In a new paper, we show how one project team tackled constant change in a dynamic setting. Common goal, constant attentiveness, mutual trust, immediate face2face communication, and improvisation without cutting corners, in combination set the stage for impressive team performance.
What motivated us to do the research?
Things change and surprises happen. In the world of teams and projects, this typically translates into unmet targets, whether it be time, cost or quality. At the same time, some teams seem to be better at tackling “whatever” comes their way. How do they do it? Which are the particular (combined) team processes that arise as a type of “team collective intelligence”? And, how does all this play out when the changes and surprises are being compounded by high expectations and limited time? We were asking ourselves these global questions as we undertook a field study of a project team with a proven record of quickly tackling frequent changes in a large and highly dynamic setting.
What surprised us?
The project we followed was the largest and most compressed any of the team members had ever experienced. In fact, within its category, it was the largest in the world. Adding to this, there was next to no time buffer. Delay was a no-go. What therefore surprised us was the general ability of the project team to keep the project on course all the while a flow of changes, large and small, continued to emerge with evolving consequences for both present and future activities. We found that the team tackled most of the changes through only a few interlinked processes that underpinned quick and decentralized decision-making. We also found that that this process-based team collective intelligence constrained the negative forces of pressure caused by all the changes.
What's the main take-away?
Consequently, what is collectively intelligent behavior of a project team? Our specific attention to team processes involved a different emphasis from intra-team interaction as such to also considering the way the team interacted and enacted solutions in a real setting. Hence, our study showed that in a dynamic and pressured environment with a constantly evolving flow of new issues, a team is able to address numerous issues by the means of only a few specific and interlinked processes.
If you want to know more, click here:
Hansen, Vaagen and van Oorschot (2020): Team Collective Intelligence in Dynamically Complex Projects—A Shipbuilding Case
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/8756972820928695
The paper is open access, so there is no paywall.
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