Teaming

Teaming Plot Summary

Introduction

As the sun set over Chile's Atacama Desert in August 2010, thirty-three miners found themselves trapped 2,000 feet underground when a massive rock collapse sealed their exit. Above ground, a complex rescue operation began that would require hundreds of people spanning physical, organizational, cultural, geographic, and professional boundaries to collaborate in ways never before attempted. When the miners were successfully rescued 70 days later, the world witnessed what many had considered impossible: a dramatic rescue born not from the command of a single hero, but through the collective efforts of people teaming across disciplines to solve unprecedented problems. This extraordinary rescue exemplifies the power of teaming - a dynamic activity that brings people together to generate ideas, find answers, and solve problems. In today's knowledge economy, success increasingly depends not on individual heroics but on collaborative learning across boundaries. Traditional models of leadership where bosses dictate and employees follow simply don't work when confronting novel, complex challenges. Instead, organizations thrive when they create environments where people can speak up, ask questions, experiment, and learn together. By exploring how leaders can cultivate psychological safety, learn from failure, and bridge boundaries between groups, we discover how organizations in healthcare, manufacturing, technology, and beyond have harnessed teaming to transform uncertainty into innovation and growth.

Chapter 1: The New Way of Working: From Execution to Collaboration

Say the word "team" and most people envision a stable, bounded group - basketball players executing practiced plays or musicians following a conductor's lead. Yet in today's workplaces, the action increasingly unfolds through "teaming" - coordination and collaboration without the luxury of stable team structures or rehearsed routines. Consider what happened at one major urban hospital, where a patient needed a CT scan to diagnose a potentially life-threatening post-surgical infection. The procedure required several specialists to coordinate seamlessly: a technician to insert a nasogastric tube, another to take an X-ray confirming proper placement, a radiologist to interpret the image, a nurse to administer contrast liquid, and finally transport to the scanner itself. What should have been a two-hour procedure stretched across four days. The tube was inserted promptly, but the X-ray technician arrived 90 minutes later. Then the radiologist didn't review the image until hours afterward. By the time the contrast liquid was administered, the day had ended without the scan being performed. The patient's condition deteriorated overnight, requiring intensive care, and ultimately the entire process had to be restarted days later. What went wrong? No single person was at fault. Each specialist competently performed their individual task. The failure stemmed from poor coordination across departmental silos. Each person optimized for their own department's efficiency rather than the patient's needs. Without real-time teaming - the back-and-forth coordination required when different people contribute to a single process - the system broke down. This CT scan example highlights why teaming matters even for routine procedures. But teaming becomes even more crucial for novel challenges. When Motorola set out to create the revolutionary RAZR phone, the team had to work differently. Engineers, designers, and marketers collaborated intensively, offering ideas freely, experimenting with unconventional solutions, and candidly discussing failures. They challenged established thinking - even ignoring human factors experts who warned the phone was too wide - and integrated diverse expertise in ways that traditional siloed work would have prevented. These contrasting examples reveal a fundamental shift in how work gets accomplished in today's organizations. While the industrial era rewarded conformity and rule-following, today's knowledge economy demands collaborative problem-solving across boundaries. Success no longer comes from executing predetermined processes but from continually learning together in the face of uncertainty. As technologies evolve, customer expectations shift, and problems become more complex, the ability to team across disciplines and distances becomes not just advantageous but essential for organizations hoping to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

