Swarmteams

This morning, before coffee even, Robin Good sent me a pointer to a Scoble Show interview with an Irishman named Ken Thompson.

Ken said that humans are the only species in nature to follow a single leader rather than operate from a group’s collective intelligence. Everyone’s a leader in a “swarmteam.” You must watch the video or read Ken’s Manifesto. This is important stuff.

The traditional business team is command-and-control. If you don’t know what to do, you just stop. Traditional teams have a lot of downtime. They swap documents that grow and grow. These position statements often drive people apart.

A swarmteam, be it a flock of birds or a bunch of engineers, communicates in short messages. They send messages in real time and come to collective agreement dynamically. Most people have forgotten how to do this. We’ve lost the messaging instinct and replaced it with a documenting instinct.

Kids have rediscovered short messaging. The rest of us better get on board with short-messaging, too. Consider a typical software development team. They start by working for mutual gain. After people get beat up by the project manager, avoiding blame is what drives their work. The project is flying blind. Teams need ongoing collective intelligence.

Want your teams to be as productive as a beehive or as energetic as an anthill, better pick up on these rules:

1. Stop Controlling - Communicate information not orders
2. Team Intelligence - Mobilize everyone to look for group threats and opportunities
3. Permission Granted - Achieve accountability through transparency not permission
4. Always-On - Provide 24*7 instant “in-situ” message hotlines for all team members
5. Symbiosis - Treat external partners as fully trusted team members
6. Cluster - Nurture the team’s internal and external networks and connections

Robin is reading Informal Learning, and he recognized that Ken and I were on the same wavelength. We’re both suspicious of artificiality. We could both subscribe to the tag-line of my book: “Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance.” You’ll be hearing more about this.

Nourish the learning ecosystem.