If you think that there is not much human teams can learn from nature think again! Temple Grandin in her amazing book Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (p303-307) puts forward the incredible theory that early humans only became today’s successful homo sapiens because they learned to act and think like the wolves they co-habited with.

Nature’s preferred method for creating complex new species is known as Symbiogenesis which suggests that complex new species usually form, not by an act of independent ‘quantum evolution’, but by the coming together and merging of two or more (less complex but independent) species. We can also apply this to business networks.

When a team building session goes wrong or out of control or slips into inappropriate behaviour it is not just the staff involved who will face the music but the senior executives in the company who allowed it to happen.

Gerold Keefer, in a paper Project Success Prediction Based on Communication Reliability Analysis suggests that the effectiveness of a teams communication can be assessed in 2 dimensions: Reliability and Distance.

Foresight 2020 is a new research report (downloadable free) written by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Cisco Systems, assesses likely changes to the global economy, to eight major industries and to corporate structures over the next 15 years.

Ken Thompson, speaking at the 2006 SPICE Conference in Luxembourg (May 5) has facilitated an interactive session with leading practitioners and researchers in the field of Software Process Improvement (SPI) on this challenging question.

Previously I have discussed The beliefs of High Performing Teams (HPTs) and shared the results of a research project on the beliefs of HPTs in a major software organisation. I now invite the SPICE2006 participants and other software engineers to participate in the next stage of this research.

If you want to play with PC-based simulations which introduce key bioteams concepts then its worth a visit to the MIT Starlogo site where under the PROJECTS section you can simulate the behaviour of bees, fireflies, slime, termites, rabbits, ants and boids (birdoids).

High Definition TVs should be a huge success yet so far they have been an unmitigated failure - a great example of the launch of a high tech product whose supporting ecosystem was not sufficiently mature.