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!

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!

If, like me, you think that Company Mission Statements are often not worth the fancy cards they are embossed you should take a look at Dilbert's Automatic Mission Statement Generator (unfortunately no longer available online). It looks like many of our major enterprises and public organizations have used it already!

When large companies are organized in the traditional divisional structure, strategic decisions often fall to managers under short-term budgetary pressure. Success in one unit hides failures in others and ventures that promise strong future growth are starved if they can't contribute short-term.

Managing any team, network or group becomes a whole lot easier if you understand the distinction of the three concentric rings of team member commitment.

Are you smarter than a goose? Sure you are -- one on one. But when it comes to working efficiently, you and your colleagues can't touch the gaggle. According to author Ken Thompson, geese and other animals that naturally form groups have a lot to teach us about business. In a theory he calls organizational biomimetics, Thompson lays out the principles underlying nature's management strategies. So what can you learn from a bird or an ant? Take a gander. Katharine Gammon at Wired Magazine reports.

In 1964 psychiatrist Dr. Eric Berne published a wonderful book Games people play in which he identified the different games people play, often unwittingly, in social situations based on his concept of transaction analysis. People in teams play games too including Freeloader, Pseudo-engager, Chase-me, Senior Partner, Inquisitor, Stop-Starter, Overcommunicator, Email Fixater and Attachmentitis.

To succeed in work environments today, you must be able to work in teams - but they are not your father's teams anymore. Bioteams are the most appropriate ways to think about teams, networks and organizations in today's interconnected world. Nature's teams display four traits that don't naturally seem to occur in organizational teams and that I contend make a huge difference to human performance. Read the full article at THE BPM Institute.

Teams, networks, groups and their members behave in an irrational way but quite predictably so. A good team leader will understand this and use it to everyone’s advantage. One key point is to knowing each team members motivations and whether they are operating in “social economy” or “market economy” mindsets.

I have to thank Jo Jordan for the idea behind this excellent little crowdbreaker which introduces the bioteams concepts and shows very quickly in a concrete way that it makes perfect sense when you actually think about it.

Support for collaboration is the hot discussion in BPM circles these days, and for good reason. It’s the human-to-human interactions of teams that count when it comes to innovation and agility. ... you and everyone you work with must be able to function in and through internal and multi-company teams, and must also grasp what the latest concept of “team” really means….

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.

In Collision detection Clive Thompson comments on a new study published in The Journal of Human Movement Science (Dec 2007), which suggests that when you can see other workers performing different tasks out the corner of your eye, it slows you down.

I am pleased to announce the release of a new Flash-based Bioteams Instant Team Assessment tool which provides an online snapshot of how much a team is operating like a bioteam by calculating its bioteams footprint across 5 key areas: beliefs, leadership, connectivity, execution and organization.

David Bolchover, author of The Living Dead: The Truth about Office Life, writing for the UK Times Newspaper in “Sickness at work: the big story” asks the big question: Why do smaller companies have fewer absences? And what can the big corporations do?

It is far too easy for teams to lose focus in today's fast paced collaborative virtual workplace. When your team starts falling behind and can no longer see just how mission critical their work is to the project, it is time for you to help the team focus, and in turn, turbo-charge their effectiveness. Ken Thompson and Robin Good suggest how you can re-kindle the team's fire.

The way a team decides to decide is one of the most important decisions it makes. In the excellent book, "Why Teams Don't Work" the authors, Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley, identify seven key decision-making methods for 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.

Sometimes the Bee-team is the A-team: the importance of an automatic team swarm response to threats and opportunities.

An obvious characteristic of nature's best teams is that they seem to have just the right amount of structure to handle their environments. Too much and they would be slow and cumbersome; too little and they would lack the sophisticated responses to protect their position in the food chain.