Global swarming

Various research has identified a small number of characteristics from nature’s bioteams, which don’t tend to be present in human organisational teams. The top three include:

• Instant Messaging – Lots of simple whole-group broadcast communications e.g. food over here, danger over there
• Collective Leadership – Any group member can take the lead at different times as appropriate e.g. migrating geese take it in turns to lead the pack
• Group Ecosystems – Small is beautiful (and innovative and smart) …..and big is powerful.

Find out more about the first of these in an article by Ken Thomson here .

I’m pleased to say that we are now working on a  practical implementation of bioteaming principals through new pilot project called Swarmteams which seeks to test some of these principles within human networks, in this case music fanbases. More on this shortly.