Five "Facts" About Teams That Aren't True

Harvard Professor of Psychology Richard Hackman has received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, and the Distinguished Educator and Distinguished Scholar Awards from the Academy of Management. Richard's latest book examines team dynamics.

Some teams have lots of time to mull things over before eventually deciding what they are going to do. Others do not have it so good: they have to solve hard problems in real time and cannot start over if things are not going well. That can be plenty hard -- and is made even harder by five common misperceptions about what actually shapes team performance.

Fact #1: Harmonious teams perform better. They operate smoothly and don’t have to waste time on pointless debates about how to proceed.

Actually: Quite the opposite, research shows. Conflict and disagreement, when well-managed and focused on a team’s objectives, can generate more creative solutions than one sees in conflict-free groups. Conflict, so long as it is about the work itself, can be good for a team.


Fact #2: It’s good to mix it up by bringing in new members. Newcomers bring energy and new ideas to a team. Without them, members risk becoming complacent, inattentive to changes in the environment, and too forgiving of fellow members’ miscues and misbehavior.

Actually: The longer members stay together as an intact team, the better they do. As unreasonable as this may seem, the research evidence is unambiguous. Whether it is a basketball team or a string quartet, teams that stay together longer play better together.


Fact #3: Having the right people on a team is the key to success. Analyze the task to figure out the knowledge and skill that is needed and then pick the highest-level experts you can corral (instead of hobbling the team by staffing it with nice people).

Actually: Expertise by itself is insufficient. If a team is to be successful, all members need to have at least modest capability in working collaboratively with others. Besides, if needed expertise does not exist within the team, members always can seek it from outsiders.


Fact #4: The more information, the better. Teams that have too little data run the risk of making erroneous assumptions and heading off in the wrong direction.

Actually: Teams sometimes drown in data. Large quantities of information don’t always help clarify a murky situation. Indeed, more data sometimes actually makes it harder to figure things out. It’s not the amount of information that counts, it is the choice about what information the team gets and uses that can spell the difference between success and failure.


Fact #5: Face-to-face interaction is passé. Now that we have powerful technologies for communication and coordination, teams can do their work much more efficiently at a distance.

Actually: Distributed remote teams are at a considerable disadvantage. There really are benefits to sizing up your teammates face-to-face in real time. A number of organizations that rely heavily on distributed teams have found that it is well worth the time and expense to get members together when the team is launched, again around the midpoint of the team’s work, and yet again when the work has been completed.

Thoughts? Reactions? Comments?

Five Things To Walk Out Of (and Five Things To Walk On To)

Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze's latest work, Walk Out Walk On, takes you inside seven communities around the world where people walked out of limiting beliefs about change, leadership and their own potential, and walked on to experiment with new beliefs and practices that made it possible to solve seemingly intractable problems. The book focuses on seven common assumptions that, if challenged, can liberate people’s creativity and capacity. Five are offered here to stimulate your own thinking; see what they provoke from your own experience.

1. From Power to Play
Most leaders believe that people are not self-motivated, that without directive control, no work gets done. They use external means, both punishment and reward. Yet when people are engaged through imagination and play, creativity blossoms in just about everybody. Seemingly impossible work is accomplished, and we experience joy both in the process of working together and in the results we create.

Question: Have you experienced times when your imagination, playfulness and creativity blossomed? What conditions led to this?


2. From Efficiency to Resilience
Conventional attempts to solve problems of scarcity focus on efficiencies—attempting to do more with less by cutting budgets and staff, minimizing resources, optimizing outputs. Yet resilience is achieved through a wide variety of small local actions that create the capacity to adapt to unending challenges.

Question: Think of times you have been adversely affected by the efficiency mindset. What have you learned? What, in your experience, creates the capacity for resilience?


3. From Hero to Host
When a community stops waiting for a hero to save it, it discovers internal resources and solutions to solve otherwise intractable problems. Using collaborative processes that rely on everyone’s contribution, people create long-term solutions that they fully support.

Question: How often do you play the hero, wanting to help people by rescuing them? How often do you trust other people to come up with their own solutions?


4. From Transacting to Gifting
Today’s transactional culture promotes self-interest and scarcity; people strive to take as much as they can and accumulate more than they need. In a gift culture—common in most traditional societies—people know they’re interdependent. When we give to one another, we are gifting to ourselves. Generosity prevails and money loses its disruptive power.

