High Performing 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:

Continue readingFive tips for a perfect meeting

The most widely used tool for mobile, distributed and virtual teams is still the plain old telephone conference call. However it is also the most badly used! So whether you are talking over Skype, mixing it with screen sharing and messaging, using your corporate PABX or just calling in to an external service if you follow these 12 simple rules you will get much better calls.

Continue readingConference Calls: Twelve Golden Rules

Sometimes the Bee-team is the A-team: the importance of an automatic team swarm response to threats and opportunities.

Continue readingTeam Swarming: are your team wasps or bees

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.

Continue readingThe law of requisite variety and team agility

The Wisdom of Crowds and Collective Intelligence are very useful concepts but not if they are used in the wrong places. Confusing these two concepts will only produce bad results for your groups and teams.

Continue readingCollective stupidity and the madness of crowds

The Delphi Technique is a proven way to harness collective group intelligence (popularly known as the wisdom of crowds) in a wide range of applications.

Continue readingDelphi collective group intelligence tool: powerful and free

The best team is Me. It might sound like heresy but sometimes the most effective way to produce something is not through collaboration but by just doing it yourself.

Continue readingCan a team have just one member

One of the biggest problems in teams, communities and networks, whether co-located or virtual, is freeriding (aka freeloading or lurking or loafing) where certain team members do not pull their weight. Here are 5 things you can do about it.

Continue readingFreeriding in teams, communities and networks: 5 tips for fighting it

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?”….

Continue readingPenguins reveal the true essence of bioteams

Biological teams make extensive use of short messages as their main means of communication: Ants use chemical messages, Bees use visual messages conveyed through dance and Dolphins use sonar, however most human teams seem to have forgotten their Messaging Instincts.

Continue readingGroup Messaging Instincts: how to recover them