A New Way of Working: Teaming

Teaming: How Organization Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy by Professor Amy Edmondson is a wonderful read for anyone interested in teamwork and how to effectively form teams. This book is rich with resources and based on strong academic research, mixed with a few 'Malcolm Gladwell type anecdotes'. It's one of the best lean books I've read and its not considered a 'lean book'.

The book is divided into 3 sections. The first section is Teaming, how to form teams, work as teams and learn as teams. The second section is how we can organize ourselves to team better. There are four pillars of effective teaming.

1. The leader is responsible for framing initiatives / changes for employees. Framing appears to be a determinant in success of team and performance of team.
2. Creating psychological safety is necessary to create environs where team members feel safe.
3. Failure is important ... Learning from failure isn't easy. Leaders must make this learning happen with specific actions.
4. Boundaries to teaming exist. The differences can either inhibit or enhance teamwork and learn.

Finally, the third section of the book is on teaming during execution. Execution-as-Learning vs. Execution-as-Efficiency is an important distinction in teaming. Execution-as-Learning is organizing teams to learn as you go. Execution-as-Efficiency is where leaders provide answers. Designing life-long learners into an organization requires four essential steps: diagnose, design, act, reflection. (Yes, reflection is hansei for those familiar with lean.) “At Toyota, reflection occurs in the moment while a small process problem is detected, addressed and resolved, real-time as the assembly line moves along.”

The complexity of the product / process offerings will determine how we respond. There are different analyses throughout the book which offer insights into how complexity impacts /should impact our expectations and responses. How we operate differs depending on the complexity of where we are on the knowledge spectrum. Well established processes with low uncertainty need control and measurement; while innovative, risky, unpredictable processes need discovery and experimentation. Failure tolerance is avoidable for low uncertainty process and is 'frequent and even desirable' with innovation.

Exception: This is a wonderful Lean book with one exception. The exception is the blame placed on Linda Ham for the Columbia disaster. Each time this incident was mentioned, I just cringed. Rather than looking at NASA's processes. The author appears to blame Ham. There are so many examples in the book where the author does a deep dive and looks at the process as the source of failure—not an individual. This may have been unintentional but doesn't take away from the valuable teachings of this book.