A childlike man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle aged habit and convention.  — Aldous Huxley

This next piece on Bio-Teams was initially intriguing to me….but after reading it, I was a bit less excited.  It seemed, at least to me, to be simply re-stating in a new terms something we already know  - “Great leaders build teams of powerful capable people and let them “play to their strengths” and lead as is needed.  If you have thoughts you want to share about bio-teaming I invite you to do so at www.kirkweisler.com/t4d 

Traditional organizational teams just became extinct.
With the emergence of global Internet collaboration, social networks and mobile communications, the very meaning of the word “team” has changed –changed utterly. Ken Thompson, former European IT Manager with Reuters and a  pioneer of the burgeoning “biomimicry” design movement, has mapped out a fundamentally new model for teams. He teaches organizations how they can look to the natural world to create high performance “bioteams” based on nature’s best designs.

In his just-released book, Bioteams, Thompson offers a way to build exceptionally agile, high performing teams based on a thorough examination of the key communication principles that underpin nature’s most successful groups –from signal bursts of migrating flocks of geese, to the waggle dance of honeybees, to the pheromone trails laid down by ants. Based on nature’s communication patterns, he provides a complete set of practical techniques that have been proven with real teams in the field, whose stories are described in a comprehensive set of case studies in the book.

According to Thompson, “Using the principles of bioteaming, command-and-control leadership gives way to connect-and-collaborate, where every member of an organizational team is a ‘leader.’ In nature and in bioteams, leaders don’t give commands, they transmit information, trusting the team members’ competencies and gaining accountability through transparency. True team leadership is about cooperation, not control. It’s about acting on opportunities, and letting others lead the leader when they know best about getting stuff done.”

Bioteams offers a vision of what successful teaming experiences look like. More than a book about team dynamics, Bioteams offers stories, principles, and guidelines showing how any individual can successfully participate in almost any work or learning-related situation faced today. Toby Coppel, Managing Director of Yahoo! Europe, said of the book, “If you are looking for the book that describes the radical new model for teams in today’s world –this is it!” Jay Cross, CEO of the Internet Time Group, summarized Thompson’s work, “Ironically, these are not really Thompson’s rules; they are Mother Nature’s.”