Bioteaming:Why virtual teams need more than internet technology to
succeed.
1. Introduction
Over the last ten years organisational teams have become much more
distributed and complex. Despite the number of technologies available to assist
team and group working it is still exceptionally difficult to manage such teams.
In some ways these technologies can actually make things worse by distracting
the team members into technology experimentation rather than the harder
challenge of learning to work together.
I propose that even if we fully master the technology of teams there will
still be something major missing which will stop our teams operating with the
speed and agility we need. We need to look to natures' most successful teams to
see what are the secrets of their longevity and dominance over millions of years
of evolution. I will explain how they all share a small number of common natural
principles which we can apply to our organisational teams.
I call this approach "Bioteaming" and I will introduce its main concepts in
the first part of this article. In the next part of the article I will show you
how you can begin to "bioteam-enable" your current team support
environment to allow your teams to become faster and become more responsive.
2. The changing nature of organisational teams
It is now rare to find a team who all know each other, sit in the same work
area day by day, work the same hours, work within the one organisation, have a
common business culture and enjoy prior history of working together. Today's'
teams are a complex alliance of staff members from different organisations,
departments, professions, locations, using different technology platforms, with
different technology backgrounds and engaging with varying levels of involvement
from core member to part-time member to occasional reviewer. These are very
different beasts to the kind of teams many of us grew up with. I believe that
the difference is so significant that we need a new name for such teams - the
Virtually Networked Team.
"Virtually" means that the team will be dependent on
Internet technologies much more than before. Less obvious but equally
significant is the fact that "virtually" also means that the team operates with
"virtual capacity" where virtual is used in its original sense
of "not physically present". This means the team constantly grows and shrinks
its active membership throughout its lifetime which makes it much harder to
maintain a coherent sense of team and purpose.
"Networked" means that the team is made of individuals who
are not always part of the same organisation and even when they are, rarely
share common reporting lines rendering a "command and control" approach
ineffective
I define a Virtually Networked Team as a team pulled
together by one or more co-operating organisations to achieve some important,
urgent and specific objective such as the:
planning and launching of a major event
designing and running of a new programme or initiative
developing and market testing of a new product
running of a major campaign to open up a new market sector
design and implementation of improved business processes
planning and execution of a change management and training
initiative
In today's organisations, supply chains, alliances and networks Virtually
Networked Teams are now the dominant means for getting big things
done!
3. The challenges and problems faced by these teams
So why is it more difficult to operate a Virtually Networked Team than a
traditional team?
The Virtual Factor
It is very difficult to manage the involvement, commitment and trust building
of a team operating "virtual capacity" because members constantly dip in and out
of the team and some of them may never be present together in any physical
meeting
The Network Factor
A Networked team does not share common accountability structures, business
cultures and professional sensibilities. This makes it hard to agree standards,
accountability structures and sanctions for non-performance.
The Technology Factor
It would be great if the team could take a week out to iron out glitches,
play with and learn the team technologies before the project starts. This is
rarely the case and new technologies show up as intrusive and as real obstacles
to getting "real work" done particularly in the early stages of team
formation.
The Business Factor
Today's rapidly accelerating business environment with its "Just do
it - now!" business culture is not news to anybody. However when you
overlay this on top of the complexity already there in Virtually Networked Teams
due to the Virtual, Network and Technology Factors it just
makes things all that more difficult. Doing a complex thing is ok if I
concentrate and take my time. Doing something very fast is ok too if I can focus
on it. But doing a complex thing very fast is altogether much more stressful
4. Statistics on Virtually Networked Teams
Virtually Networked Teams are a relatively young phenomenon in Management
Theory terms so there is actually little hard evidence available for how well or
badly they have been performing.
However one of the earliest forms of Virtually Networked Team was the
IT Project Team. By its very nature such teams are cross-functional and
thus Networked as they involve a mix of professions (e.g. IT,
Change Management and Business Staff). They are also Virtual as
they grow from small analytical teams through large development teams to medium
size implementation teams adding and dropping members along the way.
Quite a lot of statistics are available about IT Project Teams and they are
shocking - here are a few typical ones:
Only a third of change initiatives achieve objectives (OPP Survey May
2004)
74% of IT Projects are unsuccessful (Standish Group Report 2000)
Only 1 in 5 IT Projects are likely to bring full satisfaction to their
organizational sponsors (OASIG Study 1995)
These numbers
provide early but solid quantifiable evidence that there is something
significant missing or wrong in the way Virtually Networked Teams are
operating in today's' organisations.
5. Are Internet Technologies a solution to these problems?
With the emergence and maturing of a vast array of corporate strength
intranets, extranets, portals and a multitude of supporting communications tools
there is a huge potential for technology to bring real gains to teams. -
particularly those which are physically distributed or highly mobile. Few people
would dispute the potential benefits of effective communications technology or a
private asynchronous team room or a shared real-time whiteboard for a Virtually
Networked Team. However, in practical reality these technology-led benefits have
not been fully realised.
Typically teams trying to be more effective through technology run into the
serious problems in trying to make it work for them including:
Technology adoption problems where the investment needed
to learn the technology greatly exceeds the potential benefits
Accountability issues where the team find it much easier
to break virtual commitments than verbal ones
Team mobilisation is effectively ignored by technology -
although it could be immensely useful. Many team problems could be avoided by
a more structured approach to initial team setup including goal setting,
roles, risks, skills and accountabilities.
New Working Practices which are novel and unfamiliar and
are just too difficult to adopt
Overfocus on Technology and Process and not on production
of results
So I believe that Internet Technologies are certainly part of the solution
and also part of the problem too. They may be necessary but they are
certainly not sufficient!
