My own (company sponsored) research into ‘exceptionally performing teams’ exposed how BALANCE is the NATURAL substitute for TITLE-based organizational structure.  The following is a summary of the TEAM research findings;

 

In about 1993, I maneuvered my way, in my work, to undertake a study of ‘exceptionally performing teams’.  I had been asked to develop a workshop for producing managers [within a petroleum exploration and production operational setting] on ‘how better to invest in ‘information technology’.   My idea was to explore exceptional team operations, to see how they were ‘drawing in technology’ into their operations, so that the investigation didn’t have to start from the various current strains of technology and specify ‘how these should be used’.

A lot of things fell out of this investigation, and a successful workshop was developed, which was run two or three times prior to truncation by a major company re-organization.  But there was an important ‘philosophical finding’ that I was left ‘holding in my hands’, that needed to ‘go somewhere’, to be communicated and then more deeply understood,  but I did not know where to take it, or exactly how to share it, since it was very subtle.

My early ‘retirement’ in March 1, 1996, was strongly influenced by my desire to ‘work on’ a continuing investigation into this ‘philosophical finding’ and developing ways to generally share it.  One place I took it was to ‘Complexity’, the Journal of the Santa Fe Institute which was a new ‘university’ orienting to the ‘sciences of complexity’.   This institute was created by scientists-philosophers who felt that universities were pre-occupied with ‘linear theory’ and that ‘nonlinear dynamics’ was being largely ignored.

This seemed like a very appropriate ‘home’ for my ‘orphaned’ philosophical finding and I tried to capture it in an essay entitled  ‘Complexity and the ‘Learning Organization‘:  Addressing team performance in new science terms’.  The ‘new science’ referred to modern physics, relativity and quantum physics, which opened the door to ‘re-connecting’ the ‘team’ and the ‘environment’ that it was situationally included in, in the manner of [and this came to my attention later] Mach’s principle; “The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants.”

That is, the ‘orphaned philosophical finding’ I was left ‘holding in my hands’ was that the ‘identity’ of the exceptionally performing team ‘blurred’ by virtue of its building resonance into its interfacing with the world [with its host community; its suppliers, customers, service contractors, employee families etc.].

The orthodox ‘best practice teams’ were more like precision engines, ‘things-in-themselves’ with clear stand-alone identities and well defined component parts [employee roles] while the three teams that were identified as ‘exceptionally performing’ that we [myself and a colleague] ended up ‘investigating’ were distinguished by BREAKING ALL THE RULES, having thrown away their business cards [abandoned their defined credentials and position descriptions; i.e. their TITLES] and put the organization chart in the blender [The largest of the three teams, ‘team X’, was comprised of 150 members and used an unused aircraft hanger to have their ‘general assemblies’] .   They had also blurred the interfacing between their ‘self’ and the ‘others’ they were engaging with, dragging portions of the activities of the others inside of their team operations and letting part of their own activities be drawn into the operations of the others.  This was an operation in which everyone’s spirits soared.  In fact, one of the hourly union workers who was made a full member of the team like everyone, extolled the process saying how happy he was to work in this team-X environment since it had ‘put his head back on his shoulders’.

[To put this person’s comment into context, hourly workers in typical operating situations are simply ‘told what to do’ and are not privy to what the operations are all about much less the business, and in team-X’s reinventing of itself, everyone was given instruction in all aspects of the operation, including the financial/business aspects, and union workers found themselves sitting beside engineers after hours, on their own hook, watching the vital statistics of the operation on computer monitors and using their on-site knowledge to kibitz on how to solve performance problems and devise performance improvements].

So the philosophical problem was at the same time a quasi-mathematical problem.  As always, headquarters management scrutinized the production of all of the teams, giving rise to a ‘system performance’ curve as a function of ‘time’.   This curve was outstanding in the case of the team under study, and seemed to be almost doubling the performance of the best ‘normal’ teams.  Headquarters management, far from the teams themselves, were ecstatic and naturally wanted to promote the members of the team most responsible for this remarkably high production, and clone the team.

The members of the exceptional team realized that HQ management was ‘getting it wrong’, the high performance was not coming from them, the team components/members in the sense of the team as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed ‘production’, … the exceptional performance was coming from the team’s deliberate attempt to be defined more from the outside-inward, by the needs of those they were engaging with.  They were moving away from being locally defined; i.e. they were moving towards letting the defining of the team = ‘the universe expressing itself’, in the sense that the web of relational engaging they were included in was influencing them outside-inwardly at the same time they were influencing the relational web inside-outwardly [Mach’s principle].

What ‘the numbers said’ was clear in a historical graph of production.  The production of ‘team X’ had climbed up to where it was doubling the performance.  Even after describing the ‘complex source’ of this rising production, headquarters management regressed to the view that the rise in production had to be attributed to ‘improvements in the team’; i.e. improved skills and commitment of the team members, improved cooperation, teamwork, synergy within the team, improved leadership in the team.  In other words, the increase in production, they attributed to the team seen as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own locally originating, internal components and processes driven and directed productive behaviour.

Headquarters’ management selected those team members who most impressed them, promoted them and transferred them to other operations so as to ‘clone’ this high performing ‘team X’.   But it didn’t happen.   It turned out that it had been a rare exception in team X’s middle management having let team X ‘break all the rules’ and blur their positional role plays within the team and blur the boundaries where the team operations ended and the supplier, customer, service contractor operations began.  The middle management in the case of team-X not only provided this umbrella protection beneath which team X was breaking all the rules of engagement, but in their [middle management’s] interfacing with headquarters management, they translated everything arising in the new mode of team play into the orthodox format thus presenting a continuous picture of what was going [in the usual numbers based format].  Team X could not be cloned because such umbrella protection and translation was a rare item and it had been a necessary prerequisite to what had been the spontaneous emergence of the exceptionally performing ‘team X’.

The philosophical problem I was left holding on to was;

‘how does one explain that the source of ‘local’, ‘visible’, ‘material’ physical results derives from purely relational dynamics; i.e. from influences that are ‘non-local’, ‘non-visible’ and ‘non-material’ as seemed to be the case with ‘team X’?