Chapter 2: Psychological Safety: The Foundation of Effective Teaming

On January 16, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia launched successfully from Kennedy Space Center. The next day, engineer Rodney Rocha reviewed launch footage and became deeply concerned about a chunk of insulating foam that had struck the shuttle's left wing. Hoping to obtain satellite images to assess potential damage, Rocha sent an urgent email to his superior. When his request seemed unlikely to be honored, he drafted another message stating, "Remember the NASA safety poster everywhere around, stating, 'If it's not safe, say so?' Yes, it's that serious." Yet Rocha never sent this message to Mission Management. Later, at a crucial meeting eight days into the flight, he remained silent despite his growing anxiety. When asked afterward why he didn't speak up, Rocha gestured with his hand above his head and said, "I just couldn't do it. I'm too low down... and she [the Mission Management Team Leader] is way up here." Just eight days after this missed opportunity, Columbia disintegrated upon reentry, killing all seven astronauts. This tragedy exemplifies how interpersonal fear can thwart collaboration in even the most sophisticated organizations. Whether it's a nurse hesitating to call a sleeping doctor about a questionable medication dosage or an executive withholding concerns about a risky acquisition, the reluctance to voice thoughts that might threaten one's image is remarkably common in workplaces. Most people feel compelled to manage what psychologist Amy Edmondson calls "interpersonal risk" - the risk that others will think less of them for speaking up, admitting mistakes, or asking questions. What's the solution? Creating what Edmondson calls "psychological safety" - a climate where people feel free to express relevant thoughts and feelings without fear of being penalized. In psychologically safe environments, people believe that if they make a mistake, others won't think less of them. They trust that asking questions or seeking help won't lead to rejection or humiliation. This doesn't mean a cozy environment without pressure or problems - quite the opposite. Psychological safety enables the productive conflict and candid feedback essential for innovation and high performance. Research shows that psychological safety provides seven key benefits: it encourages speaking up, enables clarity of thought, supports productive conflict, mitigates failure, promotes innovation, helps achieve challenging goals, and increases accountability. Far from creating a permissive atmosphere, psychological safety enables people to take the interpersonal risks necessary to meet high standards. Organizations with both high psychological safety and high accountability create what Edmondson calls the "learning zone" - where people can speak honestly, experiment, and achieve excellence together. Creating psychological safety requires leadership. Research demonstrates that leaders significantly influence whether team members feel safe to take risks. When leaders acknowledge their own fallibility, invite participation, highlight failures as learning opportunities, use direct language, set clear boundaries, and hold people accountable for transgressions, they foster environments where teaming can thrive. In contrast, autocratic behavior, inaccessibility, or punishment of mistakes severely inhibits the collaboration needed in today's complex work environments. By cultivating psychological safety, leaders lay the foundation for the collective learning that enables organizations to adapt and innovate in an increasingly uncertain world.

Chapter 3: Learning from Failure: Turning Setbacks into Growth

Workplace failure is never fun. From a small disappointment like a suggestion falling flat in a meeting to a large blunder like a design being rejected after months of work, failure is emotionally unpleasant and can erode confidence. But failure is inevitable when teaming, particularly for two reasons: technical challenges involving new equipment or processes, and interpersonal challenges that arise when people with different perspectives collaborate. Rather than avoiding failure at all costs, the key is keeping failures small and extracting maximum learning from them. Consider the 2010 Chilean mining rescue. The initial rescue strategy through the ventilation shaft quickly proved impossible when a secondary collapse occurred. Engineers then realized that drilling a new mine ramp wouldn't work either due to rock instability. A third option - tunneling from an adjacent mine - would take eight months, far too long. The only hope was drilling narrow holes into the earth, a strategy with daunting odds - about one in eighty chance of reaching the refuge with each attempt, assuming they even knew where the miners were trapped. As drill attempts continued to fail, one after another, engineers didn't retreat into denial or blame. Instead, they embraced an approach known as "rapid-cycle learning." They measured drilling progress every few hours rather than waiting until completion, quickly abandoning holes that deviated too much. When a Chilean geologist arrived with a new technology for measuring drilling trajectories, they discovered his measurements contradicted existing data. Instead of defending their approach, they ran tests, determined his equipment was more accurate, and put him in charge of all measurement. The team's willingness to acknowledge failures, adapt quickly, and integrate new knowledge ultimately enabled the miraculous rescue. This example illustrates a truth many organizations struggle to accept: failure provides valuable information that can lead to breakthrough success, but only if properly harnessed. Unfortunately, psychological and organizational barriers often prevent this learning. People naturally avoid admitting failure due to threats to self-esteem and image. Organizations typically reward success and penalize failure, creating powerful incentives to hide problems. Most critically, many leaders falsely equate failure with fault, failing to recognize that in complex work, most failures stem from systemic factors rather than individual negligence. The nature and frequency of failure varies across different operational contexts. In routine operations like manufacturing, small process deviations should be rare and quickly corrected. In complex operations like hospitals, system breakdowns due to unexpected interactions are inevitable and must be detected before they cascade into catastrophes. In innovation operations like pharmaceutical research, experiments that don't work as intended are not just common but essential - scientists with 70% failure rates might be on the path to Nobel Prize-worthy discoveries. Leaders can develop a learning approach to failure through three critical activities. First, detect failures by embracing messengers, gathering data, and rewarding early identification of problems. Second, analyze failures through systematic investigation that looks beyond symptoms to find root causes. Third, deliberately produce intelligent failures through thoughtful experimentation that generates valuable learning at minimal cost. IDEO's mantra - "Fail often in order to succeed sooner" - captures this mindset perfectly. By recognizing that some failures are preventable, some are complex, and some are intelligent opportunities for growth, organizations can transcend the blame game and embrace failure as a pathway to innovation. The goal isn't to celebrate failure for its own sake, but to extract its lessons with curiosity, openness, and discipline. When leaders create environments where people can speak honestly about what isn't working, organizations develop the resilience and adaptability needed to thrive amid uncertainty and change.

