Bioteaming

Definition

From Ken Thompson at http://www.bioteams.com/2006/08/29/bioteams_an_introduction.html#more

"Bioteaming is about what we can learn from the teams in nature in our organisational teams. It is about how we can base our teams on natural principles, which have developed and proved themselves useful through millions of years of evolution.

Now some of these ideas have been tried before with some success and some failures. However I believe that now because of the advent of a whole new generation of internet-based communication technologies and tools it is now possible, for the first time, to create the truly successful human bioteams

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!"

Characteristics of Bioteaming

What are the principles of bioteaming?

There are a number of characteristics bioteams have in common, for example:

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?