I have invited leading Business Continuity Management (BCM) expert Pierre Wettergren to write a short guest blog on Bioteams.com to introduce this increasingly critical topic. Over the last 6 months Pierre and I have been collaborating on the design of a customisable BCM Simulation Game for Teams, which we call BCM eMATCH which allows them to run a virtual business and "what-if" the impact of different BCM strategies in response to changes and shocks their market conditions and internal operations.

Bioteams is a modern approach to teams, networks and communities who need to operate with high levels of agility and autonomy through different working practices and by exploiting the latest web2.0 and mobile technologies. Bioteams is based on research into nature's most effective groups and is described in detail in this blog (www.bioteams.com) and in my bioteams book. Here are ten great bioteams exercises you can use to enhance the agility and autonomy of any team:

Knowledge-based SMEs and SMBs (small fish) need to read "The Networked Enterprise (TNE) - competing for the future through Virtual Enterprise Networks (VENs)" with its numerous real examples and proven techniques to find out how to use VENs to develop strategic partnerships with BIG FISH (large enterprises) to propel them to the next level of competitive success. BIG FISH must also use TNE to gain enhanced access to innovation, agility and alternative risk/reward and cost models by partnering with small fish via VENs.

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.

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.

Humans and animals do not need complete information to act; they can operate on various clues provided there is a sufficient context. Organizational teams can also use this thin slicing technique in conjunction with short messaging to enhance their performance. Malcolm Gladwell’s introspective book Blink digs deep into the abyss of human cognition to illustrate the human ability to think at a subconscious level. The idea of thin slicing is used where one is introduced to only a few snippets of information which lead to a series of conclusions based on moments of rapid cognition – an ability claimed to be intrinsically dormant in most humans. By bioteams guest author Max Bhanabhai.

In the US there has been a movement particularly within the defense and advanced engineering sectors to try to develop more agility in supply chains by working differently with suppliers.

Here is a collection of my 7 most popular articles on collaborative and virtual business networks based on user feedback and page views: