Customer Reviews

Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Most Successful Designs

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This is for sure THE BOOK to open your mind and start developping yourself on the subject in a fun and intuitive way. I did order another book previouos to this one and have been doing an extensive research in the web on reviews on the subject as my customers (I am an organizational development consultant) are more and more asking for support on the subject of virtual and remote teams. Other books and approaches are ok, they provide you structure but most are still in the discovery process and using the already known patterns. They identify virtual teams as a matter of technology and not a matter of major change in how we approach work and human connections in this century. Ken Thompson goes beyond and takes you to look at best practices, there where you would not expect them. Virtual and remote teams is the top of the iceberg of the major change that we need to make in our current conception of teams and work

Web 2.0 (wikis, blogs, social networking, SMS, chat,et al) give us a whole new world of connectivity. But in addition to dealing with the daily drudge of email, Web 2.0 also can overwhelm us with noise. Thompson breaks new ground by turning to nature and the field of biomimicry to both tame and harness the new world of connectivity in getting work done by building agile high performance teams. I like to think of it as Collaboration 2.0. Thompson gives us the "human protocols" needed for effective communication using the new media. I totally agree with Dr. Patrick Cannon's comment about the book, "Don't just read it, use it."

The biggest challenge businesses today face is unlearning what was successful in the industrial age and learning how to prosper in the network era.


Ken Thompson has written an important book, a guidebook to help companies move from vestiges of the industrial age to the efficiencies of the network era.

Companies are not machines; they are living organisms. Yesterday's organizational teams are giving way to organic, self-organizing bioteams. Drawing on lessons from biology, ecology, and the natural world, Thompson provides wise counsel for setting up and nurturing bioteams. Here's the bottom line:

"After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, we humans are imitating the best and brightest organisms in our habitat. We are learning, for instance, how to grow food like a prairie, build 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."

Thompson believes that today's managements misunderstand the dynamic and living nature of the team as an entity over and above its membership.

Ken Thompson's seminal text on "bioteaming" is an inspiring and challenging textbook that introduces the theories and practical applications of virtual networking for project teams -- all in the 26 short chapters of a 210-page book.

Bioteams is an influential 21st century alternative to the command-and-control mentality of traditional project management methodologies born in the 20th century. Thompson, the Managing Director of Redburn Consulting and founder of Swarmteams.com, writes in a coherent, engaging and academic style, and manages to educate readers not only about Bioteaming but about some of the typical challenges and issues found in project management, especially IT projects. Project team members who are dispersed in different locations but networked on the Internet will find the Bioteaming approach to be the best methodology for virtual collaboration.

Thompson poses the question: "Why is it so difficult to successfully manage teams today?" "Teams are using the wrong model to organize themselves," he explains, and "Teams are not keeping pace with the rapid changes in their business environments." His theory of Bioteaming finds its roots in the natural world, out of which Thompson proposes these natural attributes of teams: 1) Collective Leadership 2) Instant Messaging 3) Ecosystems, and 4) Clustering. These mechanisms as well as the six key processes for teams are perfectly attuned principles for the Inter-networked world we live in.

If Bioteams is published in a second edition, as I'm certain it will be, more diagrams and illustrations should be included to help readers visualize some of the complex dynamics and processes Thompson is expounding on. Regardless, Bioteams is a "must-have" textbook for anyone initiating, sponsoring, managing or participating in a project at almost any level.

The author's biological examples are little more than truisms, he would be well-advised to take a couple of introductory biology and evolution courses before his next effort. For example, he trundles out the old saw that giraffes' long necks are the result of evolutionary exploitation of a niche foraging leaves from treetops. Recent research suggests sexual selection/competition for mates as a more accurate explanation for their anatomy. Many of his business examples are from the 1990's. The overall feel of this book is of a self-published effort. Don't waste much of your $$ on this one.

In an era where the forces of convergence are blurring and challenging the paradigms between businesses, customers, suppliers and industry ecosystems and where technology is leading non-linear change in the processes and dominant fabrics of society, there is a need for a holistic approach for anticipating and managing these external catalysts whilst concurrently fostering interaction, co-evolution and "emergence" between these agents operating in any given organizational, cultural, societal and/or economic system.

Ken Thompson in Bioteams delineates the extraction of the biological processes and principals underpinning nature's evolution to its application in human and organizational contexts through extrapolation and real life case studies. A very significant portion of the book is dedicated to expanding on the bioteam action `zones', rules and techniques, exemplifying the traits of collective leadership and transparency, with Thompson aligning the directive for the methodology to disrupt existing organizational DNA by designing, enabling and integrating the tenets of `living systems' theory (known as autopoiesis in the biological vernacular).

The inclusion of a dynamic bioteam evaluation scorecard together with associated techniques for team design and mobilization and the detailed case studies gives rise to the conclusion that if correctly embraced, bioteaming initiatives are strategic innovations that lead to the emergence of complex behavior using simple concepts of self-organisation. A must read for anyone serious about taking evolution seriously!!

(perhaps even three reads)