Improve team productivity by road signing
Stumble It!Usually we think of the importance of sharing 'positive' intelligence between organisational team members, however recent UK research on foraging Pharaoh ants indicates that sharing 'negative' intelligence to avoid wasted effort may be just as important.
I have written before on the importance of all organisational team members sharing 'team intelligence' (for example Virtual Team Behavior - Curiosity and Learning).
In Scents and sensibility: How foraging ants get the food we read how Pharaoh ants scouting for food place a tiny scent marker on branches that do not lead to a reward, according to a study published in Nature, the weekly British science journal.
The team concludes that the ants use a repellent pheromone to mark unrewarding branches at "decision-points" - where branches fork.
"It provides advance warning, like human road signs situated before junctions," the authors suggest.
Pheromone-based messaging is the oldest and most evolved form of biological signalling and its potential application in mobile and distributed human teams is described in The perfect mobile group communications system.
Tags: pheromones
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Comments
Ken,
I enjoy how your posts show that team dynamics should not be anywhere near as hard as we often cause them to be. Whilst humans have evolved beyond other animals, they seem to have lost some of the learnings along the way. There is so much that we can learn from nature, because we have moved so far away from it and lost these abilities.
The faster we take in these lessons from animals, the faster we become more productive.
Regards
Arthur
Posted by: Arthur Shelley | June 22, 2007 9:19 AM
Bioteams Books Reviews
When collaboration goes bad
Poor organisational intelligence leads to 'coblaboration' instead of collaboration.Harvard Professor, David Perkins, in his latest book, "King Arthur's Round Table : How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations", discusses the importance of "organisational Intelligence" and "developmental leadership" and how the absence of these leads to coblaboration rather than collaboration in organisational teams.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
