While much of the Internet-generated new media revolution talks about greater and more effective collaboration opportunities, business teams appear to be engulfed by:
The adoption of new tools without the parallel development of a new culture that supports their use and the potentialities opened by these new media scenarios is typical of all neo-phyte phases of technology adoption. We have yet not uncovered the full potential available to us when we operate, like nature operates, as cooperative, highly motivated teams.
This is why we suggest looking at nature’s most successful biological teams to uncover the secrets of extended cooperation and effective collaboration.
Robin Good (www.kolabora.com) is an online publisher (www.masternewmedia.org), researcher, and writer on the smart and intelligent use of new media technologies for effective communication. Robin, an expert in interface, information and identity design, is also recognized on the Internet as a reputable independent analyst, trendspotter, and opinion-maker in many different fields including new media, online collaboration, independent publishing (www.theweblogproject.com), communication skills (www.masterviews.com) and social change (www.communicationagents.com).
The Solution
Today’s teams are a complex alliance of talented individuals from different organisations, departments, professions, and locations. Each member has a different skillset and is accustomed to using different technology tools. Today’s teams are comprised of individuals with different backgrounds, languages, cultures and education and involved in team activities in broadly varying degrees.
Ken Thompson is an emergent leading expert in the area of virtual enterprise networks, virtual professional communities and virtual teams. His strategy includes the use of a unique set of team work-shops, multiple coaching interventions and the effective integration of a small toolkit of virtual collaboration technologies. He is now developing software, templates and task-specific tools to support the development of high-performance teams. Ken is founder of the www.bioteams.com blog which is a unique online web site dedicated to the explanation of bioteaming concepts and to the reporting on new research becoming available in this new study area.
The solution we propose to the above issues is the systematic study of nature’s most successful living teams and the extraction of principles about their operational logistics, behaviour patterns, command-structure, communication methods that can provide us with useful guidelines on how teams need to operate to be truly successful.
The Business factor
Statistics on IT project teams provide some enlightening information:
Why?
Though they may be very useful they are not the critical component that will determine how effectively any group of networked individuals will cooperate toward the achievement of a business goal.
Once you wrap your mind around this new way of looking at organizational teams you immediately need to rethink how such teams should be nurtured, organised and supported in effective and suitable ways.
Part II: How Can We Perform Better Than Nature’s Teams?
What is strategically important for operating as efficiently as a bioteam is the ability of team members to be able to self-select when to utilize personal “intelligence” and critical thinking and when to rely on team intelligence before acting.
From what we have been able to find there is no other research in the public domain, which directly looks at the beliefs of team members in high-performance teams. There is however excellent material on the detailed characteristics and behaviours of high-perform-ing teams — two of which are Hot Groups and Organising Genius.
According to our own personal experience and the research we have carried out on this topic High Performing Teams (HPT) are immediately identifiable by the tacit, or hidden beliefs by which their general behaviour and attitude is determined:
Finally, as discussed under “Learned Optimism” HPT team members are confident that they (and they alone) will succeed in delivering the mission of the project.
A human team operating in harmony with such principles, utilized by many of nature’s most successful biological teams, would be able to operate as an ultra-high-performing team, or as we like to say as a “human bioteam”.
Many scientific papers and books have emerged in the last two decadese suggesting that the survival of the fittest is only half of the story of how living species were able to survive on this planet. What appears strategic in the emergence of successful living teams was the gradual development of symbiotic behaviours, which represented initial biological strategies to spontaneous cooperation.
How Bioteaming Actually Works In our research into bioteaming over the last two years we have (so far) identified four bioteaming action zones and about a dozen bioteaming action rules. These zones and rules constitute the DNA of bioteaming. They also present themselves as the initial implementation recipe for leaders who want to make their virtual business teams significantly more productive and more effective at using virtual technologies, by adopting the proven strategies and organisational structures tested and proven successful by nature’s own best teams. The four action zones are to a bioteam what the four chemical bases (A, T, G and C) are to DNA — their interdependencies and constantly repeating patterns provide the building blocks of the double helix structure common to all living things. Leadership zone Connectivity zone Execution zone Organization zone Leadership Zone Bioteaming trait: Treat every team member as a leader RULE 1: Stop Controlling Communicate information — not orders. Traditional teams issue orders and use two-way communications widely. Bioteams provide ‘situational information’ to the team members who are trained to judge themselves what they should do in the best interests of the team. They move exceptionally fast because they mostly use one-way broadcast communications and use two-way communi-cations only when necessary. RULE 2: Team Intelligence Mobilise everyone to look for and manage team threats and opportunities. In traditional teams, it’s the leader’s job to provide most of the “Team Intelligence” — infor-mation on potential threats to, or opportunities for, the team. In a Bioteam, it is every team member’s responsibility to constantly look-out for relevant team intelligence and to ensure it is instantly communicated to all other team members through a small but complete set of message protocols. RULE 3: Permission