Teams today must revert to Stone Age
Stumble It!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.
Three instincts in particular have to be excavated from our caveman days and brought back into our organizational teams:
- Purpose shapes function and structure
“Purpose is the campfire around which virtual team members gather.”
- Leadership rotates according to the task at hand
Palaeolithic societies pooled their human capital simply to survive.
- Constant communication fosters a sense of identity
Sometimes the technology makes it too easy for a new team member to find-out all the important team information without the need to invest in the human conversations to acquire it. What we gain in information efficiency we can more than lose in missed opportunity for trust building.
Without a good sense of purpose, mission and goals you may have a group but not a team.
The single leader model of teams will not meet the challenges of a modern high-pressure virtual team - distributed leadership is key.
So as we strive to make our team more effective by learning from natures best team's we should also try to examine and rekindle what our distant ancestors knew, but which modern society has forgotten, about what makes teams work.
Tags: cavemen, organizational teams
Digg | 
del.icio.us | 
Reddit | 
Yahoo! | 
Add to my favourites
Bioteams Books Reviews
Complex adaptive systems and virtual team collaboration
Leading complexity thinkers apply biological principles to enterprises: The Biology of Business is a set of essays by ten researchers and practitioners in Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Related News & Media Articles
Bioteams and Twitter: interactive poll results: NLAB Social Networks Conference
*** STOP PRESS *** Stunning Interactive Poll results from NLAB Social Networks Conference. Q1 Would your work team be better or worse if it organised itself more like your favourite sports team? - Only 7% say it would make things worse! Q2 Does Twitter (and other such tools) distract from work and is it worth it? - Yes it does but Yes it is!
National Vehicle Monitoring Systems: Major UK Project
Every journey by every car in UK will now be monitored
The Independent Newspaper leads with the headline ‘You are being Watched’ as it reports (22 December 2005) that Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all the vehicles on its roads are to be recorded to detect potential criminal and terrorist activities.
Mobile IT could save local government millions
UK Guardian Online reports, Feb 8, that local authorities could save millions of pounds if they adopt wider use of mobile technologies, according to a new report: Cutting The Wires. The research, published by independent thinktank the New Local Government Network (NLGN), suggests that councils should use mobile phones and IT to become better organised and more relevant to their local communities.
Leave a comment