Team leaders who want their team members to show more initiative and take greater responsibility can learn from the principles of autonomous software agents so I am delighted to republish a bioteams guest essay on “Agents: Technology and Usage” by James Odell which is attached in full as a pdf.

During spring in Denmark, just before sunset, flocks of more than a million European Starlings gather from all corners to create an incredible phenomenon known as The Black Sun. The Black Sun principles of flocking and mass collaboration can also be applied to organisational teams.

The Bioteaming Manifesto is the definitive summary of the key principles of Bioteaming kindly published by ChangeThis. For a free download of the full (34-page) document please click here

Many Thanks to Robert Scoble of Scoble Show fame for producing a brand new 15 minute video interview on the basics of bioteams and how it can be applied in organisational teams.

Many people have been enchanted by the amazing video “The March of the Penguins” and most know that they have no leader. However few people go on to ask the obvious next question “If they have no leader then how do they know where to go?”....

Dr R Meredith Belbin, regarded as the father of "team-role" theory and one of the worlds foremost experts on teams, predicts that our organizational teams will evolve into more biologically inspired forms.

Fritjof Capra says organisations are not just like living systems - they are living systems!

How is it that even with our vastly superior intelligence nature's teams sometimes seem to work much better than ours - what do they know that we don't?

One of the most compelling reasons why organisations, enterprises, teams and communities should adopt biological principles is that they will live much longer if they do!

Could a virtual team have a million members? Recent developments in mass collaboration, distributed computing and the wisdom of crowds suggest the answer might be yes.