What makes great teams such? Is it just a coincidence that some teams consistently outperform others or is being a high performing team due to specific traits of those who make the team up? Robin Good and Ken Thompson suggest the team's beliefs are the key.

Sometimes the Bee-team is the A-team: the importance of an automatic team swarm response to threats and opportunities.

An obvious characteristic of nature's best teams is that they seem to have just the right amount of structure to handle their environments. Too much and they would be slow and cumbersome; too little and they would lack the sophisticated responses to protect their position in the food chain.

I have noticed that there are four things which good teams seem to do and which bad teams don't do. Check to see how your own team shapes up.

Cultivating Team Intelligence provides organizational teams, networks and communities with a much better early warning 'radar' thus enabling them to spot and deal with problems/opportunities sooner.

In this article I suggest that organizational teams, networks and communities who can adapt and adopt the “stop trying to control them” principle exemplified by nature's teams can achieve huge gains in agility and collective intelligence.

With the explosion in social software and the recognition that these types of systems need to reach critical mass to survive and prosper it is amazing that so few people seem to be applying the well-established philosophical principles of living systems (autopoiesis) to design for sustainability.

Much of the foundation of bioteaming is based on the organisation, communications and behavior of social insect societies. The BBC has a wonderful series Life in the Undergrowth narrated by David Attenborough with a whole programme dedicated to Supersocieties and Super-organisms.

Ken Thompson, writing for Insider Knowledge Magazine, in Why Penguins have no commanding officer reveals the two fundamental differences between biological teams and organizational teams and what we can learn from nature about effective teamwork.

In the ground-breaking book Communities Dominate Brands, Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore introduce a new generation of technology users: Generation C (C stands for Community). If you have some Gen-Cs on your team you are ideally placed to take advantage of bioteaming principles and here is how you can spot them.