6. What else is needed ?
The fundamental thing missing from Virtually Networked Teams today is
recognition of the dynamic and living nature of the team itself separate
from its members.
A networked business team is a living thing in itself. A Virtually Networked
Team is more than the sum of its members. An ant colony, one of natures' best
teams, has a life of its own - albeit intimately connected to the lives of its
members. In organisations we treat our teams mechanistically. We think of our
teams more like clocks, highly predictable as long as you keep
winding them up, rather than colonies which must be carefully nurtured and are
inherently unpredictable.
Interpretation of the team as a whole,
living entity, allows more insightful selection of the best course of
action. The team is in itself a super-organism and as such it needs to be
treated in ways that enhance and support its complex and interconnected nature.
If you can see the team as a whole, and not as the mere aggregation of the
individual parts that make it up, you can discover how much more productive,
reliable and efficient a virtual team can be.
Once you have this new interpretation it automatically forces you to
rethink how you should nurture, organise and support such teams
and implies radically new approaches to:
Team Mobilisation and Change Management
New Processes and Practices
Team Support Technology
Ongoing Team Coaching
7. What is Bioteaming
Bioteaming is about building our organisational teams on the natural
principles which underpin the most successful teams in nature.
Nature's most successful teams, in increasing order of size, include:
single-cells and multicellulars
the human immune system
the nervous system (including the brain)
micro-organisms such as bacteria
ants, bees and termites
jellyfish
geese
monkeys
dolphins
big cats
forests
rivers
ecosystems
the earth
The most respected theories to have emerged recently on
evolution [2] suggest that survival of the fittest is only half of the story
with many species co-evolving together in a form of long-term collaboration
known as symbiosis. A good example is our symbiotic
relationship with the bacteria in our stomachs which help us digest our food!
Lets look at a few simple examples of natures' bioteams:
Ants
Ant colonies are arguably the most successful team on the planet - they are
so dominant in nature that even despite their tiny size they make up 10% of all
living things by weight on the planet. No matter where you are in the world, it
is said, if you are outside and you look down carefully you will probably see an
ant. Ants have no overall leader - the Queens role is simply to reproduce. Even
with their tiny brains Ants use Swarm Intelligence to solve complex
route planning problems as efficiently as our best computers [1]
Geese
Flocks of geese fly amazing distances constantly rotating which bird handles
the extra responsibility and air resistance of leading. A goose can fly
70% further in a team than by itself due to the optimisation of
slipstream effects through the "V" formation. If a goose falls behind two birds
will automatically drop out of formation to care for it (or until it dies).
The Earth
The Gaia hypothesis states that all the different species on the
earth work together as a team through mutually interacting ecosystems
to maintain the climate and atmospheric composition at the optimum for
life. For example vegetation contribute to regulating the earths temperature
through the reflection of sunlight. Different types of vegetation survive better
in different temperatures thus creating a self-regulating thermostat [4].
8. How does bioteaming work?
There are about a dozen characteristics bioteams have in common; here are
three to start with:
Self-Management
The most well known trait of a bioteam is Self-Management or Autonomy.
Basically each team member manages itself and does not need to be told what to
do. This is different from most organisational teams which use "command and
control" - wait till told and obey orders. So bioteams operate as
"self-managed teams". This does not mean that there is no
leader but that every member is a leader in some domain.
Application of this trait allows a team to successfully address the
fundamental problem of accountability in a Networked Team Structure.
Non-verbal broadcast communication
Bioteams have superb communications, which do not rely on direct
member-to-member communications. For example ants predominantly
communicate through scent trails - different scents mean different
things and the intensity of the trail determines whom the communication reaches
[3]. Ants don't have to meet each other face to face to communicate and they
don't wait for replies to their communications by the other members.
This is hugely relevant today in our teams with multiple locations and every
one working different hours where members can't physically meet that often. It
also shows us that whilst face-to-face communication has an important place a
team can often achieve its goals without it.
Application of this trait helps us to design the team's communications in
a way which eliminates communication bottlenecks and redundancies.
Action-focused
Another trait is that bioteams solve problems and learn by rapid
experimentation and evolution. Bioteams have very concrete goals which are
hard-wired into the members genetically but the members don't have any actual
strategies or plans for achieving them. They work by rapid experimentation and
feedback. If something works and solves the problem it gets reinforced within
their collective set of responses for the next time - if not it dies.
Bioteams are action-focused - they act first and ask questions
later!
Application of this trait enables us to design simple team member rules
of behaviour and feedback mechanisms to enable a team to rapidly evolve improved
effectiveness
9. Summary
I have shown how teams in organisations have changed in the last ten years
and suggested a new name for the kinds of teams we now see - Virtually Networked
Teams.
I have highlighted the problems these teams face and shown that technology is
both part of the solution and part of the problem. What is missing in these
teams is recognition of the dynamic and living nature of the team itself
separate from its members.
I have identified that this new understanding can be achieved by adopting a
new emerging discipline Bioteams where we learn from natures' most successful
teams.
I have introduced some of the principles of bioteaming and indicated how
their application immediately addresses some of the major team problems we
encounter today.
In the next part of this article I will further develop the characteristics
of Bioteams and Bioteaming and show how you can immediately start to incorporate
them into your current virtual team technologies and processes to make your
teams more effective and more satisfying for teams members.
Do you think the Bioteaming ideas are a genunine step forward, or are they a
re-working of existing biological metaphors for organissational behaviour?
An obvious characteristic of nature's best teams is that they seem
to have just the right amount of structure to handle their environments. Too
much and they would be slow and cumbersome; too little and they would lack the
sophisticated responses to protect their position in the food chain.
Stumble It!
