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!

Innovation happens in many places and has many faces. Enterprises are required to nurture internal processes that work in sync like ecosystems to encourage front line intelligence to feed ideas through to management so that services, products, processes and teamwork ensues collaboratively to deliver benefits to the Value Chain. This requires effective team work and a supporting methodology that aims to treat your team more like an agile soccer team if you think about it so that anyone can effectively take control of the ball and score the goal.

In the book "Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice" by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen; the core concept of the "Job To Be Done" theory is introduced which is hugely relevant for enterprises wanting to leverage collaborative team work in creating value. The theory stresses that in order to drive organisational product, service and process excellence; we need to focus on alleviating the forces of anxiety, inertia, substitution and resistance across both the customer and employee value chain. Christensen articulates a mechanism to achieve this by firstly creating "specs" that define what outcomes and values are required in order to lead to customers or employees firing old methods, solutions, products and services and adopting new ones. In doing so, the product development team (as an example of a department vested with solving consumer problems) will be satisfied as they have induced consumer adoption either by bringing non-consumption into consuming contexts or working on incremental product and service innovation. Christensen states that "The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance".

This is important as traditionally, managers usually follow one of four primary organising principals in their innovation quest (or some composite therefore) being product attributes, customer characteristics, trends and/or competitive response. The challenge here is that these are not bad or wrong but they are essentially sampling of the most common and are insufficient and therefore not predictive of customer behaviours. In this article, I allude to how the Bioteaming action rules across the Organization, Execution and Connectivity Zone facilitates the dynamics required to solve the 'job to be done'.

I previously wrote about the most effective communication methodology using pheromone messaging inspired from Nature to identify and augment a robust, team focused unified collaboration system here. In a followup article, I write about how online collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams embody the tenets of the pheromone messaging system that Nature has employed to foster effective collaboration and teamwork within their environment. The integration of these virtual collaboration tools leads to the incubation of high performing virtual teams. Through simple changes in mindset and a reconfiguration of existing protocols, organisations can benefit from increased productivity, communication efficiency and trigger serendipitous collaboration within, across and beyond enterprises.

Project and enterprise teams across all organisation types are perpetually exposed to a stream of information flows that ebb the natural tempo of processes, policies, system mechanics, codes of conduct and collaboration protocols. These collectively bring upon the information and knowledge economy and the biggest problem here is that everyone is constantly in flux amidst a conundrum of competing batches of instruction, directives and stimuli whilst being overwhelmed with attention deficits. So how do we nurture distributed and collective intelligence in a setting where directives, knowledge and information are constantly fighting for prioritisation? How do teams effectively manage communication and leverage unified communication platforms to drive smart behaviours that lead to focused outcomes? We do this by looking at how Nature has employed the oldest and most evolved form of biological signalling, using chemicals to communicate through smell and taste, but appropriating it for the organisational context.

Image Source: Wolf Pack Explains 'Alpha' Behavior

The law of requisite variety (a term originally rooted as the first law of cybernetics) states that "If a system is to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled" . In enterprise contexts, this means that that teams and organisations need to nurture their ability to handle dynamic and complex changes stemming from the external environment and have enough structured capacity to react with collective resources in the face of these stimuli so as to not fail and become a 'un-viable system'.

An excellent article on Bioteams by Doug Kirkpatrick, US Partner at NuFocus Strategic Group concludes: "The power and elegance of bioteaming is indisputable. Whether organizational leaders will detach themselves from the perceived security blanket of traditional, artificial hierarchy in order to fully experience that power is another question entirely?"

I have written quite a lot about the importance of a team's beliefs on their performance and have published some modest research into the beliefs which differentiate 'high performing' teams from other teams. Until today I have not published the questionnaire which underpinned this research. I am now making this questionnaire available here and also, on request, a free spreadsheet tool to help you 'number crunch' and analyse the results from using the beliefs questionnaire with your own teams.

What do we mean by "Teamwork"? We often talk about Teamwork as if its a singular thing however in nature there are 4 different types - each of which have a very precise meaning. I call these Solowork, Crowdwork, Groupwork and Teamwork itself. An effective team knows how and when to use each type - an ineffective team only uses one!

*** Stop Press Ken's new book on teams is out A Systematic Guide to High Performing Teams ***

I have just purchased John Kotter's new book XLR8 ("Accelerate") which as well as reworking his previous excellent thinking on change introduces two concepts which resonate with my work - The Dual Operating System and The Big Opportunity. Lets briefly look at each of them.

I am delighted to be able to publish a new Bioteams article in the Summer 2014 edition of The Henry Ford Magazine entitled "Teams in Nature". The article summarises the differences between human teams and natures teams in three critical areas: Communications, Leadership and Scalability.

Nature has a way of automatically right-sizing a group to tackle the job at hand. Just like the Russian Matryoshka Dolls (dolls within dolls), small groups link into bigger ones, which in turn link into still bigger ones. In this follow-up article to "Why penguins have no commanding officer" and "Did ants invent the perfect system for communicating via mobile technology?", Ken Thompson writing for NESTA explores what we can learn about teamwork and group/community size from nature's most successful teams.

Fabio Padilla from Brazil has written a very interesting review of Bioteams for his MBA thesis at the Universidade Católica de Brasilia - Universa. Fabio has very kindly allowed me to republish a summary of his conclusions which he has translated from the original Portuguese.

The late Stephen Covey always reminded us that "the main thing was to keep the main thing the main thing !" However when you think about "Change Management" you could be excused for thinking its all about detailed road maps and large tomes of procedures and checklists. These are all important but sometimes they can also sadly distract from the whole point of the exercise. To stop you falling into this trap I offer you my easy to remember 4 point mental checklist based on the human body to help you constantly check that you have not been "detail distracted"!

Many business models used by enterprises have never been calibrated using the organisation's own historical data which seriously undermines their usefulness. This is generally not due to the lack of historical data but because of the way the models have been designed. So can you build business models which do not suffer from this fatal flaw? Absolutely!

It has been said that how a team decides how to decide is the most important decision it will make. I am pleased to feature a very interesting article by Jamie @ THOUGHT Stream which suggests practical tips for engaging your team, getting buy-in and how to use the Bioteams Action Zones and Rules to help.

I have been invited to participate in a software beta test which is using an online tool called Trello to coordinate test feedback. Trello is very simple and powerful and sits halfway between a forum and a wiki. It is a great tool for capturing and structuring feedback from a community in a really easy way and very compatible with a bioteams style of working.

You might not have noticed but a few weeks back I launched my bioteams microblog for short articles you can read in under a minute. It also suits me when I am travelling and want to post via mobile phone. I have been busy posting away each day and there are already lots of articles so please head over, check it out and let me know what you think.

Most online communities are simply online ghost towns. People register, get their login details, visit once, decide its not for them and never return. This pattern is repeated over and over. Maybe online communities are not for you? Here is how to decide, and if you still want one - here is how to avoid the most obvious mistakes.

Learned Optimism is an approach to self-improvement invented by American psychologist, Doctor Martin Seligman and described in his book, Learned Optimism (1990). Seligman argues for the benefits of an optimistic outlook and describes how to learn to be optimistic.

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway have discovered that bees learn to fly the shortest possible route between flowers even if they discover the flowers in a different order. In doing this they are effectively solving the challenging 'Travelling Salesman Problem' and despite their small brains are the first creatures discovered who can do this.