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!

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.

Sometimes teams can become quite blind towards some very obvious improvements to their performance. There may be huge elephants in the team room which have somehow become camouflaged. Here is a short team exercise to quickly highlight big improvement opportunities by putting the team into an imaginary pressure cooker.

As a team leader you have two distinct leadership responsibilities - Managing the Individuals and Managing the Team. Leaders who fixate on managing the individuals tend to have happy teams which unfortunately under-perform in terms of deadlines, quality, customer satisfaction and budgets! Leaders who obsess on managing the team may hit most of these targets but at the expense of team member Alienation, Burnout, Compliance, Disinterest and eventually Exiting (easy to remember - ABCDE!). Great Team Leaders manage both responsibilities. Here is a simple framework with a nice supporting spreadsheet to help you assess and improve your leadership:

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.

An important free tool which I provide with my new book 'A Systematic Guide to High Performing Teams' is a Team Process Health Check Spreadsheet written in Microsoft Excel. The spreadsheet allows you to rapidly assess each of 16 important team process elements on a scale of 0-3 ranging from 'totally absent' to 'present and effective'.

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.

Team Game Plans are essential when your team is faced with a new and challenging task, such as a business simulation game. To formulate a Game Plan the team must quickly look at their goals and targets and then, based on a shared set of priorities, values, mental models and working practices, come up with a plan for achieving them.

The word 'RAPPORT' is an excellent mnemonic for remembering the 7 key elements of a great Team Game Plan as RAPPORT is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as: 'A close and harmonious relationship in which the groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well.'

So to have RAPPORT in your team you need to quickly agree your team's:

ROLES
AGREEMENTS
PROCESSES
PRIORITIES
ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES
RESULTS
TARGETS

I am very pleased to announce the release of my new guide book:
A SYSTEMATIC GUIDE TO GAME-BASED LEARNING (GBL) IN ORGANIZATIONAL TEAMS.

My friend Charles Jennings who introduces the book kindly notes in his foreword that 'it provides a deep analysis and clear guidance to help practitioners develop effective social game-based learning solutions'.

I am pleased to release a new white paper "A Leaders Guide to creating High Performing Teams (HPTs)". This 15-page executive guide, aimed at leaders and managers in all sizes and types of organisation, proposes and explains a pragmatic and comprehensive framework for the necessary interventions required to successfully introduce High Performing Teams (HPTs) into organisations.

** BREAKING NEWS **

I would like to share with you a very simple model I use for helping teams become more High Performing which addresses 4 key aspects of teams - Communications, Alignment, Meetings and Support ("CAMP").

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 ***

Imagine the scenario. The all-day team workshop went so well. You just stopped short of a group hug. You finished off by agreeing the actions. Everyone was so pumped up and committed. Fast forward 2 weeks and all the actions are forgotten - just words on a page somewhere! Sounds familiar? What went wrong and how do you stop it next time?