Former Reuter’s IT Europe Manager and VISION business consultant
Ken Thompson’s book Bioteams is a little gem that
describes how to create high performance teams based on examples found in the
natural world. As he notes in the first chapter, “after [nature’s] 3.8
billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what
surrounds us is the secret to survival. We are learning, for instance, how to
grow food like a prairie, create ceramics like an abalone, create color like
a peacock, self-medicate like a chimp, compute like a cell, and run a
business like a hickory forest.”
The idea of biomimetics really began, Thompson observes, in the
1940’s when a Swiss inventor noticed how certain plant seeds clung to his
clothing. Closer examination led to the discovery of a unique hook-and-loop
mechanism, which led to the invention of Velcro. From that point, it was only
a matter of time before theorists began to think more deeply about how to
adapt nature’s designs for human use. Thompson observes that bioteaming is
simply the application of biomimetics to groups in human
organizations.
What better opportunity to apply the lessons of bioteaming than to
a self-managed organization, where individual members enjoy a great deal of
autonomy in pursuit of their respective missions? Without the organizational
friction of bureaucracy and hierarchy, self-managing enterprises would seem
to find themselves uniquely equipped to avail themselves of the best
analogies that nature has to offer. And there are plenty to choose
from.
From the ant world (and we love ants here at the Self-Management
Institute--we devoted one entire issue of our newsletter to them!) we learn
about the power of instant short-burst, whole-group broadcast communication.
Ants communicate both opportunity (food) and threat (predator) messages
through whole-group chemical broadcasts. These short messages require no
response (eliminating the need for two-stage communication), and trigger
message receivers to act instantly. How efficient and effective is
that?
Thompson notes that traditional organizations rely heavily on
permission structures to protect against mistakes by individual members.
Bioteams, on the other hand, obliterate those structures and drive
accountability through transparency and reliance on reputation.
Accountability then becomes the natural consequence of bioteaming, not an
artifact of hierarchical authority structures.
Thompson’s book describes several layers of bioteaming lessons,
covering natural leadership, communication, virtual networked teams, and
performance scorecards. The book concludes with several case studies of
organizations that intentionally engaged thoughtful bioteaming methods to
solve thorny business problems. The power and elegance of bioteaming is
indisputable. Whether organizations will be willing to trade the perceived
security blanket of traditional hierarchy for that power is another question
entirely.
primary: recommended
reading secondary: ??
