Bernard Hill, playing a loveable grandfather in the BBC TV drama Sunshine, when asked by his grandson "what was the best football match ever?" gives an unexpected and poignant answer: The Christmas Truce..

Picture from the 2005 movie Joyeux Noel

The Christmas Truce is the true story of how British and German soldiers in the trenches on Christmas Eve 1914 called a truce and celebrated Christmas Day by singing carols, exchanging gifts and playing football together.

This heart-warming story is an example of a natural collaboration strategy known as Tit for Tat which is nature's preferred co-operation strategy and has been proven to be the best long-term tactic for win-win collaboration between two parties.

It is also a crucial strategy for team members to use to evolve win-win outcomes with their team mates.

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: cooperation, tit for tat

Bioteams Books Reviews

Organisational teams: thin slice for responsiveness

January 22, 2007 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

Humans and animals do not need complete information to act; they can operate on various clues provided there is a sufficient context. Organizational teams can also use this thin slicing technique in conjunction with short messaging to enhance their performance. Malcolm Gladwell’s introspective book Blink digs deep into the abyss of human cognition to illustrate the human ability to think at a subconscious level. The idea of thin slicing is used where one is introduced to only a few snippets of information which lead to a series of conclusions based on moments of rapid cognition – an ability claimed to be intrinsically dormant in most humans. By bioteams guest author Max Bhanabhai.

Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK

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