February 2008

The way a team decides to decide is one of the most important decisions it makes. In the excellent book, “Why Teams Don’t Work” the authors, Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley, identify seven key decision-making methods for teams.

Good operational meetings, whether co-located or virtual, are the engine of organisational and project governance. However often their success is left totally to chance. Here are my five key tips for making them more effective:

Janine Benyus, talking at TED, describes biomimicry as learning an idea from an organism and then applying it – the conscious emulation of life’s genius. Bioteaming, then, is the biomimicry of social structures- taking ideas from Nature about how groups perform and intra-operate, and applying them to enhance how we humans work together in groups and teams. Doug Philips aka teamite#222* and bioteams guest author muses.

I have been checking out social network analysis (SNA) tools which allow social network data (directly input or imported from external systems) to be displayed, manipulated and analysed graphically in a number of ways. I was also looking for SNA tools which are free or have a free version. Here’s 4 tools which look very useful!