With the adoption and explosion of social media, unified communication platforms, virtual collaboration technologies and open source software technologies (most of which are free or require a one off donation to the developer to access augmented benefits in the value chain) – we must be mindful of how communication ebbs and flows within, across and beyond organisational systems regardless of their nature! Remember, a few wise people said “Nature is a quarry full of models” and I think this is hugely relevant going forward in leading the outlook for the future of the internet!
Ken Thompson in the Bioteaming Manifesto articulates that any approach to team support must be underpinned by a) a blueprint and b) integrated in a manner in which every team member is able to use it via an intuitive interface. However, there exists challenges in managing the team size as it is after all the team that matters in any startup, venture, task force or whatever you want to call this amalgamation of minds!
In this context, the models that can be considered are based on simple principals of knowledge and change management whereby information flows are crafted in a manner that encourages the use of instant replies, emoticons and/or simple language constructs that entertain an emergence of complex behaviours!
This modality is elaborated in my article here wherein I cite the laws of “Requisite Variety” which I include a quote of below:
The law of requisite variety (a term originally rooted as the first law of cybernetics) states that “If a system is to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled” . In enterprise contexts, this means that that teams and organisations need to nurture their ability to handle dynamic and complex changes stemming from the external environment and have enough structured capacity to react with collective resources in the face of these stimuli so as to not fail and become a ‘un-viable system’.
Mohit (Max) Bhanabhai – https://bioteams.com/2019/10/24/how-to-optimise.html
We can argue that these team rules are constitutionally bound and must encourage a series of complementary capabilities as at the end of the day – if you do not have an A and B team – the enterprise is destinated for failure! Referring back to the article in question, the following broad principals can be employed:
As a point of reference into organisational and team biomimicry, the Bioteams school of thought and supporting handbook attributes that the levers for achieving requisite variety in Nature’s team is boiled down to four key elements:
https://bioteams.com/2019/10/24/how-to-optimise.html
1. Mass: Enough members to cover the territory
2. Engagement: Members interact deeply in their local external environments
3. Randomness: Produces variety you might find unexpected “food”
4. Supporting Team Roles: The team needs enough “foragers”
A good example to dive into this in Natures teams is looking at wolf packs wherein the omega and alpha play complementary yet diametrically contrasting roles.
But how do we nurture these in technological environments in a trustworthy way so that you have teams aligned across various dimensions of cultural variance? The answer lies in gamification – something that I have covered in this article – do take a look and check it out?
Ultimately this will allow practitioners and academics alike to bridge the digital divide and get things done focus is the name of the game and the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing – SIMPLE! This will lead to amazing levels of distributed and collective intelligence. Why do you think #ElonMusk is interested in #Twitter? YOU should be amongst the FEW whom understands this!