Over the last ten years organisational teams have become more distributed and complex. Despite the number of technologies available to assist teams and group-based work, it is still exceedingly difficult to manage teams.

Photo credit: ChangeThis

And contrary to popular belief the introduction of new real-time conferencing and collaboration technologies can actually make things worse. It may distract team members from their application focus and drive them into ongoing loops of technology experimentation. In these situations, the focus on the work mission is often lost in favour of mastering and attempting to extract ever increasing benefits from technology itself.

What is dangerously lacking is a culture of collaboration and cooperative learning capable of becoming aware of the critical importance of adopting a set of behaviour-policies supportive of strong team interaction.

Unless strong foundations are placed under the way we think and act as team members, no amount of whiz-bang technology will catapult online business teams from inefficient and expensive glamorous beasts to highly effective and productive units.

This is why we suggest looking at nature's most successful biological teams to uncover the secrets of extended cooperation and effective collaboration.

Nature offers us such an invaluable heritage of best lessons learned for how teams should be run, that we have decided to take true advantage of it by starting an ongoing research and study discipline around this topic called bioteaming.

Nature-derived lessons have been tested and tried over the course of hundreds of thousands of years under an infinite number of variables and scenarios. If we are smart enough to humbly analyze and dissect the core characterizing traits of nature successful team behaviours, we may gradually devise and architect their use and growth also within our human-based teams.

This is the key mission of Bioteaming: a painstaking review and analysis of the scientific literature in search for the common traits of nature most effective biological teams.

Our goal is to identify, describe and transform such successful traits into human-compatible guidelines and principles that can be gradually adopted by virtual networked business teams.

The Changing Nature Of Organisational Teams

Nowadays, it is rare to find teams in which individuals: all know each other, sit in the same work area each day, work the same hours, share common physical work spaces, belong to and are paid by the same organisation, have a common business culture and enjoy a prior history of working together.

Today's teams are a complex alliance of talented individuals from different organisations, departments, professions, and locations. Each member has a different skillset and is accustomed to using different technology tools.

Today's teams are comprised of individuals with different backgrounds, languages, cultures and education and involved in team activities in broadly varying degrees.

Today's teams are a very different animal compared to those many of you grew up with. In fact, the differences between past teams and today are so significant that a new name is needed for today teams we like to refer to them as Virtual Networked Teams.

Virtual means that the team is dependent on Internet technologies more so than before. Less obvious, but equally significant, is the fact that virtual also means that the team operates with virtual capacity. Here virtual means not physically presentÃ. This also means that the team can constantly grow and shrink according to its needs.

Networked means that the team is made of dispersed and physically distant individuals who are interconnected and operate as an organic entity. These individuals do not utilize traditional reporting hierarchies; thus, old-fashioned "command and control" approaches are vastly ineffective.

We, therefore, define a Virtual Networked Business Team as a team created by bringing together one or more co-operating groups of people to achieve a business objective.

Such objectives include:

• Designing and developing open-source software


• Planning and launching a major event


• Market testing of a new product


• Defining a marketing, awareness or advertising campaign on a global scale


• Implementing improved business processes


• Planning and executing a change in management and training initiatives

We know that in the near future Virtual Networked Business Teams will be the dominant means for getting major work done.

The Challenges Of A Virtual Networked Business Team

Is it more difficult to operate a Virtual Networked Business Team than a traditional team?

The Virtual Factor

The "Virtual factor" is the first tangible obstacle that can be felt when dealing with the optimization of a virtual networked team.

The challenge in successfully engaging a team in which many of the members have never met face-to-face can be quite surprising. Members of a virtual team may never attend a physical meeting with their colleagues. Their accessibility and communication modes may vary from one team member to the next.

The Network Factor

A Networked team does not share common reporting lines, business cultures and professional sensibilities. This makes it difficult to agree on standards, accountability structures and sanctions for non-performance.

The Technology Factor

Technology is often a team component with its own cost of adoption and integration. The technology price to be paid by virtual networked teams can be daunting. Teams are often scared, if not altogether resistant, to the addition of new technologies that require steep learning curves and the adoption of unintuitive workflows. New technologies can be seen as be obstacles to getting the real work done; this is particularly true in the early stages of team formation.

The Business Factor

In addition to the virtual, network and technology factors, work pressure driven by today's work environments creates the perfect recipe for stress. This stress will show itself in work groups by replacing harmonious and pro-active group support with hiding from responsibilities and tattle-telling.

