Small is Beautiful …..but Big is Powerful

Posted on 11 September 2008

Category: Collaboration

by Ken Thompson

Nature has a way of selecting the right sized group to tackle the job at hand. Just like the Russian Matryoshka Dolls (dolls within dolls), small groups link into bigger ones, which in turn link into still bigger ones. In this follow-up article to Why penguins have no commanding officer, Ken Thompson explores what we can learn about teamwork and group/community size from nature's most successful teams.

In my other two articles I introduced the concept of bioteaming - building organisational teams, which operate on the principles that underpin nature's most successful teams. These range from the smallest single-cell organisms and social insects to forests and ecosystems. The articles introduced two key bioteam foundations - Pheromone Messaging and Collective Leadership – here I will introduce the idea of Team Ecosystems.

Choosing the right team for the job

Carl Anderson and Nigel Franks, two social biology researchers, discovered that there are four very distinct types of teamwork in nature:

1.    Individual Work
2.    Group Work  
3.    Partitioned Work  
4.    Team Work  

Individual Work can be completed by single individuals without help. I call it solo work. Solo work is an important aspect of human team behaviour - sometimes it's the very best way to get things done.

Group Work requires multiple team members to do the same activity concurrently. For example, ants (or soccer supporters) conducting ritual symbolic displays in territorial battles with other groups. There is concurrency but no division of labour. Different individuals must do the same things at the same time. I call this crowd work. Crowd work has a place in human teams such as in team review meetings, brainstorming sessions and at team social gatherings. However, crowd work can also be an indication of poor role definition and consequent misuse of resources. For example, a meeting where everyone starts to play the same role at the same time generally does not produce useful outcomes.

Partitioned Work is where a task is split into two or more subtasks that can be organised sequentially. For example, for a bee, collecting and storing nectar can be split into subtask 1 "collect nectar" and subtask 2 "store nectar". There is division of labour but no concurrency. I call this group work. Organisational teamwork can be achieved through group work - it lends itself particularly well to asynchronous communication methods, such as email and sharing documents..

Team Work requires multiple individuals to perform different tasks concurrently. Different individuals must do different things at the same time. There is both division of labour and concurrency. Teamwork requires the most complex co-ordination between team players. In biological teams it is used extensively for critical activities, such as responding to a threat or exploiting an opportunity.

You need the right size of team for the job

Where you a have a very large group or a crowd, it is only possible to achieve coordinated action if each member does the same thing at the same time. A classic example of this in humans is the Mexican Wave.

A crowd can move a stone or excavate a hole, but large-scale innovation (as the proponents of mass collaboration and open innovation are discovering) is another thing altogether. Large groups enable scale, mass, reach and range.

However, in a small group, each member can meaningfully do different things at the same time. Small groups may not be able to lift a large weight, but they could design a clever tool to make lifting that weight much easier.

So, nature teaches us the importance of having the right group size for the job at hand and shows us that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to groups. In nature, there are many types of inter-connected groups. For example, in the ant world there are castes within colonies, within food webs and within ecosystems.

A critical point for human teams is that we need to allow members to enjoy both the “small group dynamic” for innovation, and the “large group dynamic” for scale. Modern virtual technology makes it relatively easy for us to participate in multiple teams at the same time. However, when we do this, we need to recognise the very different team dynamics between a team (small group) and a community (large group).

Selecting the best sized team for the job resonates with research carried out by British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar. He noted that the size of human social groups fell into three categories — small, medium and large, which is equivalent to bands, cultural lineage groups and tribes.

In terms of small group sizes, one of my favourite books is The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. Brooks was a pioneer in discovering the unexpected burden it places on team communications when new members are added to teams. This work resulted in the famous maxim often referred to as Brooks Law that "adding resource to a late software project only makes it later."

How good are your teams at ‘blended teamwork'?

You can and should assess the different kinds of teamwork taking place in your teams. For example, look at the way your team collaborates to produce documents.

One popular approach is that a single author develops the entire document, copies it to the other members and then decides what to do with all their review comments. This is mostly solo work with a little bit of group work at the end. Another approach is to break the document up into multiple independent sections, each with a different author. They are independently reviewed and edited, and a single author is appointed to pull the document together.

This is pure group work but still not teamwork. A more teamwork-oriented approach would be to allocate each team member certain horizontal responsibilities, which span document sections (teamwork) plus some vertical responsibilities for specific sections of the document (solo work) plus some group review responsibilities (group work)

Each type of teamwork is appropriate for certain tasks – no one type is universally appropriate or better - a bioteam uses them all and in the right context:

• Solo work is a valid and useful activity in teams - in certain situations it is simply the most efficient way to get things done.
• Group work lends itself well to asynchronous communication methods. 
• Crowd work may point to poor team role definition, which wastes team members’ time. 
• Teamwork (in the biological sense) seems to be relatively rare in organisational teams. It requires more co-ordination between team members because different individuals need to do different things at the same time.

About the author

Ken Thompson, based in Belfast, is an expert on team dynamics and virtual collaboration. Under the pen-name of The BumbleBee, Ken creates the influential Bioteams Blog, which explores the numerous ways human teams and groups can take advantage of the mechanisms used in nature's best teams including ants, bees, geese, dolphins, wolves and songbirds.

Ken has recently published a new book BIOTEAMS: How to create high performance teams and virtual groups based on nature's most successful designs

About Bioteaming

NESTA Connect has recently launched a project, Swarmtribes, to explore how bioteam communication can be used by UK bands within their fan communities. For further information on bioteaming, please visit www.bioteams.com.