A bioteam then needs a review process where all team member actions are regularly reviewed by the whole team in the spirit of openness and learning.
Today’s teams are comprised of individuals with different backgrounds, languages, cultures and education and involved in team activities in broadly varying degrees.
Members of a team are generally very busy and they don’t have the time to read and understand complex instructions. They need brief, synthetic, focused, short messages.
Human bioteams need to imitate nature by becoming teams of peers and leaders where every member understands that it is central to their role as a bioteam member to be on the look-out for just-in-time, critical information that may be of value to the team as a whole.
A critical point is that these instant messages are so simple they really act just as “alerts.” The recipient has to “decide” what to do. Such instant messages do not convey orders or instructions.
Could a virtual team have a million members? Recent developments in mass collaboration, distributed computing and the wisdom of crowds suggest, the answer might be yes.
Mass Collaboration and Virtual Crowds
One of the differences between human teams and some biological teams is sheer scale in terms of number of members. Human teams rarely exceed fifty and a typical large single human organization might contain ten thousand members. Human organizations much bigger than this obviously exist, but they tend to organize themselves into smaller independently managed sub-units. However, biological teams such as Ant or Bee societies, can contain up to a million members in a single mature colony or hive – all of whom can act as a unit.