Yesterday, I called my old friend, Donna, to catch up. Soon I was bouncing an idea off her. She’s smart, and instantly finds the holes when thinking or writing about something. I told her I’d been reading the research literature on social networks and stumbled across the idea of the ‘many-wrongs’ principle.

If there’s an idea that gives you permission to be wrong, and for everyone around you to be wrong, well, I couldn’t pass that by. Donna agreed.

It took awhile to piece together the research that lead to this particular paper. But, while combing through citations, I found a webpage that introduced the ‘many-wrongs’ principle to triathletes. This was getting exciting, albeit in utterly nerdy way.

I finally laid my hands on the origin story. In the mid-1960s, zoologists in Finland used radar images and film to painstakingly trace the migration of certain ducks. From what they knew about the individual talents of the birds, they couldn’t explain how they replicated their flight path each season–especially when considering storms, winds, fog and topography. Yet, they proved that, when traveling in large flocks, the ducks flew nearly the same path every year, differing only by a degree or two each time. Other scientists recognized their discovery. They called it the “many-wrongs” principle.

The idea was exciting, but scientists had to abandon the line of inquiry because they didn’t have the technology to do it. Hand-tracing flight patterns from film and radar images couldn’t be that technology.

Decades went by. The idea was almost lost to time. Research into bird migration continued and then stalled. Scientists knew a lot more about the vagaries of migration and the individual capabilities of birds, for example:

“geomagnetic compass precision is reduced near the equator and the poles; stellar rotational cues are unavailable for much of the year in the polar regions; solar cues vary with season and location; navigational errors can be compounded by wind drift; correctional mechanisms can reduce directional bias but add their own random errors. Even if orientation cues were absolutely reliable, flawless navigation would require perfect sensory interpretation and integration of cues by individual [birds].”

But they were farther than ever from answering the question. How did birds migrate with such precision? Another scientist unearthed the old idea. He argued it was time to figure out how many wrongs could make it right.

Soon, other researchers were working on the math, and thus the robustness, of the principle. (As I have argued in this space before, the universe speaks in calculus.) Their study used simulations of people randomly walking from one point to another.

The magic measurement was a radius for the behaviors that suppress individual error in group cohesion. There was a radius for “collision avoidance”, and one for “orientation interaction” and another for “group cohesion” – thus the influence of your neighbor. There were no “leaders” or “more experienced navigators,” even though it is possible to model the following of experienced navigators and it is known to happen.

Renewed interest in the many-wrongs principle has fed new discoveries, including the understanding that humans also tend to navigate better in groups. Triathletes will swim with the group to improve their navigation in the open-water leg of the competition. When survival is the goal, there is intelligence in the tactic that you select.

Researchers also found that when the environment is turbulent, there seems to be no benefit in staying with the group. It’s logical that when conditions are turbulent, it’s going impair a group’s cohesion. But it’s also really sad. That’s when I realized this principle is also one of poetry.

Right now, our path is unmarked and unclear. But we’ve also been here before. Nature is our best guide when we watch carefully and follow her principles. Many-wrongs requires only that we come together to move in the direction we want to go.