The way a team decides to decide is one of the most important decisions it makes. In the excellent book, “Why Teams Don’t Work” the authors, Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley, identify seven key decision-making methods for teams.

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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.

I recommend a really insightful article in The Best Software Writing (I) by Clay Shirky entitled A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (April 2003) which takes good look at the design of social software in its widest sense - in other words any form of virtual community or collaboration system. Clay shares, from practical hard-earned experience, three things we must accept and four things we must design for if we want to create systems which are actually useful.

I was delighted to speak on "Bioteams: Turning Audiences into Communities" to a lively audience in Brighton (UK) at an event "New Frontiers in Social Media" organised by Use8 - The User Experience Society. You can get a copy of my slides here.