SwarmTeams

March 20th, 2007

Ken Thompson speaks to Robert Scoble talking about SwarmTeams , collective intelligence, group forming networks and collaboration.

Fascinating. Biology meets technology meets social media

Thompson says

Short messaging, the simple messages, very little information content broadcast. It’s either a threat or an opportunity and that’s ants broascast chemical to say there is ‘foo’ or this food and then everybody else instantly gets up message including the predictors. and it struck me. That’s very interesting because we’re very smart humans. So, we’ve kind of lost that instinct. I call it the messaging instinct and we tend to have what you call a document instinct. So, we communicate by documents, which are very complex, but the people who have recaptured the messaging instinct are kids, kids and techno geeks using IM.
So, basically we’ve built a theory of Bioteaming around, self managed teams on short messaging, broadcast the groups and myself and Robin Good of MasterNewMedia wrote a Bioteaming manifesto that a group called (Inaudible) published and that was kind of the start of it. So, we had a whole theory of biological teams then quite a smart friends said to me, “Ken, this kind of behavior change is a big one,” because the idea of everybody being a leader, the traditional approach to teams is command and control, we haven’t told you what to do and if you don’t know what to do, the safe thing stop, wait for order.
So, traditional teams have rather a lot of downtime and then traditional teams don’t short message, they do big documents, stay in positions. So, that normal metaphor is a document, document, document, … gets bigger. People move further apart off them as well all sorts of compromise. I’ve worked on standards bodies and the document gets bigger and bigger and bigger in the end they talk about was a philosophy. I am suggesting this message, talk, get agreement, short document. A totally different approach, so it’s a big, big behavior change.

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