Mark Dowds, from Brainpark, is a leading thinker and practitioner in the emerging area of Workforce Democracy - an innovation which is beginning to radically change work places by replacing 'command and control' with self-organisation. I invited Mark to write a short intro on the subject as part of my "Think Differently" series because it resonates strongly with Bioteams.

Is leadership superfluous in a self-managing team? Aren't self-managing teams supposed to be self-sustaining and self-sufficient? Associate Professor Paul Tesluk, writing for INSEAD Knowledge, wants to correct this misconception in a short article with supporting video clip.

The Economist, July 16th 2008, reports on “The cult of the dabbawala” a 5000 strong collective who are the direct descendants of a 17th century Indian warrior king. The dabbawalla have developed a fantastic reputation for organisational excellence and amazing teamwork all based on a collective leadership model without the need for any technology!

Ants interact using a system known as pheromones, involving sending 'chemical messages' to their community through smell and taste. It is also one of the oldest and most sophisticated forms of group communication on the planet with many features today's mobile and virtual teams would die for!

Humankind is the only species that places its trust in a small group of "leaders" to determine the best direction for the whole group. In his follow-up article to Did ants invent the perfect system for communicating via mobile technology? Ken Thompson, explores whether we can learn a thing or two about leadership from nature's most successful teams.

Armed with a few students, a backhoe and a handful of markers, Deborah Gordon digs up ant colonies in the Arizona desert. She asks: How do these chitinous creatures get down to business and even multitask when they need to with no language, memory or visible leadership?

This little video from Paul Kedrosky's blog shows that in the right conditions and with the right players "self-organisation" can be the best solution to a group problem.

The Book "The Starfish and The Spider" uses the amazing capabilities of starfish to survive and regrow damaged limbs as a powerful metaphor for leaderless organisations.

In this article I suggest that organizational teams, networks and communities who can adapt and adopt the "stop trying to control them" principle exemplified by nature's teams can achieve huge gains in agility and collective intelligence.

Lateral leadership skills are what you need to get the job done when you are not the boss of the team

Ken Thompson, writing for Insider Knowledge Magazine, in Why Penguins have no commanding officer reveals the two fundamental differences between biological teams and organizational teams and what we can learn from nature about effective teamwork.

Roger Fisher, the world's leading expert on win-win negotiation, describes the power of having Lateral Leadership skills which let you get the job done when you are not the boss.

Team leaders who want their team members to show more initiative and take greater responsibility can learn from the principles of autonomous software agents so I am delighted to republish a bioteams guest essay on “Agents: Technology and Usage” by James Odell which is attached in full as a pdf.

Many people have been enchanted by the amazing video “The March of the Penguins” and most know that they have no leader. However few people go on to ask the obvious next question “If they have no leader then how do they know where to go?”....

Major Oil Company, Schlumberger, exploits self-organizing virtual communities.

Harvard Business Review identifies unexpected similarities between Open Source Software (OSS) and the Toyota Production System

How is it that even with our vastly superior intelligence nature's teams sometimes seem to work much better than ours - what do they know that we don't?

A key principle of bioteams is team member self-management. Nature's teams achieve this through a surprisingly small number of simple rules which operate at the individual member level and result in sophisticated team behaviour. For example, complex 'bird flocking' behaviour can be simulated on a computer using just three rules. I propose that human bioteams can be effectively self-managed in a sophisticated way by adopting a small set of "model behaviours" at the individual team member level.

Bioteams are sustainable self-organising systems