Chapter 4: Spanning Boundaries: Teaming Across Disciplines and Distances

The extraordinary Chilean mine rescue demonstrated the power of spanning boundaries. Above ground, engineers and geologists from multiple organizations and nations collaborated on the technical challenge of locating and extracting the miners. NASA contributed expertise on living in confined spaces and helped design the rescue capsule. Chilean officials reached out globally, as President Piñera put it, "We were humble enough to ask for help." Meanwhile, trapped miners overcame interpersonal conflicts to organize themselves for survival, establishing routines for prayer, work assignments, and maintaining health in their underground refuge. The rescue's success depended on coordinated teaming - separate groups working on different problems while sharing information across boundaries as needed. But such boundary-spanning collaboration doesn't happen naturally. People are socialized through education and training to favor their own group or discipline and to view their knowledge as particularly important. Engineers think like engineers, marketers like marketers, and doctors like doctors - each occupying different "thought worlds" with distinct vocabularies, priorities, and assumptions. When these groups must collaborate, misunderstandings abound. These boundaries come in three main forms. First, physical distance separates people across locations, buildings, or time zones. Second, status boundaries arise from hierarchy, professional standing, or demographic differences. Third, knowledge boundaries exist when people belong to different organizations or occupations, creating different taken-for-granted assumptions about "how things work." Consider what happened at a global telecommunications company where customer service representatives were unable to handle complex tax questions. Geographic regions had operated like fiefdoms for decades, sharing neither information nor resources. Commissioner Charles Rossotti transformed service by creating a virtual national call center. Representatives still worked in their original locations, but became part of one large team that could route taxpayer queries to those with relevant expertise, regardless of location. This organizational change allowed knowledge to flow across previously impenetrable regional boundaries. Status differences create particularly challenging boundaries. In healthcare, physicians have more status than nurses, who have more status than technicians. Yet these professionals must team effectively to care for patients. Research in intensive care units found that lower-status team members felt less psychologically safe to speak up, ask questions, or participate in improvement efforts. However, some units overcame these barriers, creating environments where everyone felt equally engaged regardless of role. These units showed significantly better clinical outcomes over time. Knowledge boundaries arise from specialized training and organizational membership. Product development often requires engineers, marketers, and manufacturers to integrate diverse expertise despite different terminologies and priorities. Research shows that boundary objects - tangible representations like drawings, prototypes, or mockups - can help bridge these divides by giving people something concrete to discuss, reducing the confusion of specialized jargon. Leaders can facilitate boundary spanning through three key actions. First, frame a shared superordinate goal that motivates willingness to overcome communication barriers. The Water Cube aquatics center for the Beijing Olympics united architects, engineers, and builders across four countries around the exciting goal of creating an iconic, energy-efficient building reflecting Chinese culture. Second, display genuine curiosity about what others think and value, creating an environment where exploring differences becomes acceptable. Third, establish clear process guidelines that specify when and how separate teaming activities must coordinate. As organizations face increasingly complex challenges that span traditional boundaries, the ability to team across differences becomes a crucial competitive advantage. By developing interpersonal skills for boundary spanning and creating psychologically safe environments where diverse perspectives can be shared, organizations unlock the collaborative potential needed to solve our most pressing problems - from healthcare delivery to climate change to sustainable urbanization.