Granted Achieve accountability through transparency not permission Traditional teams protect themselves against member mistakes by establishing layers of permission which must be granted before a team member may take action in certain circum-stances. We call these “Permission Structures”. Bioteams slash down these “Permission Structures” to the absolute bare minimum. The only permission structures kept in place by a bioteam are those needed to protect the team against the potentially critical mistakes which would threaten the sustainability of the bioteam’s own mission. Accountability in bioteams is achieved through ‘team transparency’ and ‘reputation-based’ systems, not through control and hierarchical authorisation systems. Connectivity Zone Bioteaming trait: Connect team members, partners and networks synergistically RULE 4: Always-On Provide 24x7 instant in situ message hotlines for all team members Traditional teams expect their members to go somewhere, such as their PC, to “get their mes-sages”. Bioteams ‘take the messages to the team members’ via whichever device suits each individual member best at any particular time in their working day. RULE 5: Symbiosis Treat external partners as fully trusted team members Traditional teams pay lip-service to team members from external organisations such as customers or suppliers in terms of transparency and trust. Bioteams pick their partners very carefully but once they have committed to them they treat them identically to their own internal team members by granting them full transparency and trust. RULE 6: Cluster Nurture the team’s internal and external networks and connections Traditional Teams don’t think about their networks — they believe it’s the team leader’s job to make sure they have all the necessary resources. Bioteams pay a lot of attention to the collective networks and relationships of each team member. This is to ensure they have adequate “strong ties” to get the work done well and that they can ‘call in short-notice favours’ as needed from external parties. These networking relationships ensure bioteams have sufficient “weak ties” to quickly receive and identify early warning signals, news, rumours and hard to access information. This helps them to anticipate important changes from the external marketplaces in which they operate. Execution Zone Bioteaming trait: Experiment, co-operate and learn RULE 7: Swarm Develop consistent autonomous team member behaviours Traditional teams focus on team member individuality as a means of achieving creativity and innovation but neglect the hidden power of consistent member behaviours. Bioteams have discovered that for a team to be really effective it is critical to count on the ability of the team to guarantee a pre-defined set of key tasks in a reliable and systematic fashion. This requires that team members are competent and aware of what the fundamental requirements are and that each one of the team members is willing and capable of attending to these fundamental duties when needed. Bioteam members take a proactive and respon-sible interest in anything which might affect the ultimate success of their project whether its within their defined project role or not. RULE 8: Tit-for-Tat Team members must learn effective biological and interpersonal co operation strategies Traditional teams try to play “Win-Win” and “Collaborate” but don’t actually have any practical strategies or tactics for achieving this. Traditional teams are not really interested in the real, often raw, basic and undeclared, motivations of their teammates. Bioteams realise that “Win-Win” is an outcome, not a strategy, and use nature’ s proven personal collaboration strategies to create the conditions for it to happen. Bioteam personal collaboration strategies also address the “What’s in it for me?” question for each team member. RULE 9: Genetic Algorithms Learn through experimentation, mutation and team review Traditional teams believe that analysis is the best way to get things right. Consequently they engage in extensive planning, design and preparation tasks before trying out new things or releasing new products to their customers. Bioteams believe that “live controlled experimentation” is the only way to get things right and that most things won’t work out as planned anyway, no matter how well they are anal-ysed and designed. Bioteams quickly experiment with multiple alternative courses of action, often in parallel and in progressively larger increments to find out what works best. After they have collected sufficient data they build on and methodically apply the most promising results. Organisation Zone Bioteaming trait: Establish sustainable self-organisation RULE 10: Self-Organising Networks Define the team in terms of ‘network transformations’ — not outputs Traditional teams define their goals and roles in terms of the outputs and activities they are expected to produce — i.e. inanimate objects. Bioteams define their goals and roles in terms of the transformations they intend to make in the people and partners they will engage with — i.e. living things. They are change agents by definition. RULE 11: Porous Membranes Develop team boundaries which are open to energy but closed to waste In a traditional team the leader selects the members and the team effectively becomes “sealed” at the pre-ordained “right size” in terms of members very early in its lifecycle. There is a big focus on full-time members as the team “product engines”. In a bioteam the members select the members and recognise that the “right team size” will only emerge over time no matter what the plan says. Bioteams keep looking for new, useful team members throughout their team life-span. Bioteams particularly seek out part-time members, advisors, experts, “jungle-guides” and external allies who can help them just-in-time as necessary. RULE 12: Emerge Scale naturally through nature’s universal growth and decay cycles Traditional teams grow as quick as they can to the agreed size and as per the agreed project schedule. Bioteams are aware that growth is not something that can be managed or controlled. The team leaders and members treat their own bioteam like it is a “living thing” and watch for and facilitate natural opportunities for its growth. Part IV: Summary The Problem Today’s virtual business teams have yet to use team-based technologies to their full advantage. While much of the Internet-generated new media revolution talks about greater and more effective collaboration opportunities, business teams appear to be engulfed by technology adoption issues, lack of effective communication