How nature optimises its teams
Stumble It!Nature has a way of automatically right-sizing a group to tackle the job at hand. Just like the Russian Matryoshka Dolls (dolls within dolls), small groups link into bigger ones, which in turn link into still bigger ones. In this follow-up article to Why penguins have no commanding officer and Did ants invent the perfect system for communicating via mobile technology?, Ken Thompson writing for NESTA explores what we can learn about teamwork and group/community size from nature's most successful teams.
To read Small is Beautiful .....but Big is Powerful
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: bioteams, ecosystems, innovation, mass collaboration, NESTA, teamwork
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Beyond Multinationals: a new corporate structure emerges
The rise of the MetaNational: In a new book, From Global to MetaNational, Strategy experts and Insead Professors, Yvez Doz, José Santos and Peter Williamsonargue that the future form of successful global enterprise has now changed from the multinational to the metanational.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Related Bioteams Features Articles
Animal Leadership: Dictatorship Rules in Baboon Societies
About 18 months ago I listened to Andrew King give a fascinating lecture in London about his unpublished research into Baboon societies. Andrew explained how in the harsh environment of the Namib Desert dictatorship sometimes works better than democracy. Andrew's ground-breaking work has now been widely published and he kindly sent me some excellent links. There are many parallels with human teams, groups and communities!
The definitive guide to bioteams
New bioteaming manifesto published
I am delighted to announce that, in collaboration with my colleague Robin Good, and the very kind support of ChangeThis whose mission is "to spread important ideas and change minds" we are launching "The Bioteaming Manifesto - A new paradigm for virtual, networked business teams".
Group Messaging Instincts: how to recover them
Biological teams make extensive use of short messages as their main means of communication: Ants use chemical messages, Bees use visual messages conveyed through dance and Dolphins use sonar, however most human teams seem to have forgotten their Messaging Instincts.
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