Chapter 5: Leading for Learning: Cultivating Execution-as-Learning Culture

At Simmons Bedding Company, a venerable 130-year-old mattress manufacturer, Charlie Eitel arrived as CEO to find anemic financial performance, poor morale, and uninspiring quality. Rather than immediately restructuring, cutting jobs, or closing plants, Eitel invested seven million dollars over three years in team-building programs. He believed turning around the business hinged on changing the culture, getting people to see themselves as interdependent partners rather than individual contributors or competitors. Eitel channeled employees' newfound enthusiasm toward a clear goal: Zero Waste. This focus on eliminating waste in materials, time, and energy gave teams something measurable to improve. Teams developed technical and interpersonal skills in five progressive stages, from understanding basic production concepts to initiating improvements and coordinating across teams. An incentive program tied 25% of workers' weekly compensation to overall plant quality and productivity. The results were dramatic: $21 million in measurable cost reductions in the first year alone, while sales and revenue grew. This transformation exemplifies what Edmondson calls "execution-as-learning" - a way of operating that builds learning into day-to-day work. Unlike traditional "execution-as-efficiency" that focuses on adherence to fixed processes, execution-as-learning recognizes that today's best practice is tomorrow's outdated routine. It follows four essential steps: diagnose the situation and context, design an appropriate action plan, act while viewing implementation as an experiment, and reflect on outcomes to begin a new cycle. The approach varies across different operational contexts. In routine operations like mattress manufacturing, execution-as-learning drives continuous improvement through small refinements to well-understood processes. In complex operations like hospitals, it focuses on identifying vulnerabilities and solving emerging problems before they cause harm. In innovation operations like product design firm IDEO, it enables rapid experimentation to discover entirely new solutions. IDEO exemplifies execution-as-learning in innovation contexts. When the firm ventured beyond product design into innovation strategy with its "Phase Zero" initiative, early efforts stumbled. A project for Simmons identified promising opportunities for mattresses targeted at mobile young adults, but the client didn't implement the ideas. IDEO discovered that merely developing creative concepts wasn't enough - they needed to team differently with clients to help ideas navigate organizational obstacles. The firm evolved by hiring more business specialists, including clients on project teams, and focusing on implementation pathways. Within a few years, Phase Zero work generated 30% of IDEO's revenue. At Intermountain Healthcare, execution-as-learning takes a different form. Expert teams develop evidence-based protocols for treating specific conditions, built into computer systems that guide clinical decisions. But rather than forcing physicians to follow these protocols rigidly, the system invites clinical judgment. When doctors deviate from recommendations, they record what they did instead, creating a feedback loop that continuously improves the protocols. This approach combines standardization with adaptation, allowing Intermountain to deliver consistently excellent care while constantly learning. Leaders make execution-as-learning happen by diagnosing their context, creating psychological safety, embracing failure as a learning opportunity, and spanning boundaries. They shift from providing answers to setting direction, from punishing mistakes to encouraging experimentation, and from emphasizing individual performance to fostering collaboration. Most importantly, they focus attention on the work itself - how it's changing and what's needed to do it well - rather than trying to change culture directly. A learning culture emerges naturally when people experience a new way of working that respects their expertise and supports their growth.

