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 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.

Many of us have heard the story about the classical race between the tortoise and hare but did you know that there is a version 2.0 of that metaphor? In essence, there was a re-match as the rabbit wanted to prove that being the fastest and ergonomically conducive animal, it would win the second race. Here, the tortoise was obviously left behind but the hare came to a major roadblock in their race track i.e. the bank of a river. How could it possibly transcend this obstacle when it has no mechanics to swim and isn't designed by Nature to even glide over water? The tortoise eventually caught up and in seeing the hare; offered to carry the hare on its back so that they could both cross the river bank and reach the finish line together!

Image Source: Chalkdust Magazine

I have been reading Lord Sacks daily thoughts "Celebrating Life" and was impressed by his piece on "The Prisoners Dilemma". The Dilemma in a nutshell is that 2 prisoners are given the chance to do a deal and betray each other. If you want more background I have written about the dilemma previously and it also features heavily in my new book.

Lord Sacks is the UK's chief Rabbi and highlights one vital aspect of the dilemma which I had not previously paid enough attention to - the fact that the two prisoners are not allowed to speak to each other!

I am delighted to announce my new book "A Systematic Guide to Collaboration and Competition within Organizations" which is currently available at a special launch price of ￡5 for the paperback and ￡0.99 for the kindle version.

By observing newly formed and existing teams playing business simulations I have learned some important insights into how team-working 'evolves' and offer here some specific ideas on how you might accelerate this evolution in your own organizational teams.

On the road to Effective Team Collaboration there seems to be two intermediate phases of 'na?ve collaboration' which many teams seem to go through - Hyper-Communication and Over-Delegation.

Most approaches to project management concentrate on the tasks which need to be successfully completed to achieve the project goal. Important as this is, it is at most only half of the story of successful project management. The C3 approach addresses the hidden side of project management - the people-collaboration-end-result perspective and is also a powerful tool for conducting a quick project healthcheck.

In his unique book "Dialogue and the art of thinking together" William Issacs introduces the Four-Player System originally developed by David Kantor. This is a very important technique for supporting real collaborative thinking in teams.

The boundaries of digital collaboration extend way beyond document sharing and communications. PathXL are a Belfast-based Digital Collaboration/Big Data company who have developed workflow/data analytics software to help pathologists and clinicians make quicker, faster diagnoses of complex cancer tumour patterns and to work more effectively with colleagues in clinical cross-functional teams.

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.

"If we want to do something creative, outside the box, innovative and un-traditional I am doubtful that sitting in a traditional meeting room, having a traditional meeting and following a traditional meeting script is going to move us toward that vision". Jamie Billingham summarises best practices for radically improving meetings.

A lot of my work involves facilitating large meetings where groups need to collaborate to resolve difficult issues or develop future plans for working together. Over the last 12 months I have started to share 4 Golden Rules with the participants which always seem to significantly improve the results we get. Here they are!

The Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina recently published a useful white paper on the topical area of developing skills for virtual teams. It is available online and in PDF. What I found most interesting was the section on Virtual Team Challenges.

Most collaborative ventures don't turn out quite the way we envisage. It would be great if we could determine in advance if a particular collaborative project or joint venture will be worth the required investment. Here is a simple way you can assess the merits of any collaborative endeavour BEFORE you invest time, effort and money in failing to make it work.

The latest report (September 2011) on Virtual Teams, Virtual Work Environments in the Post-Recession Era, from Brandman University, includes very interesting results of a survey commissioned from Forrester in 2010 on Virtual Teams.

I recently worked with colleagues to identify savings through collaboration between different local councils. Each council delivers the same basic services to their citizens and the brief was to identify potential shared savings which would not compromise service quality. We used a simple but novel design method to achieve this goal which is very relevant in today's harsh economic climate.

I am involved with a UK programme which is facilitating fast-track business collaboration between enterprises in the Interiors and Lifestyles markets (furniture, jewelry, ceramics, soft furnishings, clothing etc). The project is taking its own medicine and operates as a collaborative between Birmingham City University (BCU) and The Ceramics Industry Federation (CIF).

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.

The most common approach to business collaboration (Planned Collaboration) involves prior analysis of the participants to try to identify shared interests in collaboration (e.g. as complementary players in a collaborative supply network). Another more radical approach (Serendipitous Collaboration) involves putting a random mix of companies in a room and seeing what develops. Guess what - Serendipitous Collaboration works really well provided you have a good process for uncovering synergies!