I have been thinking a lot about what happens when a leader gets under severe pressure, usually because things are not going according to plan. It seems to me this is the very essence of real leadership and where leaders can really justify their salaries. BUT according to Professor Dietrich Dorner, in his excellent book The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations, there are two very tempting but ultimately disastrous tangents a leader can pursue in a crisis instead of addressing the real issues.

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Frank Lacombe of the Evolutionary and Swarm Design Group at the University of Calgary offers a good introduction to the concept of Swarm Behavior. Using examples of ants, bees, birds, fish, and termites he identifies the two main advantages of such decentralized systems: robustness and flexibility. The objective of bioteaming is to realise these same two swarm behavior advantages in organisational teams and inter-organisational business networks.

Cooperation is neither rational not fair but it works! In a webstream from the Royal Society Professor Martin Nowak of Harvard University explains "How cooperation evolves in biology and life?"

A new IBM research report suggests that the best analogies for businesses in the future may no longer be the command structures of the military but the self-organising networks found in nature: schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects.