Just what is this thing that we call a “team”?4People have strong feelings about groups—not just members who love or detest the experience of being in them, but also scholars who study them. In an essay titled “Suppose We Took Groups Seriously …,” management scholar Harold Leavitt once proposed that groups generate so many benefits that we should consider using them rather than individuals as the very building blocks of organizations. The contrary position is perhaps most succinctly expressed in the Finnish proverb Joukossa tyhmyys tiivistyy, which translates as “In a group stupidity condenses.” Psychologist Edwin Locke and his colleagues would concur. In a provocative article titled “The Importance of the Individual in an Age of Groupism,” they suggest that a group frenzy has so overtaken organizational life that the critical role of individuals, especially in providing critical thinking, is being lost.1
Both sides can marshal support for their positions, from essays and commentaries to hard empirical data. On one side are books with highly promising titles such as Hot Groups, The Wisdom of Teams, and Group Genius, as well as scholarly analyses showing the increasing dominance of teams in the production of knowledge.2 On the other side are Irving Janis’s classic Groupthink, which shows just how wrong groups can be in making highly consequential decisions; the considerable research literature on free-riding (also known as social loafing) in teams; and the decidedly mixed evidence about the performance benefits of group techniques such as brainstorming.3 As was evident from the contrasting experiences of teams in the Project Looking Glass (PLG) simulations described in the previous chapter, group behavior can run the full range, from the best of the red teams to the worst of the blues.
By the end of this book, we will have identified what it takes for teams to wind up on the positive end of that continuum. But to get there from here requires that we first be clear about some of the basics of groups and teams in organizations:
Just what is this thing that we call a “team”?4
When would you definitely want to use a team to accomplish a piece of work, and when is that the last thing you should do?
What kind of team should you create in what circumstances? (There are several varieties.)
What signs can you monitor along the way to assess how well a team is doing?
Once the conceptual stage has been properly set, we can dig into our main task, which is to explore the conditions that those who create, lead, or serve on intelligence teams can put in place to increase the chances that their teams will perform well.
Collaboration in intelligence comes in a wide variety of forms, as is seen in Figure 2-1. At the left end of the continuum is the least intense kind of collaboration: loosely defined groups that generally are known as communities of interest. Such communities provide forums where people can exchange thoughts and observations about matters of shared interest. A community might develop, for example, among people who are interested in Asian cultures, or among those who seek exchanges with others about adolescents’ increasing involvement in online social networks. Although communities of interest may have nothing directly to do with members’ organizational work, they do create connections among people who otherwise might never encounter one another. And, on occasion, what is being discussed does turn out to stimulate work-related thoughts or ideas for some participants.
Next come communities of practice, whose members do have exchanges relevant to their organizational work, even though participating in the community is not an actual job responsibility. There are, for example, people dispersed throughout the intelligence community who all have to deal with very large quantities of raw data. Some of them have come up with strategies for sorting and compacting those data that might also be useful to colleagues in other agencies. A community of practice on data reduction strategies could help people learn from one another and perhaps provide some social support and specific guidance when members encounter particularly frustrating problems with their own data. As the world becomes increasingly connected through what commonly is known as Web 2.0, communities of practice that cross national as well as organizational boundaries are becoming commonplace. It remains to be seen whether this trend will continue, as some such communities become so large that they become unwieldy.5
FIGURE 2-1 Kinds of Collaboration
Emergent collaboration comes next. Consider, for example, individuals who are responsible for managing watch lists of a certain kind but who work in different agencies. Coordination of their activities clearly would be a good idea, but what if there were no established organizational means of doing so? In such circumstances, individuals might decide to do it on their own by keeping in touch and establishing an understanding that no changes in policies or practices would be made without first alerting and soliciting reactions from relevant staff in other agencies. As was the case for communities of practice, the growth of electronic networks is opening many new opportunities for emergent collaboration throughout the intelligence community.
Next come coacting groups, which are used widely throughout the community and will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. A coacting group is a set of people who operate in parallel but who do not have collective accountability for a work product. When an intelligence manager splits up a large analytic task and distributes the subparts to individual analysts, he or she has formed a coacting group. Although the analysts may informally discuss the work and seek feedback from one another, they work mostly on their own. After each individual has completed his or her part of the work, the group’s manager assembles the final product and delivers it to the client.
In distributed teams, the group does have responsibility and accountability for the final product, but members do not interact face to face. Instead, they rely mainly, and sometimes exclusively, on electronic means for communication and coordination. As will be seen later in this chapter, groups that have a shared task but are dispersed across geographies and time zones face some unique challenges that require special care in their structure and management.
Project teams and task forces are formed to accomplish a specific piece of work by some deadline, and cease to exist once that work is completed. A team might be formed, for example, to research and document all the collection activities taking place at U.S. ports, or to develop an improved procedure for use in coordinating with allies when a potential threat with international implications is detected.
Finally, semi-permanent work teams have a defined task that remains the responsibility of a specific team for an indefinite period. Examples include a team whose task is to continuously monitor certain crossborder financial transactions, or one that prepares a weekly report on activities in some region for a senior policymaker. The membership of semi-permanent teams does, of course, change over time, but the team itself continues until it is disbanded.
Although the continuum shown in Figure 2-1 can be useful in making sense of the many different kinds of collaboration that exist within the intelligence community, the specific points on the continuum are arbitrary. In fact, many collaborations fall between the identified points and, importantly, teams can naturally evolve over time from one kind of collaboration to another. Members of a community of practice, for example, could find their exchanges so valuable that they increasingly depend upon one another in carrying out their regular work—a form of emergent collaboration. Or a temporary task force could become a permanent fixture. Or, in the other direction, members of a temporary task force might stay in touch with one another informally after their work has been completed, ready to re-ignite their collaboration should the need arise or, as often happens, to help one another get things done when bureaucratic channels are blocked.
Even though there are no discrete, fixed types of collaboration, it is good at least to know where you are on the continuum and, given the work that needs to be done and the people who are available to do it, where you ought to be. These same qualifications also apply to this book. Our focus is on the right-hand half of Figure 2-1—that is, on those cases for which the quality of the work product depends heavily on how well those who are involved in doing it work together. The principles of good team design and leadership discussed in this book may apply to other, looser forms of collaboration as well. But the research that would be needed to assess how broadly applicable these principles are remains to be done.
In some circumstances, there is no real choice.6 Only individuals can fly single-seat aircraft, and only groups can operate planes that require synchronized input from multiple crew members. Similarly, performing a string quartet requires a team, but composing one (at least a good one) must be done by an individual. These are special cases, however. How about when there is a choice about whether to use a team or an individual to perform a piece of work?
Managers often make that decision too quickly, without deliberation and sometimes for the wrong reasons. Some managers, for example, implicitly assume that teams almost always produce higher-quality products than individuals—in effect endorsing the potential benefits of teamwork trumpeted in the popular management literature. Others may decide to assign a controversial piece of work to a team in hopes of diluting, or at least distributing, their own accountability for whatever is produced. Still others may use a team to engage those who serve on it and, they hope, thereby foster members’ commitment to the group product or decision. All of these, and more, are common reasons why lots of organizational tasks wind up being assigned to teams.
Teams always have more resources than any individual working alone, as well as greater flexibility in how those resources are deployed. If one individual becomes unavailable for the work, there are others who can rearrange their schedules to cover. Even more important, however, is that teams always have a diversity of resources available—the varied knowledge, skill, experiences, and external relationships that members bring. Those differences provide many opportunities for members to learn from one another as they work together, thereby building an ever-larger pool of knowledge and expertise throughout the community. Moreover, a diverse group offers at least the possibility that members will draw on their differences to make some magic, producing something of extraordinary quality or insight that could never have been generated by any one member acting alone.
Because teams have a number of people available for work, they can be given tasks that are wider in scope, more meaningful, and more consequential than otherwise would be possible—task attributes that foster work motivation.7 And since the work is not parceled out in small pieces to individual performers, it is easier to establish direct two-way communication with the clients of the work that, in turn, can provide feedback that helps the team improve its performance. These also are significant advantages, and they help explain why teams are such a popular means for accomplishing organizational work these days.
Teams should be used only when there are good reasons for them, reasons that can be explicitly named. Too many teams are tossed together mindlessly or merely out of habit: “That’s an interesting question,” someone says, “let’s form a task force to look into it,” and yet another unnecessary team is formed. So when you feel the impulse to create a team, ask yourself: Why do we actually need a team? Is it because the task requires more resources than any one person can provide? Or because diverse skills and perspectives are required to accomplish the work? Or because flexibility is needed to keep pace with a rapidly changing context? Or because you want to provide a setting in which individual members can hone their personal capabilities through interactions with others? If none of these reasons applies, there probably is no need for the extra work and leadership attention that it takes to create and support a team.
Moreover, some intelligence tasks are not appropriate for a group to perform. Creative composition, for example, is inherently more suited for individual than for collective performance. Creativity involves bringing to the surface, organizing, and combining into an original whole thoughts and ideas that initially are but partially formed. One intelligence community blogger characterized analytic creativity as those times “when the complex amalgamation of substantive knowledge, target experience, and creative imagination align in the brief moment of insight and inspiration that arises of its own accord.”8 That view is echoed by a writer whose publisher hosted brainstorming sessions to generate ideas for young adult novels: “We did things in a very collaborative way, and there was a lot of freedom, and the ideas would flow. … But, when faced with the actual sentence-by-sentence unfolding of a novel or a story, I can’t see how you can do that in a way that involves a lot of voices at the same time.”9
Even writing routine committee or task force reports—mundane products compared to novels, poems, or musical scores—is better done by one talented individual on behalf of a group (after extensive consultations with other members, of course) than by the group as a whole writing in lockstep. Indeed, merely creating a collectivistic mindset can compromise creativity. In one experiment, researchers prompted participants to think either about their individuality or about the groups to which they belonged. Then the participants came together in teams to perform a creativity task. Teams whose members had received the individualistic prompt generated more creative products than did those whose members had received the collectivistic prompt.10
That said, it also is true that the presence of coworkers sometimes can facilitate individual creativity. In their book Organizing Genius, Warren Bennis and Patricia Biederman quote novelist Henry James’s observation about the benefits of doing creative work with others nearby:
Every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation. Great things have of course been done by solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial circumstances.11
That observation may help explain why writers, painters, and composers so often settle in the same city or neighborhood. Presumably those in the intelligence community whose work requires individual creativity also benefit from being located near others who do similar work. The opposite also may be true: reliance on electronic technologies for communication and coordination among geographically dispersed team members may boost efficiency but at some cost in creativity.
Finally, if you are going to create a team, it should be a real team, not a team in name only. Managers who have read a few popular articles about all the benefits of teams sometimes decide to identify as a “team” some set of people whose interactions may not extend beyond conversations around the coffee machine. It will not work. The benefits of teamwork come only when capable people work together interdependently to achieve some collective purpose.
Could it be that teams, although relied upon for accomplishing many kinds of intelligence work in years past, are no longer of much use? Are the technologies available today so powerful that the advantages of teamwork now can be captured in new and better ways, without all the thought and effort required to create and support actual work teams? Consider, for example, the task of finding a solution to a challenging technical problem. Traditionally, one might have given the problem to a team of technical experts. Now, however, you can in effect put the problem out to bid, using crowdsourcing to engage the talents and efforts of an entire population, experts and non-experts alike. In many cases, someone in the “crowd” will come up with a solution that is better than the answer a team of in-house experts would have produced—and will do so more quickly and less expensively.12
Or consider the task of generating an estimate about some matter for which available data are sketchy and unreliable—for example, a country’s likely fossil fuel consumption in the year 2020, or the probability that border tensions between two nations will erupt into warfare. You could give the task to a team of experienced analysts who have deep subject matter knowledge. Alternatively, you could draw upon the collective wisdom of the crowd by asking a very large number of individuals to independently provide their own estimates, and then simply average them to generate the final product.
Crowdsourcing and collective estimation are just two of the many technology-intensive alternatives to intact teams that are available these days. Such techniques are neither panaceas nor universally applicable. As will be seen in Chapter 4, they work only for certain kinds of tasks—crowdsourcing when you are reasonably sure a solution exists but you don’t know where to find it; collective estimation when lots of people have a little something to contribute but no one has very much. These kinds of tools are not appropriate for many other types of tasks, such as those that require real-time coordination among diverse experts to generate an integrated solution to a complex problem.
The challenges are to identify the right type of team for the work to be done (as will be seen next, there are many different types from which to choose) and then to structure, support, and lead that team well. When those challenges are met, a work team can obtain results that far exceed what could be achieved either by any single person working alone or by the simple average of many people’s inputs.
Assuming you decide that a piece of work should, in fact, be assigned to a team, what kind of team should it be? Your first impulse probably would be to form a group whose members interact face to face in real time. But there are other options, each of which is appropriate in some circumstances but not in others. The right choice depends upon the answers to two questions:
1. Will responsibility and accountability for the work lie primarily with the group as a whole, or with individual members?
2. Will members need to interact synchronously in real time, or can the work be accomplished by members working at their own paces and in their own places?
The answers to these two questions spawn a four-cell table, shown in Figure 2-2. As will be seen, each of the four types of teams specified in the figure is indicated for different types of intelligence work.
Teams shown in the upper left quadrant of the figure are what software engineer Frederick Brooks has termed surgical teams. He chose that term because responsibility and accountability for outcomes lie mainly with one person, the surgeon, but accomplishing the work requires coordinated interaction among all members in real time. Brooks proposed that software development teams be structured like a surgical team in which members work closely together but one individual has primary responsibility for the quality of the output.
FIGURE 2-2 Four Common Types of Teams Adapted from Hackman & Wageman (2005b).
The role of team members in surgical-type intelligence teams is to provide the lead person with all the information and assistance that they can offer. This kind of team is called for when the team task requires an extremely high level of individual insight, expertise, or creativity but is too large in scope to be handled by any one person working alone. Some analytic assessments are of this type: considerable input is required from diverse team members, but it eventually comes down to a single individual writing the draft for subsequent review by his or her teammates.
Individual members also are primarily responsible for outcomes in coacting groups (the lower left quadrant in the figure). A great deal of work in the intelligence community is performed by sets of people that may be called “teams” but that actually are coacting groups. In this type of group, individual members operate independently and in parallel on subparts of the overall task, and the collective product is constructed by aggregating and organizing their separate contributions. Managers who use this type of group often encourage members to communicate and consult with one another, which sometimes does happen. But because individuals are accountable only for their own subparts of the work there generally is relatively little work-related interaction among them.
Coacting groups cannot generate synergistic collective products because they do not have a common task. When members are colocated they sometimes can spur one another to greater effort, but the presence of coactors also can impair performance when the work requires responses that are not already well practiced,13 or when the group is so large that members are tempted to free-ride on others’ contributions.14 Moreover, Michael O’Connor and I found in a study of intelligence analysis teams (described later in this book) that coacting groups perform less well than well-designed teams whose members share responsibility and accountability for the group product. In general, coacting groups are indicated when there is minimal need for coordinated, interdependent work by group members who can, in the main, work independently.
In these teams (the upper right quadrant of the figure), members are co-located and work together interdependently in real time to generate a product, service, or decision for which they are collectively accountable. Among the many kinds of face-to-face teams found in the intelligence community are crisis action teams, which support decision makers during unfolding crises. Team members often are seated in close proximity to one another in a secure location, physically separated from everyone else. They typically arrange their work schedules so someone is available around the clock to receive and deal with information as it arrives from the field. Members understand well that they are collectively responsible and accountable for the team’s performance.
Whether dealing with a crisis or handling more routine, ongoing intelligence tasks, face-to-face teams are what people usually have in mind when they use the term work team, and the bulk of the existing research literature on team behavior and performance is about them.15 Face-to-face teams are indicated when creating a high-quality product requires coordinated contributions in real time from a diversity of members who have complementary expertise, experience, and perspectives.
