A Swarm Intelligence-based Model for Organisational Governance: Critical Theoretical Foundations

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Research in Business, Management and Economics

Year: 2026

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A Swarm Intelligence-based Model for Organisational Governance: Critical Theoretical Foundations

Edwin Jesu Dass

ABSTRACT:

Hierarchical governance models, engineered for stable and predictable environments, demonstrate persistent structural limitations under the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions that characterise contemporary organisations. This paper conducts a critical theoretical review of swarm intelligence — the branch of artificial intelligence concerned with collective behaviour emerging from decentralised, locally informed agents (Bonabeau et al., 1999; Dorigo & Birattari, 2007) — and applies its core principles to the problem of organisational governance design. Drawing on complexity theory (Holland, 1995; Snowden & Boone, 2007), the review establishes that distributed, adaptive coordination is not merely a design preference but a theoretical requirement for effective governance under conditions of complexity.
From this analysis, the paper introduces the Swarm Governance Framework (SGF) as an original theoretical contribution — proposed here for the first time as a governance framework derived from four core swarm intelligence principles: stigmergy, self-organisation, emergence, and adaptive feedback. The SGF is operationalised through the STRUM model, a five-element design specification (Signals, Trust, Resonance, Unity, Measure) in which each element translates a swarm principle into a concrete organisational design rule. The paper argues that the SGF and its STRUM model constitute a genuinely novel governance framework, meaningfully distinct from practitioner-derived approaches such as holacracy (Robertson, 2015) and distributed organisation models (Bleijenberg, 2020), which lack formal grounding in swarm intelligence theory.
As an extension of the proposed framework, the paper identifies that the STRUM model’s five design rules simultaneously constitute a configuration specification for AI coordination agents — specifying their logging, decision-routing, pattern-surfacing, constraint, and adaptation logic — positioning the SGF as directly applicable to governance of the emerging agentic enterprise (California Management Review, 2026).
The primary contribution of this paper is the introduction of the Swarm Governance Framework and the STRUM model as a novel, swarm intelligence-derived approach to organisational governance. Secondary contributions include its application to AI coordination governance and its situation within a broader Design Science Research programme (Hevner et al., 2004) through which the framework will be empirically developed and tested.

Keywords: Swarm Intelligence, Organisational Governance, STRUM Model, Swarm Governance Framework, AI Coordination, Theoretical Review