Team Collaboration: Funny Video Icebreaker
Stumble It!"For the Birds" from Pixar is a hilarious 3-minute cartoon video which I have used many times as a ice-breaker with teams, networks and groups. It is a great way to make people laugh, relax and quickly open up a really good discussion on some very important team-related issues. Make sure you watch right to the end with the sound on!
The video can be used to open a discussion on a number of important aspects about good collaboration and effective teams, as listed below.
I have also included links to relevant articles on each of these topics
- The power of team diversity (or requisite variety) - great teams include some funny looking birds too
- The importance of big companies as well as small companies in a successful collaborative network
- Understanding and respecting the 3 distinct rings of commitment in any team
- The unexpected consequences of hasty actions
- Nobody likes free-loaders....but what can you do?
- Avoiding cliques in communities and teams
I am sure you will think of many many more.....
About Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson is an expert practitioner in the area of bioteaming, swarming, virtual enterprise networks, virtual professional communities and virtual teams and has published two landmark books:
Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Best Designs
The Networked Enterprise: Competing for the future through Virtual Enterprise Networks
Ken writes the highly popular bioteams blog which has over 500 articles on all aspects of bioteams (aka organizational biomimicry) - in other words how human groups can learn from nature's best teams.
Ken is also founder of an exciting European technology company Swarmteams which provides unique patent-pending bioteaming technologies for all shapes and sizes of groups, social networks, business clusters, virtual/mobile communities and enterprises. Swarmteams enables groups to be more responsive and agile by fully integrating their mobile phones and the web with bioteam working techniques. The latest Swarmteams implementation is SwarmTribes which helps musicians and bands form a unique collaboration with their fans for mutual benefit.
Tags: collaboration, videos
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Team member responsibility problems
One of the main dilemmas for team leaders and members is the thorny issue of responsibility. We often fixate on the problem of leaders and members not taking enough responsibility but according to Dr Scott Peck they can also do damage if they try to take too much!
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