I finished this book in October 2024. I recommend this book 10/10.
Why you should read this book:
This is book is about the power of great teams. The book is packed with great research and tools for creating a culture where improvement and innovation can flourish. Any manager who leads a team should read this book; you will learn something you can implement.
Get your copy here.
🚀 Three takeaways from the book
There is power in group thinking and innovation—never try to solve a hard problem by yourself.
Managers tend to favor pilots instead of learning as much as possible.
Leaders are responsible for the culture that allows good team collaboration, period.
🎨 Impressions
This book is a must-read for anyone who are trying to lead a team that drives on change and innovation.
✍️ My favorite quotes
Benenati put the need for knowledge sharing in blunt, practical terms: "In a company with 90,000 employees, solutions to the problems of one team are likely to exist elsewhere."
📝 My notes and thoughts
P23. Classic management theories, as we have seen, tended to overvalue control and treat organizations as mechanical systems. The learning imperative requires embracing the creation of adaptive capabilities as a fundamental organizational competence. It requires flexibility and judgment. It requires a managerial approach that works when organizations face uncertainty created by new technologies, shifting customer preferences, or complex systems. Success requires a shift from organizing to executing to a new way of working that supports collaboration, innovation, and organizational learning.
P24. Although teaming can help any enterprise improve, it is absolutely critical to success when any of the following conditions are present:
When the work requires people to juggle multiple objectives with minimal oversight.
When people must be able to shift from one situation to another while maintaining high levels of communication and tight coordination. this situation literally defines the practice of teaming.
When it is help to integrate perspectives from different disciplines.
When collaborating across dispersed locations.
When pre-planned coordination is impossible or unrealistic due to the changing nature of the work.
When complex information must be processed, synthesized, and put to good use quickly.
P27. Collective learning includes such activities as collecting, sharing, or analyzing information; obtaining and reflecting on feedback from customers or others; and active experimentation. Individual learning behaviors within a collective learning experience include the following:
Asking questions
Sharing information
Seeking help
Experimenting with unproven actions
Talking about mistakes
Seeking feedback
P29. Rather than receiving extensive training in existing processes to prepare for a new role, now employees instead are invited to get tight to work helping to discover new processes. Performance is measured based on how well they do that—this includes making mistakes and learning from them. When facing an uncertain path forward, trying something that fails, then figuring out what works instead is the very essence of good performance. Great performance, however, is trying something that fails, figuring out what works instead, and telling your colleagues all about it.—about both the success and the failure. This discovery process usually requires people to integrate different areas of expertise to figure out new approaches to the work. A script simply isn't possible. People must improvise, yet trying out a variety of things, and they must use this variety as a source of learning. When this kind of collaborative learning is underway, employees at the water cooler are likely to talk about work—problems they've encountered and solved and, more importantly, those they still need help with. A colleague at the cooler is a resource.
P36. Where one's work, department, or entire organization sits along the spectrum has implications for achieving a match between the nature of the work and how learning can be optimized. When process knowledge is mature and uncertainty low, as in a routine production setting like an assembly plant, learning should focus on improvement, on the search for more efficient execution of known processes. When knowledge is very limited and uncertainty high, as in a pharmaceutical research lab seeking groundbreaking molecular compounds, teaming should focus on innovation and discovery.
P50. Teaming, by its nature, is a learning process. No sequence of events will unfold precisely the same way twice when people must interact to coordinate ideas or actions, and so participants in such a process are always in a position to learn. Learning in teams involves iterative cycles of communication, decision, action, and reflection; each new cycle is informed by the results of the previous cycles, and cycles continue until the desired outcomes are achieved. As team members engage in this cycle, they surface and integrate their differential knowledge and find ways to effectively use the new collective knowledge to improve organizational routines.
P52. Behaviors Driving Teaming Success:
Speaking up: Teaming depends on honest, direct conversation between individuals, including asking questions, seeking feedback, and discussing errors.
Collaboration: Teaming requires a collaborative mindset and behaviors—both within and outside a given unit of teaming—to drive the process.
Experimentation: Teaming involves a tentative, iterative approach to action that recognizes the novelty and uncertainty inherent in every interaction between individuals.
Reflection: Teaming relies on the use of explicit observations, questions, and discussions of processes and outcome. this must happen on a consistent basis that reflects the rhythm of the work, whether that call for daily, weekly, or other project-specific timing.
P63. Research shows that hierarchy, by its very nature, dramatically reduces speaking up by those lower in the pecking order. We are hard-wired and then socialized to be acutely sensitive to power and to work to avoid being seen as deficient in any way by those in power. Most of this behavior is unconscious. As a result, in most organizations, even if leaders at the top of the hierarchy say they welcome employees' feedback, and even if people have the knowledge and training to say something of importance, they still may remain silent out of fear of negative consequences. Research does show, however, that leaders can promote speaking up through particular behaviors and actions. Most importantly, when leaders explicitly communicate that they respect employees, it makes it easier for employees to volunteer their knowledge. More specifically, by acknowledging the need for the knowledge and skills that others bring, leaders issue a credible invitation for people to speak up. Mistakes, in particular, require active encouragement if they are to be reported or discussed. In sum, speaking up is not natural in organizations, but it can and does happen, particularly when leaders actively model, invite, and reward candor and openness.
