Whilst it's true that the rise Artificial Intelligence threatens industries and jobs alike, it also presents an opportunity for humans and teams to embrace the new paradigm by staying one step ahead and making themselves smarter and more capable in harnessing collective intelligence. The term collective intelligence refers to the resulting knowledge or wisdom that ensues when many agents or individuals are involved in a group and where this type of 'intelligence' cannot exist through an individual endeavour. It is therefore important that in the face of tectonic shifts in technology and the rise of intelligent machines coupled with the threat of automation; teams and humans embrace a form of 'swarming' in order to not only future proof themselves but create the right type of environment to achieve outcomes that could not be reached through individual pursuits. In this article, I refer to various examples of how Nature's team achieve this 'swarm intelligence' and appropriate how these can be achieved in the organisational setting through Bioteaming.

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.

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.

It is a natural human trait to believe that we (the species) are the inventors of all clever things. Not so. One of the humbling things that biomimicry teaches us very quickly is that many times Mother Nature has beaten us to it! For example, take one of our proudest achievements: elections and democracy....

Steven Poole, writing for the Guardian on Saturday March 15, reviews "Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration", by Keith Sawyer and concludes that the book's big idea is that there is no such thing as the lone genius: everything turns out to be collaborative.

Humankind is the only species that places its trust in a small group of "leaders" to determine the best direction for the whole group. In his follow-up article to Did ants invent the perfect system for communicating via mobile technology? Ken Thompson, explores whether we can learn a thing or two about leadership from nature's most successful teams.

Dominic M. Thomas at Emory University suggests five key triggers which can be used to intervene with a virtual team which is heading for a problem before it is too late to do anything to fix it.

I have noticed that there are four things which good teams seem to do and which bad teams don't do. Check to see how your own team shapes up.

The Book "The Starfish and The Spider" uses the amazing capabilities of starfish to survive and regrow damaged limbs as a powerful metaphor for leaderless organisations.

Cultivating Team Intelligence provides organizational teams, networks and communities with a much better early warning 'radar' thus enabling them to spot and deal with problems/opportunities sooner.

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.

According to Robin McKie writing for The Observer in “Clever raven proves that it's no birdbrain“ scientists have discovered an unexpected candidate for the title of the world's second smartest creature: the raven

Poor organisational intelligence leads to 'coblaboration' instead of collaboration.Harvard Professor, David Perkins, in his latest book, "King Arthur's Round Table : How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations", discusses the importance of "organisational Intelligence" and "developmental leadership" and how the absence of these leads to coblaboration rather than collaboration in organisational teams.

Many people have been enchanted by the amazing video “The March of the Penguins” and most know that they have no leader. However few people go on to ask the obvious next question “If they have no leader then how do they know where to go?”....

Bioteaming – the secret to high-performing, self-organising, virtually networked teams

In my research into bioteaming I have (so far) identified four action zones and about a dozen action rules.This article provides a brief introduction.