Question: How are the demands of consumer culture impacting you, your family, your work? Have you experienced times when gifts of service or work were freely offered, no strings attached?


5. From Scaling Up to Scaling Across
Taking things to scale doesn’t happen vertically through one-size-fits-all replication strategies, although this is today’s dominant approach. Change happens as local experiments move horizontally through networks of relationship, scaling across communities and nations. People become inspired by one another’s discoveries and create their own initiatives; they also support one another as pioneers.

Question: Do you know of small local efforts that grew large not through replication, but by inspiring others to keep inventing and learning?


Thoughts? Reactions? Ideas?

A Nation United

Daniel Seddiqui challenged himself to hold fifty jobs in all fifty U.S. states within 50 weeks -- and succeeded! Despite the wide range of culture, jobs, attitudes, and social dynamics he encountered, Daniel noticed five traits of all Americans regardless of location:

Trait One: Pride in One’s Work
It doesn’t matter if they were miners, factory workers, or television reporters – each worker showed great pride and meaning in what he or she was doing. A cheesemaker felt his work contributed just as much, and was just as important as the work of a scientist. Everyone was truly dedicated to their work, and believed they were contributing to a better society.

Trait Two: Kindness to Strangers and Outsiders
Whether you're in the supposedly intolerant bible belt, the economically depressed rust belt, the free-flowing Big Easy or the supposedly rude Big Apple, everyone had the audacity and heart to care for a stranger in need as though I was their own friend. Regardless of where I was, people showed kindness and charity.

Trait Three: An Optimistic Outlook
No matter what predicament they face, Americans stay true to their diligent work ethic by continuing to keep high spirits and hope. Many times I encountered people who were struggling or going through rough patches, but in all cases, it was very evident that they believed firmly that their situation would improve.

Trait Four: Open-Mindedness
There's barely any place left in this nation that does not have an intermingling of several cultures -- either through racial diversity or immigrant populations. In all cases, I noticed that people had learned to live amongst each other and respect each others' practices and beliefs. I lived and worked side by side with African-Americans, Indians, Whites, Latinos, Asians -- even the Amish -- and I rarely heard or saw any judgments being passed on the basis of ethnicity, origin, or beliefs.

Trait Five: Respect for Innovativion
Everywhere I went, I saw people striving to improve, be more productive, and take risks. We consistently reinvent ourselves and use any and all resources to create new ways of living.

Not that different after all, are we?

Five Poor Excuses for Ignoring Your Past

Author John Schuster's new book is all about the power of your past and how it can be an effective learning tool -- in stark contrast to the current trend that dictates that only the "now" is important and the past should be discarded entirely. Why are people so eager to disregard their past? Well there are a number of supposedly good reasons, and here John lists five of them and explains why they really aren't such good reasons after all:

Reason One: Certain memories can be painful to recall.

Good Reason? It would seem so. No one enjoys pain, and if it happened a while back, why rehash it now?

Why It’s Wrong: Like it or not, that pain is with us today even if it’s invisible. Events in our life shape us, painful ones included. We devised strategies to cope with these negatives, and some may have worked well for years but are now in your way. That is why we have to look back at the negatives -— to affirm the good strategies we devised and refine them, and recast the painful memories that lead us into poor strategies. We need to find new lessons, ones that benefit rather than weaken us.


Reason Two: The past is dead. I much prefer to be in the now.

Good Reason? Possibly. The past is irrevocable, and can never be fully sorted out. It’s better just to concentrate on the moment, live your values, and move ahead step by step, knowing that the present is all you ever really have.

Why It’s Wrong: Being in the now is an excellent practice, but it is just not nearly enough. Remember what Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It is never even past.” The past lives on in ways that are not helpful if we leave unfinished business there. So we cannot discount the past in service to the now. Try as we might to breathe and be present, we can’t even be fully in the now when our many positive gifts from the past stay unclaimed and the negatives remain to still be recast.


Reason Three: I am goal-oriented, progress-motivated, busy person. Reflection is not my strong suit.

Good Reason?: Yep. Having an action-based orientation favors all kinds of outcomes for me -— achieving goals, advancing my career. Slowing down to reflect is not in my make up.

Why it’s Wrong: We all have busy streaks when reflection is not going to happen, nor should it in those times. But in the Excited States of America, one of our cultural flaws is an addiction to speed always, everywhere. Reflecting on our pasts helps us stay goal-oriented, because it gets all of us behind the right goals chosen to match our uniqueness, not parts of us behind goals we acquired because we picked them up somewhere while we were busy being action-oriented.


