Teaming - Needs a new Meaning

August 05, 2010. 33 men trapped 2300 feet underground some of the hardest rock in the world when the San Jose copper mine in Northern Chile caved in. They found their way to a refuge, designed for this purpose, that had food supplies for just 2 people for 10 days, filthy and intensely hot and absolutely no way of communicating with the top. The experts above found the situation hopeless as no technology in the industry was capable of drilling through rock that hard and deep, fast enough to save the lives of those trapped. To make matters worse, it was not clear how many of them trapped were alive and where exactly was the location of the refuge.

The Rescue

A remarkable process of situational humility and collaboration unfolded. Three separate drilling rig teams, nearly every Chilean government ministry, the United States' NASA space agency, and a dozen corporations from around the world over a10 week period - teaming across hundreds of individuals with the deepest possible diversity. Lots of ideas, trials, experimentation, failure, heartbreak and even helplessness. Curious and humble in the face of the very real challenge ahead, they were willing to take risks to learn fast what might work.

17 days into this tragedy André Sougarret, a brilliant mining engineer came up with the idea of a small incision, found through a bunch of experimental techniques, to break through to the refuge. This was the first connection from the surface with the trapped miners. For the next 53 days, that narrow lifeline would be the path where food and medicine and communication would travel from aboveground. The other plans continued the teaming to find a way to create a much larger hole and also to design a capsule. On the 69th day, over 22 painstaking hours, they managed to pull the miners out one by one. The following video outlines the rescue operation.

The term "Situational Humility" needs to be understood in the context of this successful operation. It was absolutely essential to recognize that any idea from anyone across this large diverse body that was working on this rescue operation that cost over $ 20 Million was not to be discounted. More importantly, the best of Knowledge and past expertise was of no use and there had to be "Learning in Action" that was Shared and Collaborative to derive a solution that worked in the current circumstances.

The Future of Work

The future of work is no different from the above presented case study of the trapped miners. We are double trapped by a recessionary economy and crippling impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the psyche and physicality of our social fabric. Innovation is the only way we are going to find a way out of this hole. And this will require us to collaborate and share in ways we have never known before.

Teaming will no longer be just the coming together of people. It will have to mean Coordinating, Sharing and Collaborating with trust; across boundaries of all kinds -- expertise, distance, time zones and cultures. This is the true significance of the ecosystem.

Innovation Versus Competition

Despite great examples from sports and other walks of life, the concept of teaming has been poorly understood and played out in the corporate environment. The reason for this is the dedication to Competitiveness as opposed to Innovation. These terms (Innovation and Competition) have often been misrepresented by the industry to mean the same. But they are not. The notion of competition that one's success depends on another's failure where a customer's expectation should be managed to the ability to deliver optimally; is not conducive to Sharing and Collaboration where the entire customer universe is viewed with suspicion. Innovation on the other hand embraces the success of the entire customer universe in the process of fulfilling aspirations and consequently growth that is centered on Value translated to Trust.

Like the teams that collaborated on the surface to rescue the miners, the starting point for enterprises is an an inherent humility that they don't have the right attitude and environment to cross the chasm from Competition to Innovation.

Psychology of Successful Teams

Google's internal research project "Aristotle" invested millions of dollars over a period of three years to find out the traits of the highest performing teams. And as the following video suggests, they came up with three essential traits:

1. Equality in distribution of conversational turn taking.
2. Higher average social sensitivity.
3. Psychological safety of every member.

Every team member can only speak with confidence and conviction when they perceive their contributions are valued. Similarly, Social Sensitivity can be practiced only when there is a shared understanding of Values, Beliefs and Assumptions. And together, they contribute to the psychological safety of every member who knows their contribution creates and manages value that the enterprise delivers to the customer ecosystem.

Enterprises have Performance Management Systems without the necessary empowerment. The amount of debt that they incur - be it strategic or technological is proof and a contributing factor to this lack of empowerment. Therefore, the above three learnings from Google have to be reviewed against:

• not only the poor way in which teaming has been understood in the erstwhile corporation where people came to work 9 - 5;
• but also renewed in the context of the new Virtual Workplace where people are operating literally 24*7 globally.

Human Capital Management

Ground Zero of the future of work is Human Capital Management understood from a renewed context and relevance. Where the term capital equates to the contribution made by an individual / team / process / enterprise and / or ecosystem from an Intellectual (Solution & Application) measure. In such an enterprise, the customer would be truly embedded and centric to an enterprise's growth moving through the states of Alpha, Beta and Theta; as IP that is critical to the customer's aspiration gets transported seamlessly from Conceptualization to Commercialization in a Continuum.

The real Market Capitalization value of enterprises would be based on the pipeline of intellectual property (IP) and not on the pipeline of Customers. This fundamental shift in measuring value will automatically impact how enterprises manage human capital; the source of an enterprise's Market / Value Capital.

It is not enough to merely shift the elephantiasis of the left to the right leg. One finds many corporations taking a victory lap with the announcement that they have successfully enabled their employees to Work From Home (WFH). This is the least of the priorities when one is grappling with the double whammy of the effects of the economic recession and the global pandemic. The key is how does one shift the mindset and the working methods to the twin engines of Innovation and Operations working mutually inclusively; where people participate seamlessly across both the engines with capabilities that contribute to excellence.