approaches, reliance on old traditional work methods, absence of strong team motivation and of effective cooperative workflows. The reason this happens, we contend, is that we have fundamentally failed to recognise the innate living nature of organisational teams in them separate from their members. We treat our teams mechanistically, like clocks, to be commanded and controlled and cannot understand why they constantly misbehave and surprise us. We have not yet learned to nurture and nourish these teams like living entities where spurts of growth emerge unpredictably despite, and even in spite of, all our plans, roadmaps and timetables. The adoption of new tools without the parallel development of a new culture that supports their use and the potentialities opened by these new media scenarios is typical of all neo-phyte phases of technology adoption and it reflects the very early stages of evolution we are still at in becoming effective team players of this technology-driven information economy. The Solution We propose that the solution is to recognise the autonomous aspects of business teams and networks and to learn how nature’s most successful biological teams operate. We propose a new discipline called Bioteaming dedicated to examining what virtual business teams can integrate and adopt from the operational principles guiding the most effective biological teams. Our initial framework integrates four bioteaming action zones and twelve action rules which embody techniques and principles that can be immediately transferred to any virtual business team. We have seen that there is a great deal that can be learned from nature’s most successful living teams but we also acknowledge the profound impact that human dimensions of intelli-gence, beliefs and motivations has on effective interpretation of these operational guidelines. Our research clearly shows that team members’ beliefs have a huge impact on a team’s over-all performance. Therefore we have made the examination of the team members’ beliefs and the understanding of how to best leverage them a central tenet of bioteaming. In this light, we have identified seven key beliefs of high performing human teams as the final piece in our first bioteaming definition. We believe that the combination of bioteaming principles with supportive coaching/leader-ship, and appropriate technology driven by a cohesive set of beliefs can produce ultra-high performing teams, groups, communities, networks and even organisations that can outper-form today’s mechanistic and hierarchical organisational teams. For More Information please see: The Bioteaming Conundrum http://www.bioteams.com/2005/08/04/the_secret_dna.html In the research into bioteaming we have (so far) identified four action zones and about a dozen action rules. These constitute the DNA or recipe book for leaders who want to make their organisational/ project teams significantly more productive through the use of virtual technologies. The hidden potential of human teams goes beyond nature’s best efforts http://www.bioteams.com/2005/08/29/the_seven_beliefs.htm There is one other area a team needs to address as part of a bioteaming strategy if it wants to be exceptionally successful — team member beliefs. In this article we suggest the seven hidden beliefs of high performing teams. How a team can become more productive by using three simple rules http://www.bioteams.com/2005/07/01/virtual_team_productivity.html In this article we introduce and identify the first key overarching principle of Bioteams and define the first three action rules. References Margulis, L., 1998. The Symbiotic Planet — A New Look at Evolution, Weidenfield & Nicholson, pp. 33-49 Wilson, E., Holldobbler, B., 1994. Journey to the Ants, Harvard University Press Bonabeau, E., 1999. Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems, Oxford, pp. 9-7, 271-273 Marten, G., 2001 Human Ecology: Basic concepts for Sustainable Development, Earthscan Frankl, V., 1984. Man’s Search for Meaning, Simon & Schuster Seligman, M., 1990. Learned Optimism — How to change your mind and your life, Free Press Lipman-Blumen, J. & Leavitt, H., 1999. Hot Groups — Seeding them, feeding them and using them to ignite your organization, Oxford University Press Bennis, W., 1997. Organizing Genius — The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, Nicholas Brealey Publishing Endnotes Man’s Search for Meaning Learned Optimism: How to change your mind and your life Hot Groups: Seeding them, feeding them and using them to ignite your organization Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution Info About The Authors It is our goal to analyze these principles and to see where and how some of the biological teaming principles can be transferred to the areas of organizational design, leadership, online collaboration, business networking, and human resources management. It is our mission to show that true change can be enabled across organizational teams by leveraging nature’s multi-million years of wisdom available to us by carefully studying highly effective biological teams. Such discipline is to be named bioteaming and it consists of the research, mapping and identification of such key behavioural traits from nature’s most effective biological-teams and in their re-definition within the context of new human-based business team workflows.
RULE 3: Permission Granted
Bioteams are aware that growth is not something that can be managed or controlled. The team leaders and members treat their own bioteam like it is a “living thing” and watch for and facilitate natural opportunities for its growth.
The adoption of new tools without the parallel development of a new culture that supports their use and the potentialities opened by these new media scenarios is typical of all neo-phyte phases of technology adoption and it reflects the very early stages of evolution we are still at in becoming effective team players of this technology-driven information economy.
We believe that the combination of bioteaming principles with supportive coaching/leader-ship, and appropriate technology driven by a cohesive set of beliefs can produce ultra-high performing teams, groups, communities, networks and even organisations that can outper-form today’s mechanistic and hierarchical organisational teams.
Such discipline is to be named bioteaming and it consists of the research, mapping and identification of such key behavioural traits from nature’s most effective biological-teams and in their re-definition within the context of new human-based business team workflows.
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