Reason Four: I had a great childhood and adolescence. Why dig into it and make more work for myself?

Good Reason? Figures...I'm well-adjusted and I don’t need therapy. I am about the most normal person I know.

Why it’s Wrong: Many of us had great childhoods, but there is still work to do. Sometimes we flat out forget the gifts of our past, and don’t define ourselves around these gifts and lessons. We can romanticize and sentimentalize our pasts and not see the really difficult fixes that we had to work through. This keeps us on our surface and away from our depth.


Reason Five: I was immature/impulsive in my past, and I had no control over some of the things that happened. I know this now, so what’s to learn?

Good Reason? Why not? Who hasn’t chalked up a memory to inexperience or immaturity, and since we think that now we’re mature and we survived and even thrived to this point, what’s the reason for going back?

Why It’s Wrong: Sure, we are succeeding in some ways, and we all do things that are immature and later regret it. On top of that, things happened to us beyond our control. But how we acted on impulse when we’re younger actually tells us a lot about our own passions and weaknesses and what is important to us now and what isn’t. Think of these moments as those periods in your life where you were truly honest with yourself and see what you can learn about yourself from them. Also, remember that the things that were out of your control can lead to subtle or not so subtle strategies of victimizing yourself or demonizing others.

Good enough reasons for ya?

This Ain't Your Mama's Green Marketing

Green marketing has certainly changed a lot over the last several years, and Jacquie Ottman knows this because she has been working in this arena since 1989 (when "being green" just meant you lacked experience in a particular field). Jacquie wants businesses and companies to keep in mind five new lessons for green marketing with authenticity and impact:

Lesson One: A single customer can bring down your entire green strategy.

Disgruntled customers don’t patiently write a letter to the CEO these days. We live in a wired world where individual consumers have incredible reach to markets through their blogs and tweets. All it takes is for one influencer to notice a problem or issue and bring it up to others. From there, it spreads virally across firewalls and nations. And remember, greenwashing is a very tough accusation to come back from.

Lesson Two: Green is entirely mainstream now.

At one point it seemed that only a niche market really cared about environmental sustainability and you could usually catch them by looking for Birkenstocks and vegan recipes. But now, everyone — including suburban families, corporate heads, and government departments -- have all gone green. You are no longer selling green to a small cross-section of the public, you are selling green to everyone.

Lesson Three: Price, performance, and convenience no longer guide consumer purchasing.

Nowadays, values guide consumer purchasing. Historically, consumers bought solely on price, performance, and convenience, but today they look at how products are sourced, manufactured, packaged, disposed of. Even such social aspects as how factory and farm workers are treated all matter.

Lesson Four: Companies need to tell the whole story

BP, ExxonMobil, and SIGG learned this lesson the hard way. Today's brands gain trust by practicing radical transparency, disclosing the good and the bad. Consumers are smart enough to know that some waste is inevitable in any production process, they just want companies to be honest about it and constantly be working to reduce it.

Lesson Five: Today's consumers look at the entire life-cycle of a product.

A product's life used to begin the moment it was purchased and end the moment it was consumed, broken, or discarded. However, modern consumers want businesses to have accountability for how a product was created and overseen even before it hits store shelves, and in the case of many non-perishables, how it will be broken down at the end of its life-cycle to minimize waste.

Your thoughts, reactions, or observations?

Five Reasons to Give Improv a Shot in Your Organization

There are tons and tons of trust-building exercises and theories but none of them are as active (or as much fun) as improvisation. Here are five good reasons to give improv a shot as your organizational trust-building tool of choice:

Reason 1: We already improvise – every day.
If you think you can’t improvise, take a moment to consider any workday. We all head in with a schedule in our heads and outcomes for the day. I would bet that 90% of the time, that agenda changes on the fly. How do you manage? You improvise. The good part is that if you can master a few simple behaviors that improvisers use on stage, it can exponentially improve your ability to adapt, stay engaged and move on.

Reason 2: Positive behaviors = positive results is a known fact.
The underlying principle of improvisation is the concept of “Yes!” Improvisers believe that contributions should always be greeted with agreement – at least at first. Not all ideas are kept, but the act of positive reaction changes how people feel about their value, their part in a project and about you. A 2001 paper from the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations found that for every 1% improvement in the service climate (a company in a good mood), there’s a 2% increase in revenue.

