In the ground-breaking book Communities Dominate Brands, Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore introduce a new generation of technology users: Generation C (C stands for Community). If you have some Gen-Cs on your team you are ideally placed to take advantage of bioteaming principles and here is how you can spot them.

Team leaders who want their team members to show more initiative and take greater responsibility can learn from the principles of autonomous software agents so I am delighted to republish a bioteams guest essay on “Agents: Technology and Usage” by James Odell which is attached in full as a pdf.

Here is a brilliantly simple technique, which I call The 4 Team Stressors, for waking a team up to some serious problems which, in the pressures of work, it has somehow managed to totally ignore and which might just sink it!

Growing a successful virtual community is like tending a delicate rose in your garden. Both the rose and the community need to be carefully nurtured and both are under constant threats to their continued health and existence. Despite all our hopes and intentions for them, they are both living systems and will never thrive and develop on demand – no matter how hard we push!

Humans and animals do not need complete information to act; they can operate on various clues provided there is a sufficient context. Organizational teams can also use this thin slicing technique in conjunction with short messaging to enhance their performance. Malcolm Gladwell’s introspective book Blink digs deep into the abyss of human cognition to illustrate the human ability to think at a subconscious level. The idea of thin slicing is used where one is introduced to only a few snippets of information which lead to a series of conclusions based on moments of rapid cognition – an ability claimed to be intrinsically dormant in most humans. By bioteams guest author Max Bhanabhai.

In a Harvard Management Update Virtual Teams: Palaeolithic Insights About the Art of Cyber-Managing, the authors propose a delicious irony about today’s teams: to succeed we need to recover the long-forgotten instincts of our ancestors.

During spring in Denmark, just before sunset, flocks of more than a million European Starlings gather from all corners to create an incredible phenomenon known as The Black Sun. The Black Sun principles of flocking and mass collaboration can also be applied to organisational teams.

A research report by Henley Management College in the UK on remote and flexible working, Managing Tomorrow’s Worker (MTW) concludes that leaders who successfully manage distributed teams pay attention to some things "traditional team" managers often neglect.

Harvard Professor Marco Iansiti predicts that the future business competition will not be between companies or even supply chains but between networks.

The Bioteaming Manifesto is the definitive summary of the key principles of Bioteaming kindly published by ChangeThis. For a free download of the full (34-page) document please click here