Statistics on Virtual Networked Teams

Virtual Networked Teams are a relatively young phenomenon . There is little hard evidence available for how well they perform in real-world scenarios.
However one of the earliest forms of a Virtual Networked Team is the typical IT project team.

By its very nature the IT team is cross-functional and heavily interconnected (networked). It integrates a wide mix of specialists (e.g. IT, change management and business staff). IT teams also embody some of the virtual factor as they expand and shrink (via the hiring of short-term consultants) according to the amount and complexity of assigned projects.

Statistics on IT project teams provide some enlightening information:

• Only a third of change initiatives achieve objectives (OPP Survey May 2004)


• 74% of IT projects are unsuccessful (Standish Group Report 2000)


• Only 1 in 5 IT projects is likely to bring full satisfaction to their organizational sponsors (OASIG Study 1995)

These numbers reveal the quantifiable evidence that there is something deeply wrong in the way Virtual Networked Teams are operating in today's organisations.

Are Internet Technologies A Solution To These Problems?

With the emergence and maturing of a vast array of corporate-strength intranets, extranets, portals and a multitude of supporting real-time and asynchronous communications tools, there would appear to be a huge potential for technology to bring real gains to team productivity.

This would seem to be particularly true for those teams which are physically distributed or which are highly mobile.

Few people would dispute the potential benefits of effective real-time communication tools or of shared and secure workspaces.

However, in practical terms, hardly any of the supposed benefits are generally realized by teams utilizing these technologies.

Why?

Typically teams trying to be more effective through technology run into serious problems in trying to make it work for them including:

• Technology Adoption: the investment needed to learn the technology greatly exceeds the potential benefits
• Accountability Issues: teams find it much easier to break virtual commitments than verbal ones
• Team Mobilisation: technology per se does not generally address the need for mobilizing action. It leaves teams using new tools without having first asked the proper strategic questions: who am I, where am I going, why do I want to get there?
• New Working Practices: novel and unfamiliar working practices are just too difficult to adopt within a short amount of time
• Overfocus on Technology and Process: not enough focus on production of results

What we believe is that Internet Technologies are part of the problem, as much as they are also part of the solution.

Though they may be very useful they are not the critical component that will determine how effectively any group of networked individuals will cooperate toward the achievement of a business goal.

What is MISSING?

The fundamental thing missing from Virtual Networked Teams today is the open recognition of the dynamic and living nature of the team itself as a separate entity from that of its individual members.

A networked business team is a living entity in and of itself. A Virtual Networked Team is more than the sum of its members abilities.

An ant colony, one of natures' most efficient and successful living teams, has a life of its own, albeit intimately connected to the lives of its members.

In organisations we treat our teams mechanistically.

We think of our teams more like clocks or engines that are assigned to specific tasks and assignments. We want the highest control of them and we want them to be very predictable in their work behaviour.

Exactly the opposite of what nature's bioteams do.

Interpretation of the team as a whole, living entity, allows a more insightful interpretation of the most efficient courses of team action.

The team is in itself a super-organism and as such it needs to be treated in ways that enhance and support its complex and interconnected nature.

If you can see the team as a whole and not as the mere aggregation of the individual parts that make it up, you can discover how much more productive, reliable and efficient a virtual team can be.

Once you wrap your mind around this new way of looking at organizational teams you immediately need to rethink how such teams should be nurtured, organised and supported in effective and suitable ways.

This is an excerpt from the introduction to new Bioteam Manifesto that ChangeThis has just kindly published on its site.

To read the full Manifesto:
ChangeThis: The Bioteaming Manifesto (PDF - 35 pages)

For more information about Bioteaming see also:

1. Virtual Teams Doorway To Effective Collaboration (audio-visual presentation)

2. The Bioteaming Conundrum
In the research into bioteaming we have (so far) identified four action zones and about a dozen action rules. These constitute the DNA or recipe book for leaders who want to make their organisational/project teams significantly more productive through the use of virtual technologies.

3. The hidden potential of human teams goes beyond nature's best efforts
There is one other area a team needs to address as part of a bioteaming strategy if it wants to be exceptionally successful team member beliefs. In this article we suggest the seven hidden beliefs of high performing teams.

4. How a team can become more productive by using three simple rules
In this article we introduce and identify the first key overarching principle of Bioteams and define the first three action rules.