Why Do Good Teams Fail?

Welcome to the very first xNEWS newsletter, where we will explore principles and practices of leadership in an exponentially changing world.

My partner in this experiment is Deborah Ancona, a professor at MIT. You can learn more about me here and Deborah here.

We plan to publish a biweekly newsletter in the form of a dialogue. I am kicking off today, and Deborah will respond in two weeks. We hope you will join us with insights and questions along the way. If you are interested,? please hit subscribe.

Let's get started.

Why do good teams fail?

You build a team with exceptional talent. Team members are committed to the goal and motivated to excel. Yet the results are depressing. You're not getting breakthrough ideas. Implementation falters, as does the energy and entrepreneurial spirit. Why does this happen?

This question bedeviled me as a young manager in a large multinational company more than two decades ago. Later, it became a focus of my doctoral studies. As a professor of organizational behavior, I have widened the lens to include a more diverse set of organizational phenomena (more about this later), but the central puzzle still captivates me. The answers keep shifting, and the importance of finding them keeps growing.

15 years ago, Deborah and I published a book dedicated to finding the answer. In essence, we found that "good" teams fail to keep up with the world outside its boundaries. They are internally focused. Genuinely great teams, on the other hand, go out before they go in. They constantly reevaluate their collective mental model about what the world looks like, collaborate with the full spectrum of stakeholders across the ecosystem, and engage relentlessly in external outreach. We call these teams "x-teams."

Recently, we revisited our findings in an article in MIT Sloan Management Review, Turn Your Teams Inside Out. Were they outdated? The opposite, as it turns out. In the book, we argue that the traditional model no longer works in an exponentially changing world. This world is volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, diverse, asynchronous, and evolving at a furious pace. A world whose map is constantly shifting. 15 years ago, we said that teams that do not redraw their maps of the external world and engage with it will fail, and now, this is more urgent than ever in order to keep up with changing times.

“Conventional teams think of the organization as their context, while x-teams are oriented toward the broader context, including the larger business ecosystem.”?

For businesses to thrive in today’s world, teams must widen their perspective to include all parts of this ecosystem: consumers, new technologies, competition, and more. Contexts and challenges are constantly changing, meaning teams always have more to learn. You need innovative people who have broad networks and are excited about shaking up the status quo. The future of work is diverse, dynamic, and distributed. If anything has changed since we first began our research, it has only become more urgent to prioritize x-teams in organizations.?

Others have contributed significantly to our knowledge in this domain. Mark Mortensen notes the increasing prevalence of? team “fuzzy boundaries.” Amy Edmondson suggests abandoning traditional teams for “teaming,” which she calls “teamwork on the fly,” where experts are temporarily gathered to solve problems. Anita Williams Woolley explores how teams survive punishing external demands through “bursts” of togetherness, and Anna Mayo examines how to successfully navigate complex interdependencies in the relentlessly dynamic context of healthcare. I will explore the critical practical implications of these and other research advances in coming newsletters.

While we have answered many questions, many more have emerged since we first started to explore the changing nature of teamwork. It is becoming clear that the capacity to take on the challenges we face requires much more than what any single individual, or team, can deploy.

A key takeaway is this: to face the challenges of an exponentially changing world, leadership needs to emerge from wherever the best talents, capabilities, and information are found across levels and geographies. We need to go beyond the team to the system as a whole. Call it SystemX.

Deborah, over to you. What are your reflections on x-teams in an exponentially changing world 15 years later? What do we do now?

Thank you for joining us for the first edition of xNEWS. Don’t forget to subscribe.

Want to learn more?

Check out the full article here.