Next month (April 2020) it will be 15 years since I published "The Bioteaming Manifesto" in collaboration with my great partner Robin Good.
The idea of using 12 rules derived from nature to create more effective teams is even more relevant in today’s Virtual-Mobile-Global world of organizations.
You can also visit the website bioteams.com with over 600 articles on the increasingly relevant discipline of Organizational Biomimicry – improving organizations by adopting and adapting natural principles. On bioteams.com you can still download the very popular Bioteaming Manifesto (33-pages) for free as a PDF.
There is also a Tedx talk and a bioteams book.
And finally here is a quick reminder of the 12 bioteaming rules:
Rule 1: Stop Controlling
Communicate information not orders
Rule 2: Team Intelligence
Mobilize everyone to look for and manage team threats and opportunities
Rule 3: Permission Granted
Achieve accountability through transparency not permission
Rule 4: Always-On
Provide 24*7 instant "in-situ" message hotlines for all team members
Rule 5: Symbiosis
Treat external partners as fully trusted team members
Rule 6. Cluster
Nurture the team's internal and external networks and connections
Rule 7: Swarm!
Develop consistent autonomous team member behaviors
Rule 8: Tit-for-Tat
Team members must learn effective biological and interpersonal cooperation strategies
Rule 9: Genetic Algorithms
Learn through experimentation, mutation and team review
Rule 10: Self-Organizing Networks
Define the team in terms of "network transformations" - not outputs
Rule 11: Porous Membranes
Develop team boundaries that are open to energy but closed to waste
Rule 12. Emerge
Scale naturally through nature's universal growth and decay cycles
