’t leave.
So I got curious. How do they know where to go every time? What’s so special about that one patch of air? Were they planning something nefarious?? Or do they just really like my stairs?
I looked it up and learned a lot! Good news is they’re a mating swarm, not an omen. 🙏
They’ve been doing some version of this for longer than there have been humans around to be annoyed by it.
The most interesting one though? Not one of them is in charge. And it’s kind of beautiful!
No leader. No coordination. No complex communication.
Each gnat is flying its own messy little path with no idea the others are even there.
What holds the shape is actually one fixed point on the ground, a high-contrast spot like the edge of my step, and every single one of them is running the same simple rule: find that spot, stay over it.
That’s the whole system. The wind, the light, where any one of them drifts, all of it stays loose. The only thing that’s fixed is that they find a high-contrast spot.
And it’s worked for millions of years regardless of the whole world changing around them.
As cheesy as it is to pull a business lesson out of a bug cloud on my balcony… I hate to admit it gave me a new way to think about how teams hold together.
Because most of us assume that when things feel chaotic, we need more control. More rules on the work and more eyes on the output.
But the gnats don’t hold together because someone’s steering or they have a sophisticated communication system. They hold together because they have one simple rule that’s engrained for everyone.
There are a lot of founders who build it the other way around. They build structure for their teams that’s so rigid and hard to maintain or iterate that the operation stays chaotic. The exact opposite of the gnats.
The most sustainable structure is simple and clear. What’s one thing in your business that is overly complicated and could be simplified?
- Valentina
📚 The Learning Lounge
A cozy corner where we share the latest insights, ideas, and takeaways from books, videos, articles, and more.
"Simple Rules" — Donald Sull & Kathleen Eisenhardt (Article). The research version of the gnat. Sull and Eisenhardt studied how people and organizations survive real complexity, and found the winners don't build more rules, they build a handful of good ones that give clear guidance while leaving room to judge. If you've been adding process every time something gets messy, this is the case for doing the opposite, especially at agency size where every extra rule is one more thing the team drags through every change.
"How to Kill Creativity" — Teresa Amabile (Article). Amabile spent her career studying what actually undermines creativity inside companies, and the culprit is usually well-meaning managers chasing control and efficiency. Her finding maps straight onto this week's letter: teams need clear goals and real autonomy over how they get there, and the damage happens when you flip it, pinning down the how and leaving the what fuzzy. Worth reading if your team's gotten quieter and less inventive the more "organized" you've made them.
💚 Full service ops for creative agencies.
Focus on big ideas, not busywork.