Reason 3: Committing to the game creates accountability.
After an improviser says “Yes!” they immediately say “and.” That simple word, “and,” allows them to add an idea, a joke, and a flavor to the scene onstage. When they add their piece, it also means that they are committed to the scene. They are in it and will stick to it through failure or success. If we could all jump into our work with the attitude that will be positive and add our contribution, every time, everything would be done faster, better.

Reason 4: Improv removes the fear of making mistakes and managing the unexpected.
Improvisers make mistakes and encounter the unexpected all the time. More importantly, when faced with those occurrences, we acknowledge it (instead of shoving it under a rug), think about how it could be used for the good of the scene or comedy, and move on. Instead of running, fretting or obsessing about the unexpected, you can make mistakes into opportunities by working like an improviser.

Reason 5: Fun is a good thing.
The most successful executives and high-performance teams which whom I’ve worked always include fun in the list of why they’ve done so well. Being willing to laugh, work like it’s play, and act like a team is the best way to spend the many hours you are away from your home and family.

Convinced? Interested? Still scared? Tell us…

Five Ways Scenario Planning Could Have Averted Major Disasters

Author Tom Chermack is a seasoned academic with impeccable corporate credentials as well in the field of scenario planning.Scenario planning derives from the observation that, given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, a good decision or strategy to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures. Tom lists below the five ways in which scenario planning exercises by Companies and organizations (such as BP) could have averted the oil spill and ensuing crisis.

1)Consider Internal Dynamics. This may come as blasphemy to many scenario planning professionals. Scenario exercises have almost always focused on external events and forces, because the purpose is commonly to explore and understand what is going on out there. Given that more and more companies have global reach, and many have revenues that exceed small nations, a failure to explore internal dynamics can be a major oversight. Toyota is a prime example of an internal oversight that led to an organizational crisis. A secondary benefit of using internal dynamics as major forces in scenario exercises is that it brings the scenarios immediately closer to the users. Using an internal factor as a major critical uncertainty can help managers see how their actions could make a difference, and creates a set of circumstances in which their judgment matters, and they can see how their decisions might play out.

2) Explore Unlikely Scenarios -- Do Not Assign Probabilities. Scenarios existed that contained the events of September 11, 2001. The scenarios were dismissed as “unlikely” because the odds of their occurrence were deemed slim. This is a great lesson in the purpose of scenarios. The purpose is to explore and understand unlikely events that could fundamentally impact an organization (and increasingly, our world). Assigning probabilities is a sure way to dismiss the unlikely scenario elements and defeat the purpose of any scenario planning effort.

3) Consider Responses. Many scenario exercises fall short of considering responses in each scenario. One of Peter Schwartz’s key questions for each scenario is “What will we do IF…”, yet this basic question is often overlooked. These do not have to be detailed contingency plans, but general responses to environmental conditions are critical. BP Amoco might never have been able to anticipate the problems that caused a major leak in the Gulf of Mexico, but general approaches to handling a potential disaster should have been considered long before drilling for oil. The potential for equipment malfunction is almost a predetermined element -- why not anticipate it?

4) Realize Regional Differences. Scenario planning use is on the rise, which is a good sign. Scenarios are powerful tools that can help people clarify their perceptions. More and more scenario projects are being undertaken for global events. For example, the UNDP website posts scenarios for India, China, Global Warming, Global Economies, etc. While these are useful starting points, they become a backdrop for more detailed scenario work. This applies to almost any complex phenomena -- location, resources, environment, and landscape all matter. This is a good reminder of Pierre Wack’s thinking that you must begin with macro scenarios, and, like a camera lens, you zoom in on the details according to a more specific location or issue.

5) Celebrate and Communicate Success. Many companies are currently using scenarios with great success. A great example is the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, MN (I was born and raised in the Twin Cities). Disaster scenarios were documented and well integrated with emergency response teams in Minneapolis, which is why the response was so rapid and seamless. Yet, not much was publicly communicated about the success of the response effort. The swiftness could be attributed to good planning, anticipating unlikely events, and thinking through responses, all of which would make for a good case that many city planners could learn from.

I urge company and community leaders to share their successes -- as we will be doing with our work through the Scenario Planning Institute at Colorado State University. I welcome your thoughts, comments, and observations.