Chapter 6: Case Studies: Leadership That Makes Teaming Happen

At Children's Hospital and Clinics in Minneapolis, Chief Operating Officer Julie Morath faced a daunting challenge: achieving 100% patient safety at a time when medical errors were rarely discussed openly. Hospital culture had long emphasized individual blame for mishaps - what insiders called the "ABC's of Medicine": Accuse, Blame, Criticize. This approach neither produced error-free care nor revealed ways to improve systems. Morath began by assembling a diverse Patient Safety Steering Committee and delivering presentations about medical errors nationwide. When many pushed back, believing errors weren't a problem at Children's, she responded with inquiry rather than argument: "Tell me, what was your own experience this week, in the units, with your patients? Was everything as safe as you would like it to have been?" This simple question transformed the dialogue, inviting caregivers to reflect on their own experiences rather than defend the status quo. To build psychological safety, Morath emphasized the systemic nature of failures: "Health care is a very complex system, and complex systems are, by their very nature, risk-prone." She introduced "blameless reporting" to allow confidential communication about errors without punishment, replacing checkbox forms with open-ended questions that prompted deeper reflection. New language substituted "study" for "investigation" and "accountable" for "blame," reinforcing the focus on learning rather than punishment. The results emerged organically from the front lines. A clinical nurse specialist created a "Safety Action Team" in her unit, which discovered a safer feeding bag design that was eventually implemented throughout the hospital. Others developed "Good Catch Logs" where nurses anonymously recorded near-misses that could have resulted in medication errors. As nurses realized their entries led to concrete changes, they became more comfortable reporting issues. Over ten years, Children's earned national recognition as a leader in patient safety - not through top-down directives but by cultivating a psychologically safe environment where everyone contributed to solving problems. This approach to leading complex operations differs markedly from what works in routine settings. While Eitel at Simmons had a blueprint for improvement and persuasively sold it throughout the organization, Morath had to invite "coinvestigators" to help discover new processes for ensuring safety. Her leadership consisted less of providing answers than asking good questions that engaged people throughout the hospital in a collaborative learning journey. In innovation contexts, leadership takes yet another form. At IDEO, founder David Kelley and CEO Tim Brown created an environment where cross-functional teams of engineers, designers, architects, and specialists could collaborate in a process they called "focused chaos." The company's walls display brainstorming rules like "Defer judgment" and "Encourage wild ideas," establishing psychological safety as an explicit value. When IDEO ventured into new territory with its Phase Zero consulting service, leaders didn't dictate solutions but allowed teams to experiment, fail, learn, and evolve their approach - exemplifying the discipline of execution-as-learning in innovation work. These case studies reveal how leadership must adapt to context. In routine operations, leaders inspire improvement along well-understood paths. In complex operations, they engage others in discovering new approaches to reduce risks. In innovation operations, they create environments where talented people can explore possibilities and learn from failures. What unites these approaches is a focus on the work itself rather than abstract culture change. By helping people experience new ways of working - more interdependent, aware of others' needs, and willing to improve - leaders create learning cultures that enable organizations to thrive amid uncertainty and change.

Summary

The knowledge economy demands a fundamental shift in how we work together. As expertise becomes increasingly specialized and problems grow more complex, the old command-and-control model that fueled industrial growth proves woefully inadequate. Today's success comes not from executing predetermined processes but from teaming - the dynamic activity of coordinating and collaborating across boundaries to solve novel problems and generate innovative solutions. Effective teaming requires creating environments where people feel psychologically safe to speak up, experiment, and learn from failures. Leaders who acknowledge their own fallibility, invite diverse perspectives, and view mistakes as learning opportunities cultivate the conditions where collaboration flourishes. Whether improving mattress manufacturing at Simmons, reducing medical errors at Children's Hospital, or designing revolutionary products at IDEO, organizations thrive when they integrate learning into everyday execution. This mindset shift - from organizing to execute to organizing to learn - transforms how work gets done, enabling companies to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances and discover breakthrough innovations. The journey toward becoming a learning organization isn't about implementing a program or changing culture in the abstract. Rather, it begins with focusing renewed attention on the work itself - how it's changing and what's needed to do it well. By engaging people in meaningful collaboration around real challenges, leaders create the experiences that naturally give rise to a learning culture. As we face increasingly complex challenges that span traditional boundaries - from healthcare delivery to climate change to sustainable development - our ability to team across differences becomes not just a competitive advantage but a necessity for solving our most pressing problems. The organizations that will truly excel tomorrow are those cultivating the environments today where people can speak honestly, learn continuously, and transform uncertainty into opportunity through the power of teaming.

About Author

Loading...

Amy C. Edmondson

Read more

Related Books by Amy C. Edmondson

Loading...

The Fearless Organization

Amy C. Edmondson

Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

★★★½☆4.0