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.

Ant communications are very different from the communications we typically experience in our organizational teams. In fact they are so different that to really understand them you have to try and find some way to experience them. Here is one way!

Those who don’t believe that humans can swarm and flock must not have been watching the World Cup in Germany. The Mexican Wave, or La Ola, is a spontaneous activity involving very simple individual behaviors which produces an amazing collective result.

Many thanks to Nancy White for her excellent and very comprehensive live blog on Bioteaming: Natural Models for Virtual Teams from the very recent Collaborative Tools Conference (CTC2006) in Boston.

I presented Bioteaming: Natural Models for Virtual Teams at the Collaborative Tools Conference (CTC2006) at the Seaport Hotel in Boston, MA, on June 22. We discussed what nature's teams might teach us about messaging, swarming, networking and personal collaboration strategies.

Two collaboration strategies, Tit-For-Tat (TFT) and Win-Stay,Lose-Shift (WSLS), out-perform all others in evolution. In a live webstream from the Royal Society in London Professor Martin Nowak of Harvard University explains why.

Here is a collection of the 4 most popular bioteaming articles based on user feedback and page views.

A significant body of research into evolution now indicates that survival of the fittest is only a part of the story. Life did not take over the globe by combat but by networking!

Richard Conniff in his excellent paper, The limits of the alpha male, gives an excellent introduction to self-organizing behaviour in flocks of birds, termites, red deer, whooper swans and gorillas.

In traditional organisational teams we have processes like selection, mobilisation, planning, operations and dissolution. Bioteams have a totally different set of natural processes: Foraging, Co-Evolution, Reproduction, Nurture, Maintenance and Metabolism.