Bioteaming and Movement Building

I’m enamored with the thought that God did not give us the gospel to explain creation, He gave us creation to explain the gospel. In other words, as Psalm 19 declares, day to day and night to night creation pours out speech and proclaims the glory of God and of his handiwork. So when I found the following comparison between nature’s most successful teams and building effective ministry teams, I was on it like a bear on to honey (notice please the creation metaphor!)

Bioteaming–as this discipline is called—is about building organisational (or ministry) teams that operate on the basis of the natural principles which underpin nature’s most successful teams. Nature’s most effective bioteams include: single-cells and multicellulars, the human immune system, the nervous system (including the brain); micro-organisms such as bacteria and social insects (ants, bees and termites); jellyfish, geese, monkeys, dolphins, big cats; and forests, rivers, ecosystems of the earth.

In two years of studying nature’s best bioteams, Ken Thompson and Robin Wood identified several bioteaming traits with accompanying subsets of action rules. These rules, they argue, can help leaders adopt effective strategies for leading effective teams.

And since all movements are organic, these strategies might help us launch and lead movements of evangelism and discipleship–i.e. read the bioteaming traits and my underlined points in light of movement building.

Bioteaming Trait One: Treat every team member as a leader.

First:
Communicate information — not orders. Bioteams need situational information because team members are trained to judge themselves what they should do. They are committed to team intelligence.

Second: Mobilize everyone to look for and mange team threats and opportunities. In bioteams, every team member has responsibility to constantly look-out for relevant team intelligence and to ensure that it is instantly communicated to all other team members.

Bioteaming Trait Two: Connect team members, partners, and networks synergistically.

Third: Treat external partners as fully trusted team members. By picking partners carefully, bioteams create a symbiosis in which partners are treated identically as their own internal team members are. External partners are granted full transparency and trust.

Fourth: Nurture the team’s internal and external networks and connections. Bioteams pay a lot of attention to the collective networks and relationships of each team member–their clusters. They foster both strong ties and weak ties.

Bioteaming Trait Three: Experiment, co-operate and learn.

Fifth: Develop consistent autonomous team member behaviors. Bioteams can deliver a pre-defined set of key tasks;
each one of the team members are competent in these fundamental tasks and take a proactive interest in these tasks.

Sixth: Learn through experimentation, mutation and team review. Bioteams believe that live controlled experimentation is the only way to get things right. They quickly experiment with multiple alternative courses of action and work together to find out what works best.

Bioteaming Trait Four: Establish sustainable self-organization.

Seventh: Define the team in terms of network transformations–not outputs. Bioteams
define their goals and roles in terms of transformations they intend to make in the people and partners they engage with. They are change agents.

Eighth: Scale naturally thru nature’s universal growth and decay cycles. Bioteams know that growth can’t be managed or controlled–growth is not on a schedule. They act as living things watching for and facilitating natural opportunities for its growth.

(I only included 8 of the 12 action rules. To see the rest, visit http://www.bioteams.com/2005/08/04/the_secret_dna.html#more)

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