These teams, which sometimes are called virtual teams or dispersed teams, are located in the lower right quadrant of the matrix. Although distributed teams are responsible and accountable for their collective products, their members are neither co-located nor required to interact in real time. Instead, team members use information and communication technologies to exchange observations, ideas, and reactions at times of their own choosing. A team charged with assessing the implications of ongoing materials movement in an overseas location whose membership includes individuals located both at headquarters and in the country of interest would fall into this quadrant.
Because members are not co-located, distributed teams can be larger, more diverse, and collectively more knowledgeable than those whose members work face to face. When they function well, such teams can bring widely dispersed information and expertise to bear on the team’s work quickly and efficiently.16 As increasing numbers of organizations have logged experience with distributed teams, however, it has become clear that they are not a panacea. Although decision-support systems can mitigate to some extent problems that arise from excessive size or diversity, distributed teamwork still tends to take more time, involve less exchange of information, make error detection and correction more difficult, and result in less participant satisfaction than is the case for face-to-face teams.17
Distributed teams are most often used when it is logistically difficult or impossible for a team to have regular face-to-face meetings. But even teams whose members are not geographically dispersed increasingly are relying on communication and information technologies for coordinating members’ work.18 Researchers are now working to identify the special conditions, beyond the mere availability of sophisticated communication technologies, that such teams need to function well. Although findings are not yet definitive, it appears that the list of critical conditions will include clarity about team boundaries (it is hard to coordinate at a distance if it is unclear who actually is on the team), a face-to-face rather than electronically mediated launch, and continuous leadership support throughout the team’s life to keep members engaged and aligned with collective purposes.19
Not included in Figure 2-2 is a special kind of team that is not in any traditional sense a bounded work team at all. Sand dune teams are dynamic social systems that have fluid rather than fixed composition and boundaries. Just as sand dunes change in number and shape as winds and tides change, teams of various sizes and kinds form and re-form within a larger organizational unit as external demands and requirements change. Sand dune teams can assume different forms for different tasks, which may make them especially well suited for intelligence work that does not lend itself to the formation of simple, stable teams.
Sand dune teams were used to good effect in a small analytic unit in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget that conducts economic analyses for senior policymakers.20 Some of the unit’s tasks required research that extended over many months; others required members to track legislation making its way through Congress in real time; and still others were one-shot analyses for clients that had to be completed in a matter of hours by teams created on the fly. Teams in the unit were continuously forming and re-forming as task requirements changed, with different individuals serving simultaneously on multiple teams that had different tasks, clients, and expected life spans.
The organizational units within which sand dune teams operate typically are small (perhaps fewer than 30 members) and have reasonably stable membership, which permits the development of unit-wide norms and routines that allow teams to form and re-form smoothly and efficiently. Dynamic teams of this type appear to have great potential not just for the intelligence community but also for other settings, such as hospital emergency rooms and crisis management centers, where people who do not work together regularly (and may not even know one another) must come together and begin work without delay. For all their potential, considerable research remains to be done to document what is needed to help such “sudden” teams get off to a fast start and proceed with their work efficiently and well.
The term team is something of a projective test, used by both scholars and practitioners to refer to a wide variety of different social forms for accomplishing collective work. With teams, it definitely is not the case that one size fits all. In thinking about how best to get a particular piece of intelligence work accomplished, then, the first question to ask is whether a team should be used at all. It should now be clear that the answer to that question is not always affirmative. Although teams do have many potential advantages, the downside of teamwork is just as real and just as prevalent—if not more so. In many circumstances, therefore, the wise (or at least prudent) course of action is to forgo the upside potential of teams in order to protect against the real damage that can be done by an ill-conceived team that goes bad.
The second question is what type of team to create. We have seen that the five common types of teams discussed—surgical, coacting, face-to-face, distributed, and sand dune—are appropriate in some task and organizational circumstances, but not in others. So when the possibility of forming a team to take on some intelligence task arises, it always is a good idea to reflect on what has been discussed in this chapter before calling some people together, dubbing them a team, and tossing them the work.