Bioteams or Bioteaming is a new research discipline concerning how organisational teams and inter-organisational business networks, supply chains and virtual communities can become more effective by studying how natures' most successful teams have evolved at the microscopic, insect, animal and ecosystem levels.

Examples of highly successful biological teams include the biological cell, the nervous system, antcolonies , bee swarms, the hearts pacemaker cels, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_pacemaker flocks of geese, dolphin pods, food webs and large scale ecosystems.

Bioteaming incorporates research from diverse fields including sociobiology, cybernetics, complexity, ecology, evolution and cognitive science.

A central tenet of bioteaming research is that whilst we should be humble enough to learn from biological teams we should not be limited by them as human teams and their members have vastly superior potential for intelligence, creativity, autonomy, beliefs, language and self-awareness.

See also Lateral communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_communication

Interlock Research
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlock_research

How natures' teams operate

Almost all of us have been part of some team in our workforce or organisation or even a sports club. Usually this is a mixed experience - we have some victories but lots of failures too. It was hoped that all the communication technologies like email, the Internet, broadband, mobile phones and Personal digital assistants(PDAs) would make things better for teams but in many cases it's actually made it worse!

However if you look at nature its teams seem to work much better than ours - for example:

<strong>Bumblebees</strong>

The fact bees can fly goes beyond current human understanding of aerodynamics (This is not true, it is now well understood how bees fly0- they should not be producing the "lift" their wings generate - they are the wrong shape! Even so a honeybee can point the other bees in the swarm to a distant honey source simply by performing a complicated waggle dance, which acts like a compass to show the heading the others need to fly

<strong>Ants</strong>

Ant colonies are arguably the most successful teams on the planet - they make up 10% of all living things by weight. No matter where you are in the world, it is said, if you are outside and you look down carefully you will probably see an ant. Even with their tiny brains they regularly use Swarm Intelligence to solve complex route planning problems as quickly as our best computers.

<strong>Geese</strong>

Flocks of geese fly amazing distances constantly rotating which bird handles the extra responsibility and air resistance of leading. A goose can fly 70% further in a group than by itself due to the optimisation of slipstream effects through the "V" formation. If a goose falls behind two birds will automatically drop out of formation to care for it (or until it dies).

<strong>Termites</strong>

Historians tell us that the invention of the "arch" was one of the central defining milestones of human civilisation. Yet we now know that lowly termites build arches on the plains of Africa within their giant mound like nests, some over ten feet tall, thousands of times larger than themselves. These nests even have full air conditioning!

Slime moulds - these are in many ways the most extraoridinary bioteams - they are orgnisms that can be at one moment a collections of millions of individual entities - amoeba, which at the drop of a hat can turn into an organised blob which can walk of somewhere else! Slime mould

These examples are only the tip of the iceberg - we could go on and on!

Common characteristics of Bioteams

So Bioteaming is about what we can learn from the teams in nature in our organisational teams. It is about how we can base our teams on natural principles, which have developed and proved themselves useful through millions of years of evolution.

Now some of these ideas have been tried before with some success and some failures. However now because of advances in sociobiology, cybernetics, complexity, ecology, evolution, cognitive science and the advent of a whole new generation of internet-based virtual team technologies and tools it seems more possible, for the first time, to create true human bioteams.

There are a number of characteristics bioteams have in common, for example:

<strong>Self-Management</strong>

The most well known trait of a bioteam is Self-Management or Autonomy. Basically each team member manages itself and does not need to be told what to do. This is different from most of our teams which traditionally use "command and control" - wait till told and obey orders. Some business teams are now operating as "self-managed teams". This does not mean that there is no leader but every member is a leader in some way.

<strong>Non-verbal communication </strong>

Bioteams have superb communications, which do not rely on direct member-to-member communications. For example ants predominantly communicate through scent trails known as Pheromones where different scents mean different things. The ants don't have to meet each other face to face to communicate. Also most of their messages are broadcasts and are not intended to be replied to - this gives them enormous responsiveness and speed.

This is very relevant today with many of our teams "virtual" in the sense that they are working over multiple locations with every one working different hours and where members can't physically meet that often. Bioteams show us that whilst face-to-face communication has an important place a team can often achieve its goals without it.

<strong>Action-focused</strong>

Another trait is that bioteams solve problems and learn by rapid experimentation and evolution. Bioteams have very concrete goals which are hard-wired into the members genetically but the members don't have any actual strategies or plans for achieving them. They work by rapid experimentation and feedback. If something works and solves the problem it gets reinforced within their collective set of responses for the next time - if not it dies.

