Bioteams and Quorum Sensing
The Hawaiian bobtail squid hosts bacteria that light it up at night. Photograph: Nick Hobgood
There are many examples of where Quorum Sensing is vitally important in business life - e.g.
- Knowing when to start a meeting when key people keep arriving late
- Knowing when to launch a new product with a growing pilot customer base
- Knowing when to try to introduce charging in an online community
This is just one more example of how we can learn from nature's teams (Bioteams).
To read Bacteria and the power of teamwork
The article concludes with the comment:
"When it comes to life on Earth, we like to think that the bigger the brain, the better. Bacteria might be small but they communicate in more than one language, they strategise, they co-ordinate their efforts, they have thrived in places you wouldn't even go for a dare. It seems clear the bacteria still have a lesson or two for us big-headed folk".
About Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson delivers keynote conference speeches, workshop facilitation and in-house consultancy in four key business areas:- Creating High Performing Teams in enterprises including Virtual and Mobile Teams (based on the Bioteams Book)
- Establishing effective Collaborative Business Networks enabling companies to co-operate effectively in areas such as sales and product development (based on the book - The Networked Enterprise)
- How to use the latest social media technologies including blogging and online communities to promote enterprises, brand, organisation or event
- Development of graphical on-line interactive Business Dashboards and What-if Simulators for organisations to support Performance Improvement, Strategy Development and Executive Team Development.
Tags: bacteria, bioteaming, bioteams, quorum sensing, virtual communities, virtual teams
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Bioteams Books Reviews
What teams can learn from wolves
If you think that there is not much human teams can learn from nature think again! Temple Grandin in her amazing book Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (p303-307) puts forward the incredible theory that early humans only became today’s successful homo sapiens because they learned to act and think like the wolves they co-habited with.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Related Collaboration Research & Science Articles
Swarm intelligence and robots
MoreIntelligentLife report on James McLurkin’s, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and AI Lab, talk at the Idea Festival in Louisville about distributed robotics and swarm behavior.
Culture differences in international teams
Once upon a time there were three teams - an Indian Team, a Chinese Team and a Hungarian Team.....Very interesting observations by Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School on teams of software engineers in different countries.
Simulate bioteams with StarLogo
If you want to play with PC-based simulations which introduce key bioteams concepts then its worth a visit to the MIT Starlogo site where under the PROJECTS section you can simulate the behaviour of bees, fireflies, slime, termites, rabbits, ants and boids (birdoids).
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