Book: Bioteams: High Performance Teams based on naures most successful designs. MK Press, 2008

This book by Ken Thompson is a detailed examination of how biomimicry based organisational models, like swarming, can be applied in business environments. The author calls his approach: “bioteams”.

He writes:

“There are three unique group behaviors discovered from research into nature’s teams (such as ants, bees, dolphins, geese, wolves and the higher primates) which if adopted by human teams, in both physically co-located or virtual distributed enterprises, makes them much more agile, responsive and productive:

1. Pheromone Messaging: Instant whole-group broadcast communications.

2. Collective Leadership: Any group member can take the lead.

3. Team Ecosystems/Blended Teamwork: Small is beautiful but big is powerful.

Bioteams is the new discipline of adapting principles from nature’s groups to improve human team performance.”

However, he stresses that: “Bioteaming is not about us all behaving like ants or bees – rather it is about how we incorporate natural principles, based on 10 million years hard won evolutionary experience to make smart human teams much more effective and how we can use technology to help!”

Here’s a summary of the characteristics of bioteams:

“What are the principles of bioteaming?

* Self-Management

The most well known trait of a bioteam is Self-Management or Autonomy. Basically each team member manages itself and does not need to be told what to do. This is different from most of our teams which traditionally use “command and control” – wait till told and obey orders. Some business teams are now operating as “self-managed teams”. This does not mean that there is no leader but every member is a leader in some way.

So in designing technologies to support teams we need to focus on timely information rather than providing orders and to-do lists.

However bioteams are not just about self-management – there’s quite a few other important traits, for example:

* Non-verbal communication

Bioteams have superb communications, which do not rely on direct member-to-member communications. For example ants predominantly communicate through scent trails – different scents mean different things – they don’t have to meet each other face to face to communicate.

This is terribly relevant today in our teams with multiple locations and every one working different hours where members can’t physically meet that often. Bioteams show us that whilst face-to-face communication has an important place a team can often achieve its goals without it.

* Action-focused

Another trait is that bioteams solve problems and learn by rapid experimentation and evolution. Bioteams have very concrete goals which are hard-wired into the members genetically but the members don’t have any actual strategies or plans for achieving them. They work by rapid experimentation and feedback. If something works and solves the problem it gets reinforced within their collective set of responses for the next time – if not it dies. Bioteams are action-focused!

We tend to treat our human teams more like clocks than colonies! They are going a bit slow so they need to be wound up. Bioteaming teaches us that we cannot be prescriptive about what will work and what won’t work – we have just got to try it and see!

* 3-Dimensional

Another key principle is the way each member strives to maintain a dynamic relationship with to the other members, the external environment and the colony itself. Each bioteam member is fundamentally 3-dimensional – they constantly engage autonomously with their close team members, their external environment and the colony as a whole.

Often human teams are much more 1-dimensional with team members only concerned with part of the big picture. Again technologies such as internet-based tools can help us make our teams more 3-dimensional. Experiments have shown that if you remove a complete caste (of workers) from an ant colony the others will adapt – just try that with a human team!

But can bioteaming deal with all the motivation and conflict issues we see in human teams?

* Motivation and Conflict

Yes – Human Bioteaming extends biological principles, which cover the mechanisms for being effective as a team to also deal with these hugely important issues. It’s about the “why” as well as the “how” or the “what”. For example when an ant or a microbe gets a stimulus it just responds, like Pavlov’s dog, it does not have any choice. Human teams have huge amounts of discretion and self-awareness. Ant colony members don’t need to be motivated and rarely get distracted. That’s why human bioteams need a coach – we can’t treat a human team like an ant colony.

* Individuality

Another key difference is the importance of the individual in a human team. If one member of an ant colony gets it wrong there are so many others who get it right that it does not matter. Human teams are smaller and one member’s behaviour can make a huge difference. Think of a dodgy goalkeeper in a sports team. However if the Ant Queen makes a mistake in choice of nest location then that’s another story….. In general however the consequences of individual member failure are much higher in human bioteams and we need working practices and tools (such as accountability and transparency) to protect us from this.

* Human Intelligence

Also Human Bioteams are of course much smarter than nature’s teams – at least in an individual member sense. A principle of biological teams is that complex group behaviour can arise from simple individual behaviour given sufficient time, scale and feedback loops. In other words exceptionally well co-ordinated morons (apologies to social biologists) can produce dazzling results! What then might an exceptionally well co-ordinated smart human team, employing the same principles, produce? ”

For a more detailed discussion of the three group behaviours mentioned above, see the page here.

Here’s the excerpt on collective leadership:

“Why penguins have no commanding officer

Many people have been enchanted by the film The March of the Penguins, especially when they realise that the penguins have no single leader. But if they have no leader then how do they know where to go?

This is a good question because it reveals the essential difference between human teams and nature’s teams. The answer is that no single penguin knows where to go, but they know where to go as a group.

This is known as collective or team intelligence and is a key feature of other biological teams, such as ant colonies. Perhaps surprisingly, humankind is the only species that operates ‘leader intelligence’ – the trust that a small group of leaders knows best for the whole group.

Traditionally, human-team management is classic command and control – good for warfare or civil engineering, but poor for organisational teams, especially when distributed, mobile, semi-formal and with ill-defined structures and boundaries.

Biological teams are ‘self-organising’. Instead of relying on a few leaders, every member has the potential to be a leader in some domain and at some time. How can organisations learn to become more like these biological teams?

Step one – convert command and control teams into ‘self-organising teams’ with distributed leadership structures.

In addition, biological teams do not use long or complex messages to communicate the way we do. Instead they use short messages.

For example, ants use chemical messages (pheromones) and bees use visual messages conveyed through dance.

When you analyse communications in these teams you quickly notice certain common characteristics:

* Peer systems. Everyone in the group or team communicates like this, not just the leaders or elders;
* The messages are sent and instantly received in situ. In other words, the messages come from, and go, to wherever the other members of the group happen to be – they are not stored for processing later (like e-mail);
* They are predominantly ‘one to many’ broadcast messages (‘shouts’) with some ‘one to one’ messages (‘whispers’) but not much ‘one to some’ messages (‘gossips’);
* They often only use one-way messages – the receiver can take action (or not) without having to reply first. This makes it fast and responsive.

Contrast this style with what we typically have in our teams – leader-dominated broadcasting and a proliferation of e-mails and attachments. Also, the tendency to delay action until replies are received from all team members, which is a great way to destroy productivity and responsiveness. An unfortunate side effect of our vastly superior intelligence over the insect and animal kingdoms is that we have forgotten natural ‘messaging instincts’ in favour of ‘document instincts’.

Step two – rekindle messaging between team members as the dominant communication mechanism, instead of e-mail and documents. In other words, move from ‘document-review-talk’ to ‘message-talk-document’, which produces shorter documents and greater ownership.

Mother Nature teaches us that we can implement collective intelligence through self-managed teams. We can recover our natural ‘messaging instincts’ through mobile-phone text messaging, for example, and instant messaging. The result should be teams that work more naturally. In other words fast, responsive and adaptive with every member engaged to the best of their abilities. “