X-posted from custardether.co.uk

I was very interested to hear Ken Thompson’s talk, having read his white paper about the concept of Swarm Teams and explored his website, which goes into the biological parallels of his system in more details.  Swarm Teams is a text message-based system, similar to Twitter, but based on the way teams work in nature.

 

He posed the question: What can we learn from nature’s social networks?

 

To address this question, he started by describing the traditional team model that we are all very familiar with – the Military-style team:  getting people to do what they don’t want to do and if in doubt, don’t do nothing.

 

In comparison, he then looked at biological teams and the way they operate.  He described how he got into this line of thinking when designing online systems, starting out with the creation of the Bumble Bee blog to collect articles about using biology to improve teams, then leading to Swarm Teams – a text message system enabling people to operate like a bioteam.

 

He highlighted the main benefit this system can have for small businesses – namely getting small businesses together to go for big contracts by creating a network. 

 

In addition, he described SwarmTribes – a version of the Swarm Teams concept – which is used to connect the likes of musicians with their fans – developing a degree of intimacy between bands and fans.  This is aimed mainly at small bands who want to develop their fan base and interact with them – having a conversation as Steve Clayton described earlier in the day.

 

The main benefits of swarms are:

 

1. You can ask the network
2. When one knows, all knows
3. Mobile co-invention

 

Thompson then demonstrated SwarmTeams by getting us to join his swarm using our mobile telephones and sending messages (on silent mode!) comparing soccer teams with work teams

 

He pointed out that no one gets as excited about their work team in the same way as they do about their football/sports team.

 

He moved on to talk about collective leadership – noting that natural teams are not lead by only one single leader the whole time.  Instead, they work on the principle of the right leader, for the right task at the right time… single leadership teams are not relevant in nature.

 

He explained that short messaging is what creates dynamic mobile teams both in nature and in human interaction, compared to document messaging, hence a surge in sms messaging – this is a natural, instinctive form of communicating and disseminating information.

 

The structure Swarm Teams is designed to mimic works on the principle that you should not try to broadcast to the whole group – but instead go to the best communicators.  The whole principle of mimicking the way communication works successfully in nature seems completely obvious when it is explained, but for some reason it is not the way our management structures and work teams work. Thompson’s advice was to treat social networks like living networks and to remember the very poignant statement that: “The most successful teams on the planet are not human teams” when using social networking to develop cohesive teams and communities online in our business practices.