The second half of this year will be all about "Tribes". Master marketing blogger Seth Godin has written yet another book: "Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us". Although details are not known, "according to Godin, Tribes are groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. Tribes make our world work, and always have."

Photography by The Dilli Lama.

Would this be a useful way of looking at projects?

I think so. It's always nice to jump on a hype bandwagon once in a while. And it has such a nice ring: Project Tribes.

The central element of a tribe is the leader and the idea, the goal. You need a leader who can inspire, one that can present Big Audacious Goals that seem to rock the world. Your project needs Al Gore, your project needs goals like "Save The Planet". That's why people join the gang. That's why people want to be part of it.

The goal and the leader.

The leader will set some rules of interaction. The leader will keep efforts aligned. Within this context the teams get self-organized and the Big Hairy Audacious Goal makes sure it's all in the right direction.

So it's not top down, and it's not entirely bottom up.

It's all about tribes.

People that work in groups (project, organization, society as a whole) have to cope with change. The more effective you are in this area, the more success you will have in this ever morphing world. This is a short outline of how people effectively cope with change.

Photography by Sabrina's Stash.

Humans In Groups Are Systems

"Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor to laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other." (source)
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In the previous post I used a picture of myself leaving the medina of Fes, Morocco through the gate. For me, this old city is a great illustration of human complexity.

When discussing abstract concepts like networks of humans, complex adaptive systems and their fractal nature (a society is a large organization, an organization is a large group of people etc …) you sometimes can loose the link to reality. What is the picture you have in your mind when dealing with these concepts? While we are discussing the fish pond as metaphor, I want to share with you the image of the medina of Fes, Morocco.
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How are people coordinating work when there is no central control? You might read about all this self-organizing, no-command, treehugging teams, but you just keep on wondering how this can work?

Ted.com brings us again a great presentation that provides us with the answer to how ants do exactly this. Watch it, and watch it till the end. You'll be amazed about the simplicity and effectiveness.

Thanks to BioTeams.com for pointing out this video.

As a fundamental model for projects I want to use the notion of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). In this post I will outline what this means; what are the properties of a CAS and how are they beneficial in our quest to search for answers to project problems?

Why CAS In The First Place?

I am the first to admit that my attention to the use of complex adaptive systems is largely triggered by its current popularity. It is a new and exciting concept that is getting more and more popular, and its associated attention, in almost every scientific discipline. It is this multi-disciplinary aspect in combination with new and exciting that sparked my interest.
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Jeffrey Stamps and Jessica Lipnack over at Endless Knots have put a draft version of their chapter "The Virtual, Networked Organization" for us all to download. This will be the final chapter of the book "The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams" that will be released in 2008.

I don't know how long they will keep it available, so get it while you can This PDF file provides a great introduction to the topics they blog about: networked and virtual organizations. Duh.