This little video from Paul Kedrosky's blog shows that in the right conditions and with the right players "self-organisation" can be the best solution to a group problem.

Kare Anderson, journalist and author, has just published an excellent bioteams podcast, Be an Alpha Swarmer? Attract fans. Start movements, on her very popular collaboration blog. The podcast features a 35 minute wide-ranging discussion of practical bioteaming techniques and their real-world applications in various groups.

By studying swarming behaviour in ants, locusts and crickets there is much we can learn about robot communications, how cancer tumours spread and even how our neurons swarm to produce thoughts.

Sometimes the Bee-team is the A-team: the importance of an automatic team swarm response to threats and opportunities.

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.

During spring in Denmark, just before sunset, flocks of more than a million European Starlings gather from all corners to create an incredible phenomenon known as The Black Sun. The Black Sun principles of flocking and mass collaboration can also be applied to organisational teams.

Those who don’t believe that humans can swarm and flock must not have been watching the World Cup in Germany. The Mexican Wave, or La Ola, is a spontaneous activity involving very simple individual behaviors which produces an amazing collective result.

In a previous article, Seven 'model behaviours' for bioteam members, I discussed the work of Craig Reynolds and the three critical autonomous behaviours which enable birds to flock. Here I propose that human bioteam members need just seven autonomous behaviours to enable them to swarm.

If you want to play with PC-based simulations which introduce key bioteams concepts then its worth a visit to the MIT Starlogo site where under the PROJECTS section you can simulate the behaviour of bees, fireflies, slime, termites, rabbits, ants and boids (birdoids).