Customer Reviews

The Coming Shape of Organization

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Belbin sees Biologically-based teams as the next step

Dr R Meredith Belbin, regarded as the father of "team-role" theory and one of the worlds foremost experts on teams predicts that we will evolve into bioteam forms.

Specifically he suggests our organisations will evolve into those forms "which combine the devolved but integrated strengths of the higher insects with the directive and strategic abilities of humans".

In his book "The Coming Shape of Organisation" [1] he picks out five observations human teams need to learn from "a diminutive masterclass" of social insects such as bees, ants and termites:


Five Observations
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1. Division of Labour
They have no overall single leader but rather a co-operating leadership caste.


2. Superior use of Intelligence
Social insects are superior to humans in their ability to rapidly integrate new information from a wide range of senses and share it widely to ensure urgent action happens immediately rather than passing it up and down hierarchical chains of command.


3. Flexibility of Member Castes
Social insect colonies consist of a number of distinct castes of insects playing specialised roles such as foragers, attackers and nest maintainers. However these castes are are flexible and grow and shrink as required and can even change their roles in a crisis.


4. Devolved decision making
The system is geared up to concurrent (as opposed to sequential) decision making - there is no chain of command to slow decisions down.


5. Redundancy and Contingency
Colonies are not dependent on a single individual or system. They are based on scale and interlocking systems - any one of which might fail without catastrophic consequences for the colony.


Two Immediate priorities for Teams
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He goes on to identify two guidelines which he suggests seem worth transferring immediately to human affairs:

a. transferring major decision making away from a single boss (Mr Big) to a co-operating leadership group

b. replacing monolothic organisational processes with concurrent interlinked systems


A call to humility!
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In a statement which seems to lay down a challenge to humility in our thinking about teams Belbin concludes that "evolution will almost inevitably take us in the direction of species that have arrived at superior forms of organisation before us".

I wonder who he means?

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ken thompson blogs on
http://www.bioteams.com
on all aspects of teams and collaboration
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