We tend to treat our human teams more like clocks than colonies! They are going a bit slow so they need to be wound up. Bioteaming indicates that we cannot be prescriptive about what will work and what won't work - we have just got to try it and see!

<strong>3-Dimensional</strong>

Another key principle is the way each member strives to maintain a dynamic relationship with the other members, the external environment and the colony itself. Each bioteam member is fundamentally 3-dimensional - they constantly engage autonomously with their close team members, their external environment and the colony as a whole.

Often human teams are much more 1-dimensional with team members only concerned with part of the big picture. Experiments have shown that if you remove a complete caste (of workers) from an ant colony the others will adapt - just try that with a human team!

Current Bioteams Research

The following articles provide an introduction to the current research on bioteaming:

<ol><li>Self-Organising Teams - learning from nature [905]</li>
<li>The DNA hidden within biological teams [906]</li>
<li>How natures teams communicate [907]</li>
<li>What high performing teams believe [908]</li>
<li>The Bioteaming Manifesto [909]</li>
</ol>

Bioteams Bibliography

1. Anderson , C., Franks N., 1989. "Teamwork in animals, robots and humans", <em>Advances in the Study of Behavior</em>, pp. 1-27

2. Anderson, C., McMillan E, 2003. "Of Ants and Men: self-organized teams in human and insect organisations", E<em>mergence</em>, 2003, pp. 1-9

3. Barabasi, A., 1999. "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks", <em>Science</em> Volume 286, 1999, pp.509-512

4. Belbin, R., 2000. <em>Beyond the Team</em>, Butterworth Heinemann, pp. 80-86

5. Belbin, R., 1996. <em>The Coming Shape of Organisation</em>, Butterworth Heinemann, pp. 23-32

6. Bonabeau, E., Meyer, C., 2001. "Swarm Intelligence - A Whole New Way to think about Business", <em>Harvard Business Review</em>, pp. 107-114

7. Bonabeau, E., 1999. <em>Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems</em>, Oxford, pp. 9-7, 271-273

8. Capra F., 2002. <em>The Hidden Connections</em>, Flamingo, pp. 85-112

9. Capra, F., 1997. <em>The Web of Life - A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter</em>, Harper Collins, pp. 153-171, 189-216

10. Crick, F., 1970. "The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology", <em>Nature</em>, Volume 227, pp. 561-563

11. Dawkins, R., 1976. <em>The Selfish Gene</em>, Oxford, pp. 189-201

12. Dennis, C., Gallagher R., 2001. <em>The Human Genome</em>, Nature Publishing Group, pp. 9-22

13. Franklin, S., 2003. "Coordination without Communication", <em>Institute for Intelligent Systems</em>, pp. 1-6

14. Gladwell, M., 2000. <em>The Tipping Point</em>, Little, Brown & Company, pp. 15-29

15. Gordon, D., 1999. <em>Ants at Work</em>, Norton, pp. 142-165

16. Granovetter, M., 1973 "The strength of weak ties", <em>American Journal of Sociology</em>, Issue 6, pp. 1360-1380

17. Johnston, S., 2001 <em>Emergence</em>, Penguin, pp. 29-33, 73-82

18. Margulis, L., 1998 <em>The Symbiotic Planet - A New Look at Evolution</em>, Weidenfield & Nicholson, pp. 33-49

19. Maturana, H., Varela F., 1992. <em>The Tree of Knowledge - The Biological Basis of Human Understanding</em>, Shambhala, pp. 43-52, 180-201

20. Mitleton-Kelly, E., 2003 "The Principles of Complexity and Enabling Infrastructures", <em>The Application of Complexity Theory to Organisations</em>, Pergamon, Chapter 2

21. Prigogine, I., 1997. <em>The End of Certainty - Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature</em>, Free Press, pp. 183-189

22. Resnick, M., 1997. <em>Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams - Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds</em>, MIT Press, pp. 49-68

23. Reynolds, C., 1987 "Flocks, Herds and Schools - a distributed behaviour model", <em>Computer Graphics</em>, pp. 25-34

24. Tinbergen, N., 1964 <em>Social Behavior in Animals</em>, Science Paperbacks, pp. 16-21

25. Watson, J., 1968. <em>The Double Helix</em>, Penguin, pp. 1-8

26. Wilson, E., Holldobbler, B., 1994. <em>Journey to the Ants</em>, Harvard University Press, pp. 41-58, 96-106, 107-122

27. Wilson, E., Holldobbler, B., 1984. "The Wonderfully Diverse Ways of the Ant", <em>National Geographic</em>, pp. 779-813