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I have been reading Lord Sacks daily thoughts “Celebrating Life” and was impressed by his piece on “The Prisoners Dilemma”. The Dilemma in a nutshell is that 2 prisoners are given the chance to do a deal and betray each other. 

Lord Sacks is the UK’s chief Rabbi and highlights one vital aspect of the dilemma which I had not previously paid enough attention to – the fact that the two prisoners are not allowed to speak to each other!

Continue readingThe Prisoners Dilemma, Trust, Cooperation and Effective Teams

I have been studying one of the most highly regarded books on the future of AI (Artificial Intelligence), “Superintelligence – paths, dangers, strategies” by Nick Bostrom. Bostrom meticulously reviews the five most likely paths to “superintelligence” which he defines “as any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of (individual) humans in virtually all domains of interest.”

One of Bostrom’s conclusions is totally unexpected and requires immediate consideration within today’s major organizations and enterprises!

Continue readingThe Superintelligent Organization: Create total competitive advantage?

An excellent article on Bioteams by Doug Kirkpatrick, US Partner at NuFocus Strategic Group concludes: “The power and elegance of bioteaming is indisputable. Whether organizational leaders will detach themselves from the perceived security blanket of traditional, artificial hierarchy in order to fully experience that power is another question entirely?”

Continue readingThe Huffington Post: Biohacking the Organization

As a team leader you have two distinct leadership responsibilities – Managing the Individuals and Managing the Team. Leaders who fixate on managing the individuals tend to have happy teams which unfortunately under-perform in terms of deadlines, quality, customer satisfaction and budgets! Leaders who obsess on managing the team may hit most of these targets but at the expense of team member Alienation, Burnout, Compliance, Disinterest and eventually Exiting (easy to remember – ABCDE!). Great Team Leaders manage both responsibilities. Here is a simple framework with a nice supporting spreadsheet to help you assess and improve your leadership:

Continue readingHow good a team leader are you? Try my Team Leadership Assessment!

An important free tool which I provide with my new book ‘A Systematic Guide to High Performing Teams‘ is a Team Process Health Check Spreadsheet written in Microsoft Excel. The spreadsheet allows you to rapidly assess each of 16 important team process elements on a scale of 0-3 ranging from ‘totally absent’ to ‘present and effective’.

Continue readingFree High Performing Teams Instant Healthcheck Tool Spreadsheet

By observing newly formed and existing teams playing business simulations I have learned some important insights into how team-working ‘evolves’ and offer here some specific ideas on how you might accelerate this evolution in your own organizational teams.
On the road to Effective Team Collaboration there seems to be two intermediate phases of ‘naïve collaboration’ which many teams seem to go through – Hyper-Communication and Over-Delegation.

Continue readingThe evolution of effective team working and how you can accelerate it!

What do we mean by “Teamwork”? We often talk about Teamwork as if its a singular thing however in nature there are 4 different types – each of which have a very precise meaning. I call these Solowork, Crowdwork, Groupwork and Teamwork itself. An effective team knows how and when to use each type – an ineffective team only uses one!

Continue readingTop teams understand the 4 different types of Teamwork in Nature

Most approaches to project management concentrate on the tasks which need to be successfully completed to achieve the project goal. Important as this is, it is at most only half of the story of successful project management. The C3 approach addresses the hidden side of project management – the people-collaboration-end-result perspective and is also a powerful tool for conducting a quick project healthcheck.

Continue readingC3: a new approach to Collaborative Project Management

In the recent UK floods we heard a lot about defences failing and phrases being bandied about by engineers and managers such as “a once in a hundred years” event and “could never have been envisaged.” However when I hear these types of explanations it always makes me think instead of the crucial differences between a promise, a responsibility and a guarantee.

Continue readingWhat’s the difference between a promise and a responsibility?

Diane Koutu, writing for Harvard Business Review, suggests 3 very useful distinctions around being resilient. I like them because they addresses some of the weaknesses of otherwise excellent schools of thought such as Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism – namely that it encourages people just to soldier on and put a brave face on things and not ask for help which can be seen as failure.

The first thing you need to do is to face reality – denial of your difficulties is not the same as being resilient.
The second thing, which resonates with Viktor Frankl’s findings of what made the difference between life and death in concentration camp prisoners survive (described in his book Man’s Search for Meaning) is to search for useful meaning in the difficulties.
Finally the third thing is to creatively improvise solutions – if it was easy you would have already sorted it!

Continue readingHow to be Resilient – Face Reality, Find Meaning, Creatively Improvise.