Virtual Teams Roadmap To High-Performance Collaboration: The Bioteaming Manifesto

Today's virtual business teams don't appear to be able to fully leverage the much touted opportunities offered by always-on interconnectedness, easy access to unlimited information sources and real-time communication and collaboration tools.


Photo credit: ChangeThis

While much of the Internet-generated new media revolution talks about greater and more effective collaboration opportunities, business teams appear to be engulfed by:

• technology adoption issues


• lack of effective communication approaches


• reliance on old traditional work methods


• absence of strong team motivation


• lack of effective cooperative workflows.

The adoption of new tools without the parallel development of a new culture that supports their use and the potentialities opened by these new media scenarios is typical of all neophyte phases of technology adoption.

We have yet not uncovered the full potential available to us when we operate, like nature operates, as cooperative, highly motivated teams.

 

 

The solution me and Ken propose to the above issues is the systematic study of nature's most successful living teams and the extraction of principles about their operational logistics, behaviour patterns, command-structure, communication methods that can provide us with useful guidelines on how teams need to operate to be truly successful.

It is our goal to analyze these principles and to see where and how some of the biological teaming principles can be transferred to the areas of organizational design, leadership, online collaboration, business networking, and human resources management.

It is our mission to show that true change can be enabled across organizational teams by leveraging nature's multi-million years of wisdom available to us by carefully studying highly effective biological teams.

Such discipline is to be named bioteaming and it consists of the research, mapping and identification of such key behavioural traits from nature's most effective biological-teams and in their re-definition within the context of new human-based business team workflows.

This is an excerpt from the introduction to new Bioteam Manifesto that ChangeThis has just kindly published on its site.

To read the full Manifesto:
ChangeThis: The Bioteaming Manifesto (PDF - 35 pages)

For more information about Bioteaming see also:

1. Virtual Teams Doorway To Effective Collaboration (audio-visual presentation)

2. The Bioteaming Conundrum
In the research into bioteaming we have (so far) identified four action zones and about a dozen action rules. These constitute the DNA or recipe book for leaders who want to make their organisational/project teams significantly more productive through the use of virtual technologies.

3. The hidden potential of human teams goes beyond nature's best efforts
There is one other area a team needs to address as part of a bioteaming strategy if it wants to be exceptionally successful team member beliefs. In this article we suggest the seven hidden beliefs of high performing teams.

4. How a team can become more productive by using three simple rules
In this article we introduce and identify the first key overarching principle of Bioteams and define the first three action rules.