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.

Symbiosis is a central tenet of bioteams which in bioteams means you should 'partner date' widely but commit to partners very carefully. But according to wikipedia there are four different types of symbiotic behavior possible between two different biological species.

From studying nature's bioteams it seems there are 3 dominant patterns of communication which can be used in a biological group. All three also have their place in the electronic communications we use in our human teams. However one of them, if over-used, can be destructive or indicate the absence of crucial group support structures.

My research into biological teams has revealed that they make extensive use of short messages as their primary means of communications. For example, Ants use chemical messages, Bees use visual messages conveyed through dance and Dolphins use sonar: unlike human teams they all exhibit strong Messaging Instincts.