Bioteams: what can we learn from nature's social networks?
Nature’s teams, such as bees, geese, ants and dolphins, are based on a small number of fundamentally different principles than human teams. Interestingly these “bioteams” seem to bear a much closer resemblance to today’s virtual/ mobile social networks than the traditional organisation teams we all know and love. Ken will explore whether an awareness of these principles can help us get much more value out of both social software and social networks.
Ken Thompson: "Bioteams - What Can We Learn from Nature's Social Networks"
Prizes?! Ken says we're going to be interacting and we get prizes!
Most networks are networks of convenience.
Check out Ken's most recent book The Networked Enterprise.
Three principles of swarms: ask the network, one knows - all knows, network invention
www.swarm-pro.com/private/messageboard.aspx - the name of the swarm is NL owned by ken.thompson. to join, text "JOIN NL username to 07786203958
After we've registered Ken asks us a variety of questions to which we respond via sms to this swarm team. We can all see the (often quite funny!) responses to the questions by browsing to the url. Ken is going to add this to his site later.
Apparently we're a collective brain. If there was one question we wanted to ask the room, what would it be?
How any of those constantly twittering get any work done? Ken rephrases: "Does Twitter distract from work?"
Are current group structures natural?
Bioteams share 4 common behaviours:
any group leader can take the lead - nature's groups are never led exclusively by one member. Collective leadership is...the right leader for the right task at the right time. Single leader teams are no longer appropriate.
Pheromone-style Short messaging. Nature's groups use short instant message. Instantly broadcast and received in situ. Short and simple...all species have a message instinct.
Small is Beautiful and Big is powerful
Crowds - everyone does the same thing at the same time...Scale or the Wisdom of Crowds.
Small groups...everyone can do different things at different times
Read the many through the few. Nature's networks are clustered. Some group members have many more connections than the average. These members have extreme connectivity.
Humberto Maturana on Autopoieses: "a living system is one whose only products are itself." (more on Maturana here: http://www.oikos.org/maten.htm)
Boundary, processes, nervous system, external communications = living network
Check out swarm tribes: http://www.swarmtribes.com/Public/getswarming.aspx?sname=jd4
*The most successful teams on the planet are not human teams.*
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