Well, a-lot has changed in the last few months. I don't want to be cliched by saying this, but we are now officially living in 'unprecedented' and dynamic times. Economies have tumbled, organisations that relied on open office spaces and hot desking as modes of productivity have switched entirely to distributed and virtual working from home. Not to forget, other words in the mainstream have surfaced with strong degrees of truth, such as the fact that the need to adapt and pivot business models is more important now than ever! Re-inventing the value chain within executive teams now occur virtually, involve everyone in the organisation and virtual meeting toll Zoom has definitely inherited some great PR, user adoption and a booming share price as a result!

The world is currently facing new challenges and the impacts of potential global pandemics are shaking fundamental working paradigms that contributed to and engineered economic success in the past. Companies are being forced to look at ways to support their workers through virtual technologies that foster remote working and collaborative project engagements in distributed, non physical environments. The problem is that the future of work is not easily comprehensible or transmissible amidst the ranks of leadership teams and identifying how an organisations productivity, employee engagement, cultural diversity and unity is improved in virtual settings forms part of the resistance against moving to a complete virtual team model - despite its benefits. With the Bioteaming manifesto now reaching fifteen years since conception, it is now relevant to revisit what fundamental elements makes virtual communities and distributed teams sustainable and committed to cohesion and success.

I am pleased to launch the YouTeamFast blog/online resource which pulls together Twenty One of my best techniques for assessing, mobilising, operating and improving teams and is the second website in my YouWorkFast series.

Prediction Markets apply group intelligence techniques such as the wisdom of crowds to provide new insights into certain types of decisions about the future which an enterprise must make. According to Andrew McAfee of MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of the book Enterprise 2.0. "They may seem like strange beasts but prediction markets are simply stock markets; they contain securities that are bought and sold by traders." Read his excellent 2-page introduction.

I am the team! It might sound like heresy but sometimes the most effective way to produce something is not through collaboration but by just doing it yourself.

The Delphi Technique is a proven way to harness collective group intelligence (popularly known as "the wisdom of crowds") in a wide range of applications. It is also non-proprietary and supported by a number of excellent free resources.

A virtual team profiling technique to help you spot problems before they turn into nasty surprises by first exposing the nature of the team in 8 key dimensions: Team Objectives, Leadership Style, Member Profiles, Team Shape, Environment, Working Approach, Social Dynamic and Technology.

Good operational meetings, whether co-located or virtual, are the engine of organisational and project governance. However often their success is left totally to chance. Here are my five key tips for making them more effective:

The most widely used tool for mobile, distributed and virtual teams is still the plain old telephone conference call. However it is also the most badly used! So whether you are talking over Skype, mixing it with screen sharing and messaging, using your corporate PABX or just calling in to an external service if you follow these 12 simple rules you will get much better calls.

The Wisdom of Crowds and Collective Intelligence are very useful concepts but not if they are used in the wrong places. Confusing these two concepts will only produce bad results for your groups and teams.