Any business collaboration, process improvement initiative, change management mandate or integration project requires the incumbent to articulate a clear set of deliverables which if not met can be catastropic to project execution and surely cause mission drift! These elements form the required input and inspire the throughout for a resultant output that is coherent, on point and gives rise to structural embedness.
Years ago, I was intrigued by a book composed by Ori Brafman entitled Sway: The Irresitable Pull of Irrational Beahviour which potrays very sobering tales of overreaction, loss aversion, mind-games and how these can throw off even the most trusted professionals in the world (surgeons, pilots) from rationality under certain pressure conditions! Rememebr, even Shakespeare warned us of irrationality though King Lear whom was blinded by his faith and divided his kingdom to Gonoreil and Regal before going thorough the cathartic process after a series of self realisations and peturbations.
Nevertherless, the point is that we do need to take a pre-mortem approach in any enterprise. This is the antonym of a post-mortem, where you look at what caused a project to fail. True, you cannot factor for multi-variate change, however, you can put in place key tenets of self-organisation which if “supported by a foundation of interacting orgnsations and individuals” will enable all participants to “coevolve their capabilites and roles” (Moore, 1996). You need to take a multi stakeholder approach here to ensure that the team is able to identify key levers of change and catalysts that would definitely result in project failure!
To effectively ‘nudge’ the emergent properties of the simple rules of rationality into the right context and to induce a type of ‘structural coupling’ between the business ecosystem and the digital ecosystem; we need to understand that players in the B-Team are often the A-Team!
A simple yet poignant point of reference to delve into this further is articulated in this article wherein it is clear that the B-Team is the A-Team; ensuring the focus on automatic team swarm response to threats and opportunities is effectively met and with trust in your management information systems, enterprise resource planning tools and corporate mandates!
Quoting the article “So when the s**t hits the fan in your team:
- Are you a group of individuals or a team of partners?
- Is it everyone for themselves or a team response?
- Is the response automatic, consistent and rapid or does everyone need to think about what they are going to do?
- Does the response depend on who finds out first?
For more on the importance swarming in teams see Top teams know how to swarm.“