P71. How Leaders Can Cool Conflict:
Identify the Nature of Conflict: Though a difference of opinion about a product design or a work process is useful, personal friction and personality clashes are counterproductive. Understanding the differences between types of conflict allows leaders to better manage contentious exchanges.
Model Good Communication: Good communication when confronting conflict, especially heated conflict, combines thoughtful statements with thoughtful questions, so as the allow people to understand the true basis for a disagreement and to identify the rationale behind each position.
Identify Shared Goals: By identifying and also embracing shared goals, teams are able to overcome the fundamental attribution errors that erode respect and instead develop an environment of trust.
Encourage Difficult Conversations: Through good communication, as just defined, it's useful to engage in authentic, conversations that help build resilient relationships and put aside ideological and personal differences.
P75. In nearly two decades of research, I've discovered that successful teaming efforts have followed strikingly similar paths, even across very different settings. Though the organizations I've examined operate in a range of environments and include enterprises in varied locations on the Process Knowledge Spectrum, many experienced similar failures when attempting to facilitate a significant transition or implement a novel technology. To help organizational leaders, I've synthesized both the positive and negative lessons I've learned from my research into leadership actions:
Action 1: Frame the situation for learning.
Action 2: Make it psychologically safe for the team.
Action 3: Learn to learn from failure.
Action 4: Span occupational and cultural boundaries.
P86. Psychologists and behavioral scientists have established the power of a variety of alternative cognitive frames. For instance, when people frame a task as a "performance situation," they are more risk-averse and less willing to persist through obstacles than when the same task is framed as a "learning situation." Not only do people adopting a learning frame persist longer in unfamiliar, challenging tasks, but they ultimately learn more as a result. In addition, people with a performance frame engage in less experimentation and innovation and are less likely to formulate new strategies in difficult situations. Instead, they're more likely to fall back on ineffective strategies they have used previously.
P93. Critical Dimensions for Successfully Framing Implementation:
The leader's role: whether the surgeon, as the team leader, framed himself as an interdependent team leader or an individual expert.
The team's role: whether the team's role was framed as empowered partners or skilled support staff.
The project's purpose: Whether the project purpose was communicated as aspirational or defensive.
P93. The leader's role: In general, leaders are visible spokespeople. They can create a shared awareness of crucial performance gaps and are in a position to articulate the potential opportunity represented by a new direction or initiative. People pay particular attention to what leaders say and do compared to what peers and others say and do. Therefore, in engaging others in the uncertain path forward of a new initiative, leaders can deliberately use framing to help focus attention and motivate action. By deliberate use, I mean leaders should present themselves in a way that encourages teamwork and fosters mutual respect, which is crucial to helping others share information, ask questions, and experiment with the variety of new behaviors or tasks that may be involved.
P103. Learning Frame:
Leader's view of self in carrying out the project: Important and interdependent in overcoming the challenges ahead.
Leader's view of others in carrying out the project: Valued partners with essential input for overcoming the challenges ahead.
Overall view of the situation created by the project and corresponding tacit goal for the project: Challenging, full of unknowns, and an opportunity to try out new concepts to try out new concepts and techniques. The tacit goal is to learn as much as possible so as to figure out what to do next.
P108. Leadership Tactics for Reinforcing a Learning Frame:
Use verbal and visual discourse to promote the learning frame.
Reinforce this framing by explaining and modeling the desired interpersonal and collaborative behaviors.
Explain these desired behaviors in practical terms, such as "Speak up if you see something wrong" or "Just pick up the phone and ask if you have a question."
Initiate activities, for example, a kick-off meeting, a meeting to identify personal goals within the teaming or learning efforts, and training on how to efficiently deal with inter personal conflict. These can facilitate new processes or routines and help team members build confidence.
Use artifacts such as a prominent sign in the project work area to visually reinforce the learning frame.
P109. Managers who want to build a learning organization must reframe the ideal employee in their own minds—and get ready to celebrate the disruptive questioner who simply won't leave well enough alone. The organizational learning enabler is constantly questioning and improving, not accepting and using current practices.
P110. Four Tactics for Individual Reframing:
Tell yourself that the project is different from anything you've done before and presents an exciting opportunity to try out new approaches and learn from them.
See yourself as critical to a successful outcome and yet as unable to achieve success without the willing participation of others.
Tell yourself that others are vitally important to a successful outcome and may provide key knowledge or suggestions that you can't anticipate in advance.
Communicate with others exactly as you would if the above three statements were true.
P112. Lessons and Actions:
Reframing is a powerful leadership tool for shifting behaviors and enrolling people in change.
How people working in an organization, especially those in leadership positions, frame a project can determine the difference between success and failure.
In framing their role, leaders must explicitly communicate their interdependence and express both their own fallibility and the need for collaboration.
