About Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson is a practitioner, author and speaker on collaboration, high performing teams and game based learning.

He works with organisations on the practical side of teamwork: how groups actually communicate, decide, commit and follow through, and where that breaks down. Much of it is field work rather than theory, tested with real teams and written up here as it goes.

Bioteams

The idea behind this site is that nature has already solved most of the problems organisations struggle with. Bees, ants, dolphins and flocking birds coordinate at speed, share information without hierarchy, and act without waiting for permission.

Bioteams turns that into something a team can use: four zones of behaviour, and twelve rules under them. Ken set the framework out with Robin Good in The Bioteaming Manifesto, a 33-page paper that has been downloaded more than 20,000 times and is still free to request.

Books

• Bioteams — the full treatment of the framework
• A Systematic Guide to High Performing Teams
• A Systematic Guide to Game-Based Learning (GBL) in Organizational Teams

There is also a TEDx talk, and everything else on Amazon.

The work has been picked up by Wired, which featured Bioteams in 2008, and by the Huffington Post, where Ken wrote on biohacking the organisation.

Elsewhere

Ken designs and runs immersive, facilitated business simulations at Business Simulations — live and in-person learning interventions for teams working on collaboration, leadership and commercial judgement.

To get in touch, email him directly.