Ecolearning

Bioteams, by Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson has written an important book, a guidebook to help companies move from vestiges of the industrial age to the rocket ride of the network era. This is Management 2.0: We are all leaders. We must keep one another informed in real time. We trust living systems to self-organize. Read this book if you want to know what’s going on. Ironically, these are not really Thompson’s rules; they are Mother Nature’s.

The biggest challenge businesses today face is unlearning what was successful in the industrial age and learning how to prosper in the network era.

Most companies are stuck in the past. In addition to their over-reliance on control, these organizations think business a zero-sum game; I win, you lose. They tend to have a black-and-white view of the world; things are rigid; the fundamentals still apply. Secrecy is competitive advantage; hoarding information is the norm.

On the other hand, to companies that embrace the future, reality is the unpredictable result of complex adaptive forces. Nothing is perfect; stuff happens. Cooperation is a win-win game. Relationships are all-important, and the more open you are, the easier it is to form them.

Companies are not machines; they are living organisms. Yesterday’s organizational teams are giving way to organic, self-organizing bioteams. Drawing on lessons from biology, ecology, and the natural world, Thompson provides wise counsel for setting up and nurturing bioteams. Here’s the bottom line:

After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, we humans are imitating the best and brightest organisms in our habitat. We are learning, for instance, how to grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, create color like a peacock, self-medicate like a chimp, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest.

Many managers misunderstand the dynamic and living nature of the team as an entity over and above its membership. Among the natural attributes of bioteams are: