Radical teams

TAKE A LOOK at these comments made by members of two very different teams:

I have prepared a list of five alternative approaches. It seems very straightforward. Research each one, select the best, present our recommendations, and act. We should be able to compare the options on a spreadsheet, weigh the costs, time, and commitment, and come up with a solution.—Member of a “traditional” team

As we were gathering information, some of the things that we thought were right were just not so. We were surprised that we were learning new things. We began to challenge ourselves to think of other areas where we might be wrong. We began to look at things we've done for years and years without questioning.—Member of a “radical” team

The “traditional” project team approaches its project in a straightforward fashion, defining the project as clearly as possible at the outset, breaking it into discrete stages and steps, monitoring it to stay on course, keeping it within its predetermined scope, and evaluating it against the original criteria.

Yet, almost everybody I talk to, in just about every type of organization, tells me that very few projects are as straightforward as the one just described. Volatile business conditions are producing projects in which huge breakthroughs in business performance are demanded, not just incremental improvements. Teams are being required to face unknown, uncertain situations no one has encountered before. Here are some examples:

■ Getting products to market at four times the existing speed

■ Increasing margin contributions by 50 percent over the next three years, while continuing to increase market share

■ Tripling sales over a six-year period, without acquisitions

■ Moving to a fully integrated international company in which previously regional-based products and services are now offered uniformly across the globe

■ Forming a centralized information systems function among four highly decentralized business units

■ Bringing to market a revolutionary new product no one has dreamed of before.

Under these conditions, teams are instructed to “think out of the box,” “break the frame,” and “shift paradigms.” Our studies of over 100 teams in a wide variety of different organizations have shown that the vast majority of project teams do not produce “out of the box” solutions. They keep business as usual. Their results are often viewed as inadequate.

A new and radical approach to teams may be essential to produce breakthrough results with today's messy, complex business projects. Why use the term radical? First of all, the new approach needs to be truly revolutionary, incorporating whatever it takes to produce “out of the box” solutions. But radical is even more appropriate for another reason. Derived from the Latin term for root, the primary meaning of radical is “to get at the root or origin of things.” (For example, the radical sign √ is used in mathematics to refer to the root of a number.) And that's exactly what radical teams do. They do not accept issues on their face value. The real problem is often not what appears on the surface. Only by digging below the surface, getting to the root, do meaning and substantial solutions emerge.

Of the teams that we studied, only a small number could be designated as truly radical. Take the examples of these two teams:

■ A publishing company had been losing customers steadily for several years, supposedly because of poor customer service. The organization engaged several top consulting firms to tackle the customer service issue. However, their recommendations did not help. A “radical” project team took another look at the problem, suspecting that the customer service issue might be a symptom of a deeper, more pervasive problem. The team's discovery? The company's product line was obsolete. Now, several years later, the team is being credited with sparking a remarkable company turnaround. The company has entered several new products and introduced several new product lines. It is experiencing sales growth of 20 percent per year, with over half of sales coming from new products that did not exist a few years ago.

■ A large public utility facing deregulation knew a simple fact: reduce costs by half or go out of business. But how could this be done? Both labor and material costs were fixed at much higher levels than those of its new competitors. All obvious cost-reduction steps seemed to have been taken. After considerable struggling, a project team came to understand that they themselves, as middle managers, were the problem—that there were obvious ways to reduce costs but they would require new relationships with the workforce and new ways of managing the business. The team exceeded its cost-reduction targets. Many of its ideas are being implemented corporatewide.

What made these teams different from the other teams that we studied?

Most teams spent a great deal of effort defining the project at the beginning and stuck to this definition throughout their projects. With radical teams, the way that projects were first defined turned out to be the real problem.

Most teams mapped out their projects from beginning to end at the outset, creating detailed road maps. For radical teams, later steps become clear only after some initial steps were completed.

Most teams limited the scope of projects within predetermined boundaries. For radical teams, problems frequently exploded from narrowly defined issues to broad “systemic” issues that embraced whole organizations.

Most teams looked at unexpected events and roadblocks as impediments to be avoided and minimized whenever possible. With radical teams, unexpected events were often the impetus for breakthroughs, and accidents and disappointments often led to successes.

Getting Radical

How can you tell if the radical-team approach is needed? It all depends upon the nature of the projects that teams are tackling. Here are some signs that can tip you off that the radical-team approach is needed:

Breakthrough results are required, not just incremental improvements. Examples include developing products or processes with the potential for a 5- to 10-time increase in performance compared to anything else on the market, reducing costs by 30–50 percent, or getting products to market twice as fast as you have before. In all of these cases, the organization needs to do something it has never done before.

The project involves a new or unknown situation the organization has not encountered previously and for which no ready answer is available. Increasingly, firms are faced with new problems or projects. Sometimes, an expert has the answer. Or maybe another organization has figured out what to do. However, in more and more cases, nobody has solved this problem before.

The organization has tried without success to solve this problem in the past, maybe several times. Projects such as these are very deceiving. They appear simple and straightforward on the surface. Yet, the organization keeps going up to bat on the same problem over and over again and striking out.

The project is intertwined with a broad range of other organizational issues and factors. Under these conditions, there's a good chance that problems seen as restricted to specific functions are often mere symptoms of pervasive, organizationwide patterns and issues. In addition, operational problems related to internal processes may turn out to be strategic issues related to external business conditions.

Not all of these signs need to be present. In fact, at the beginning of projects, it is likely that the signs of uncertainty will be faint and limited. However, over the course of projects such symptoms usually become more evident as teams develop deeper understandings of their projects. After projects are complete, many teams look back and comment on how obvious it should have been that they were tackling projects with high levels of uncertainty.

Examine projects in your own organization. If one or more of these signs are present in any given project, there is a good chance that traditional approaches will not give you the results you want. However, that's not to say that you should abandon traditional project management. Teams still need to define, plan, monitor, and evaluate projects carefully. However, they need to do so with understanding that learning, discovery, and reframing will be essential for success.

So what concrete actions can teams take to incorporate the radical team approach?

Action Step 1. Approach projects as a process of learning, experimentation, and discovery.

Acknowledge uncertainty and the need to learn. Most teams begin projects with relative certainty regarding what needs to be done. In contrast, radical teams openly declare their own ignorance. They recognize that they do not have all of the answers. They understand that to complete their work successfully they will need to discover things that they do not know and that preconceived ideas and solutions are likely to be erroneous and misleading.

Separate assumptions from facts. In most teams, members often present their opinions as indisputable truths. In contrast, radical teams seek to make clear and careful distinctions between what they know (facts) and what they believe to be true (assumptions). They present their opinions as assumptions to be tested to see if they are true or not. They challenge each other to verify whether statements are facts or assumptions.

Act to learn. The heart of the team learning process is action, not in the sense of implementing any final solutions or recommendations, but as a means of propelling team learning. Throughout their projects, radical teams take actions that will generate knowledge and test assumptions, not merely complete a series of tasks.

Reduce learning cycle time. Traditional teams are concerned primarily with project cycle time, completing their projects on or before schedule. Radical teams are concerned primarily with learning cycle time—the speed at which they are able to generate new knowledge through action. The goal is to discover in a few weeks what might otherwise take months and years of painful trial-and-error learning.

Action Step 2. Question the way projects are defined and reframe projects as needed.

Be sensitive to early warning signs. Most teams tend to ignore any information that contradicts the framing assumptions about the project. Radical teams relentlessly search for the ground truth, following the facts wherever they might lead.

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Openly explore divergent views. In most teams, disagreements resemble tennis matches. Every volley is greeted by a quick response. The “ball” is hit back over the court as quickly and forcefully as possible. In radical teams, people take special care to put aside their perceptions and are genuinely open to being influenced by other points of view.

Exploit breakdowns to produce breakthroughs. Frustration, interpersonal conflict, lack of progress: most teams typically view these as signs that they are in trouble. In contrast, radical teams expect that such breakdowns occur and try to use these breakdowns to produce project breakthroughs. They recognize that the tension underlying these symptoms may provoke new insights.

Periodically stop and capture lessons learned throughout your project. Seldom do most teams ask themselves, “So, what do we know now that we did not know before? How does this new information change how we are looking at our project?” In contrast, radical teams collectively and explicitly capture what they have learned; treating lessons learned as tangible team products, just as important as the other deliverables produced.

Reframe your project to reflect deepening understandings. Most teams do not change the way their projects are originally defined, even if there is concrete evidence that much bigger issues are involved. Radical teams recognize that reframing is likely the only way to produce desired project outcomes. They are not afraid to recognize that the way their projects are defined may be the real problem.

Action Step 3. Maximize impact on the whole organization.

Uncover connections among seemingly unrelated factors. Many teams have tunnel vision. They start by defining tasks as specifically and narrowly as possible. They then limit themselves to investigating a limited band of forces and factors. Radical teams seek to uncover connections among a range of forces and factors that initially might seem unrelated, gradually increasing the scope of their work.

Reach out to influence others. Most teams are relatively passive in the stance they take toward key stakeholders: people who will need to support decisions, people who will implement final recommendations, and people who will be affected by what happens in the project. Radical teams seek to influence people who might possess control, power, or authority over their projects.

Go against the organizational grain. Most teams accept the prevailing company culture without question. In contrast, radical teams purposefully separate themselves from cultural aspects that might impede their learning. They identify elements of the culture that could hurt their project and establish explicit team norms that violate these aspects of the culture.

Take responsibility for making things happen elsewhere. After key accomplishments, most teams are shy and reluctant to suggest that their work has the potential for widespread impact in their organizations. Radical teams deliberately share what they have accomplished and transfer what they have learned to others. The motive is not self-promotion. It is to expand the impact of the projects and achieve more powerful results. They are not afraid to push their organizations to take actions they might not have taken otherwise.

OF COURSE, THE ULTIMATE question is, “Do radical teams produce better results than do traditional teams?” With the sort of problems described earlier, the answer appears to be a strong “Yes.” In almost all cases, the radical-team approach produces breakthrough results exceeding those of traditional teams and often surpassing organizational expectations. Measurable results have included dramatic sales gains, significantly reduced costs, the rapid penetration of new global markets, and the successful introduction of new technologies. In fact, in several cases, firms have credited radical teams with keeping their companies alive and viable in the midst of fast-changing business conditions.

Payoffs also exist for individual team members. Radical-team projects, by their nature, offer excellent opportunities for enhancing professional skills and knowledge, requiring individuals to develop broad, encompassing perspectives and sharpening their capabilities dealing with leading-edge business issues. In fact, many years later, individuals often point to their experiences on radical teams as defining moments in their careers, visibly demonstrating their competence in solving their firms’ toughest business problems. ■