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: