iPhone
Sports teams and organizational teams: a bioteams crowdbreaker
I have to thank Jo Jordan for the idea behind this excellent little crowdbreaker which introduces the bioteams concepts and shows very quickly in a concrete way that it makes perfect sense when you actually think about it.
BIOTEAMS book just published
You followed the blog; you listened to the podcasts; you watched the movies; now read the book! "Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Most Successful Designs" is now available from Amazon.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Animal intelligence: amazing new research findings
National Geographic Magazine, March 2008, contains a wonderful feature article which explores the work of many different researchers who are all independently starting to discover that it is not just the higher primates and dolphins who have Minds of their Own.
Five tips for a perfect meeting
Good operational meetings, whether co-located or virtual, are the engine of organisational and project governance. However often their success is left totally to chance. Here are my five key tips for making them more effective:
Conference Calls: Twelve Golden Rules
The most widely used tool for mobile, distributed and virtual teams is still the plain old telephone conference call. However it is also the most badly used! So whether you are talking over Skype, mixing it with screen sharing and messaging, using your corporate PABX or just calling in to an external service if you follow these 12 simple rules you will get much better calls.
The Sustainable Network Model
As 9 out of 10 networks fail, including social networks, virtual communities and business clusters, I decided to start developing some "Sustainable Network Model" techniques to predict if a network has the necessary ingredients before huge amounts of effort are expended in vain.
Team Swarming: are your team wasps or bees
Sometimes the Bee-team is the A-team: the importance of an automatic team swarm response to threats and opportunities.
The law of requisite variety and team agility
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.
The four disciplines of great teams
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.
Collective stupidity and the madness of crowds
The Wisdom of Crowds and Collective Intelligence are very useful concepts but not if they are used in the wrong places. Confusing these two concepts will only produce bad results for your groups and teams.
