It is far too easy for teams to lose focus in today's fast paced collaborative virtual workplace. When your team starts falling behind and can no longer see just how mission critical their work is to the project, it is time for you to help the team focus, and in turn, turbo-charge their effectiveness. Ken Thompson and Robin Good suggest how you can re-kindle the team's fire.

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.

Peer review is supposed to combat fraud, but it can just as easily hold back radical discoveries, says Terence Kealey writing for The Daily Telegraph (19 Feb, 2008).

T-Enterprise have just released a new game viral to draw attention to the problems the bee population is facing with the varroa mite which unless something is done could wipe out the entire bee population within ten years.

Good operational meetings, whether co-located or virtual, are the engine of organisational and project governance. However often their success is left totally to chance. Here are my five key tips for making them more effective:

Janine Benyus, talking at TED, describes biomimicry as learning an idea from an organism and then applying it - the conscious emulation of life's genius. Bioteaming, then, is the biomimicry of social structures- taking ideas from Nature about how groups perform and intra-operate, and applying them to enhance how we humans work together in groups and teams. Doug Philips aka teamite#222* and bioteams guest author muses.

I have been checking out Agna a neat little free social network analysis (SNA) tool which runs on both PCs and Macs (on top of Java). Agna allows social network data (directly input or imported from external systems) to be displayed, manipulated and analysed graphically in a number of ways/styles and is very easy to install and use. Agna is a great way to get into SNA.

Armed with a few students, a backhoe and a handful of markers, Deborah Gordon digs up ant colonies in the Arizona desert. She asks: How do these chitinous creatures get down to business and even multitask when they need to with no language, memory or visible leadership?