Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway have discovered that bees learn to fly the shortest possible route between flowers even if they discover the flowers in a different order. In doing this they are effectively solving the challenging 'Travelling Salesman Problem' and despite their small brains are the first creatures discovered who can do this.

I have been piloting a radically different approach to meetings which I am calling "Egoless Meetings" which addresses three popular unwritten rules about good meeting practices which are unfortunately totally wrong. RULE 1 is that everybody gets to speak. RULE 2 is that discussions in themselves can be useful. RULE 3 is that when you meet you must work as a team not as individuals.

Team Beliefs are the fuel which can really energise or kill team effectiveness. Unfortunately this is often the most neglected aspect of a high-performing team initiative. In this article I remind people of the key beliefs of high-performing teams.

Most collaborative ventures don't turn out quite the way we envisage. It would be great if we could determine in advance if a particular collaborative project or joint venture will be worth the required investment. Here is a simple way you can assess the merits of any collaborative endeavour BEFORE you invest time, effort and money in failing to make it work.

Very interesting article in The Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, Bacteria and the power of teamwork, which reveals the amazing ability of bacteria to "quorum sense" - i.e. know when they have critical mass to achieve their objective. Quorum Sensing is hugely important for human groups and one we often get badly wrong!

I was part of a fascinating panel session "Mobility, Teams, The Cloud and Collaboration" at the recent Mobile Cloud Summit (London: 21 September). The summit and the session was chaired by Jeffrey Peel of Quadriga Consulting and my co-panelists were Brian Caulfield of DFJ Esprit and Chris Horn of Movirtu.

Congratulations to the Socialcast blog for an excellent summary of Bioteams plus a truly awesome poster "Unlocking the Bioteams formula" which gives a great introduction to bioteams - all in a single picture.

I thought it might be useful to provide a single page link to the full collection of videos and animations I have posted on Vimeo over the last year. I upgraded to Vimeo Plus which allows me to publish videos in HD and also to view the videos very effectively on the leading smart phones.

Very nice short article by Harold Jarche in his blog "Life in Perpetual Beta" which revisits the 4 key zones of Bioteams: Leadership, Connectivity, Execution, Organization.

The BBC Nature site reports on research published in the journal Naturwissenschaften which has discovered that a certain species of stinging ant may grab a fellow worker in their jaws and take them with them to help manage large food items they cannot carry by themselves.

I am looking forward to speaking and running a workshop on High Performing Teams at ECCIXII - the 12th European Conference on Innovation and Creativity in Portugal (Faro) from September 14-17.

I have been thinking for a long time about developing an online game for High-Performing Teams which was complex enough to be useful but simple enough to be usable! I am pleased to introduce the A4 Team Game (Alignment, Attitudes, Attention and Autonomy) which can be configured for different team challenges and runs on the desktop, the web or even embedded in other applications.

I spoke at the inaugural TEDx event in Belfast on March 23. My argument was that we have all experienced high-performing teams but mostly not at work (sports, music, adventures, holidays, family etc)! In the video The Lost Secrets of High-Performing Teams I remind us of what we may have forgotten about great teams and make a plea to bring these sensibilities back into our work teams.

Mark Dowds, from Brainpark, is a leading thinker and practitioner in the emerging area of Workforce Democracy - an innovation which is beginning to radically change work places by replacing 'command and control' with self-organisation. I invited Mark to write a short intro on the subject as part of my "Think Differently" series because it resonates strongly with Bioteams.

This week marks the 6th anniversary of the publication in April 2005 of The Bioteaming Manifesto by ChangeThis. The manifesto is the foundation of the Bioteams book, published March 2008, and is a comprehensive conceptual framework for the effective management of today's Virtual Teams, Multi-Enterprise Teams and Cross-Functional teams. Download it here

I have collaborated with Jeff Peel and his Business Evidence Thought-Leadership blog to produce a new 4-minute video on Natural Teams - how we can use simple ideas from nature, sports teams and families to radically improve our work teams.

I spoke at the inaugural TEDx event in Belfast on March 23 on "The 7 secrets of High-Performing Teams". Here is a link to a nice blog post by Alan in Belfast on the whole Belfast TEDx event with a collection of short video interviews with all the speakers.

Major Article in Stategy + Business Magazine about how companies, governments, and other organizations are working together across traditional boundaries to solve problems which are too big for one enterprise to solve by itself.

#1 The Social Media Healthcheck Reference Card
#2 The Seven Secrets of High Performing Teams (AudioCast)
#3 Leading collaborative business networks - 10 rules

Get all 3 here!

In this new short audio/video I share 7 secrets on how teams can significantly improve performance by adopting simple techniques from Bioteams. These techniques are particularly relevant to large cross-functional teams and multi-enterprise teams whose members are not co-located and spend much of their working days on the road or on client site.