Learning team building techniques from ants and its application in organisational teams

Man evolved from nature and ultimately dissolves into the nature. In the process man has learned many things from nature for survival. Man's biggest genetic gift is his vast capacity for learning from his environment (R. Mathur et al, 2008). To quote a few examples what man has learnt from nature are: how to fly like birds; camouflage technique from Chameleon; Climbing walls like Geckos using most advanced dry-adhesive technology found in nature; routing calls efficiently in communication network using Ant- based foraging technique and emulation of engineering marvels of termite mounds (Eric Bonabeau and Meyer, 2001); from robot design to material science and as well as in the areas of nanotechnology engineers and scientists are borrowing mechanism from nature (Ken Thompson, 2008); in the field of medicine pioneers have searched through the rich diversity of plants in jungles to discover the special properties that, once discovered, can be synthesized (Meredith Belbin, 1998); and such other insights have come from observing the natural world around us.

Nature offers us an invaluable wisdom leamed and tested over the course of millions of years (Ken Thompson and Robin Good, 2005). One such area for learning from nature is to look at nature's most successful living biological teams like Ants which can provide useful guidelines on how teams need to operate to be truly successful and apply the nature's wisdom and successful team behaviors of extended cooperation and effective collaboration in organizational work teams in order to become more successful, consistent and adaptable to changing environment.

Ants represent one of evolution's most successful and instructive developments. Ants based biological team is looked at because today's organizational teams don't work effectively for several reasons.