P122. When we speak up about concerns or ask questions at work, we risk being seen as ignorant. Right or wrong, people may expect us to already know the answer or understand the situation. Similarly, most people intuitively believe that speaking up about mistakes or seeking help will lead people to conclude that they're incompetent. And when someone speaks up about problems or errors, he or she also risks being seen as negative. Because most people also believe themselves to be working to the best of their abilities when others give them negative feedback, it can be seen as inaccurate, and so the messenger can be seen as a troublemaker. Finally, when speaking up about something, we might risk giving the impression of being disruptive. This is particularly true in a busy organization where it's often hard to accomplish the day's tasks within normal business hours, so interruption can seem more disruptive than helpful.
P122. Good Interruptions: Interestingly, research by the University of Minnesota professor Mary Zellmer-Bruhn shows that interruptions benefit learning. A study of 90 teams working in the pharmaceutical and medical products industry found that interruptions increased the transfer of knowledge and the acquisition of new routines. Despite such benefits of speaking up, however, organizational silence is prevalent due to the inherent risks and associated fear of speaking up. In one study, over 85 percent of the managers and staff interviewed admitted to remaining silent about a concern.
P132. Harold Benson, whose research includes helping people relieve physiological stress, finds that when we hear a fire engine's clanging bell, for example, our bodies respond as if we are experiencing a charging lion. Other research suggests that fear, on an individual or organizational level, impedes collective learning. Fear in those with subordinate roles leads to a tendency to conceal one's tentative thoughts. Not surprisingly, this desire to figuratively fade into the background hinders the process of teaming. Consider some common euphemisms for speaking up: "sticking one's neck out" and "rocking the boat." Small wonder that our overriding tendency is not to speak up.
P133. When people in power speak authoritatively and speak first, it often results in greater self-censorship by others, even if this was not the original intention. Likewise, without meaning to, managers often reduce their willingness to engage in meaningful dissent by seeking endorsement rather than an honest questioning of the views.
P139. Leadership Behaviors for Cultivating Psychological Safety:
Be accessible and approachable: Leaders encourage team members to learn together by being accessible and personally involved.
Acknowledge the limits of current knowledge: When leaders admit that they don't know something, their genuine display of humility encourages other team members to follow suit.
Be willing to display fallibility: To create psychological safety, team leaders must demonstrate a tolerance of failure by acknowledging their own fallibility.
Invite participation: When people believe their leaders value their input, they're more engaged and responsive.
Highlight failures as learning opportunity: Instead of punishing people for well-intentioned risks that backfire, leaders encourage team members to embrace error and deal with failure in a productive manner.
Use direct language: Using direct, actionable language instigates the type of straightforward, blunt discussion that enables learning.
Set boundaries: When leaders are as clear as possible about what is acceptable, people feel more psychologically safe than when boundaries are vague or unpredictable.
Hold people accountable for transgressions: When people cross boundaries, set an advance, and fail to perform up to set standards, leaders must hold them accountable in a fair and consistent way.
P140. One cardiac surgeon team leader in the previously mentioned study repeatedly told his team: "I need to hear from you because I'm likely to miss things." The repetition of the phrase was as important as its meaning. People tend not to hear or believe a message that contradicts old norms or stances when they hear it only once.
P141. Signs That a Workplace is Psychologically Safe:
People on a team say such things as:
"We all respect others."
"When something bugs me, we're able to confront each other."
"Everyone in our group takes responsibility for what we do."
"I don't have to wear a mask at work. I can be myself."
People talk about mistakes and problems, not just successes.
The workplace appears to be conducive to humor and laughter.
P160. The role failure plays in a teaming effort or within a learning organization varies in important ways across the Process Knowledge Spectrum. Although a 90 percent failure rate might be expected in a biology research lab if 90 percent of the food Taco Bell served was wrongly prepared or used spoiled ingredients. Obviously, that would be unacceptable. Likewise, if 70 percent of commercial airline flights never made it to their destination or 50 percent of new automobiles broke down as they were driven off the dealer's lot, consumers would be incensed. If even a 1 percent failure rate occurred in any of these three settings, the offending companies would soon be out of business. Clearly, the frequency and the meaning of failure shifts as we move across the Process Knowledge Spectrum.
P170. When leaders adopt an exploratory approach, they embrace ambiguity and openly acknowledge gaps in knowledge. They recognize that their current understanding may require revision, and so they actively search for evidence in support of alternative hypotheses. Rather than seeking to prove what they already believe, exploratory leadership encourages inquiry and experimentation. This deliberate response helps to accelerate learning through proactive information gathering and simple, rapid experimentation.
P175. The primary danger in failure analysis is that people tend to leap prematurely to conclusions unless the analysis emphasizes a careful consideration of all possible causes and effects. For example, a retail bank that was losing customers conducted a failure analysis to figure out why customers were switching to other banks. The data showed that most customers who closed their accounts picked "interest rates" as the reason for switching banks. However, once the bank actually compared their interest rates to others in the area, they found no significant differences. Might the customer's real reasons for leaving be something different from what they actually said? Careful interviews with the dissatisfied customers revealed a less obvious reason for customer defections: they were irritated by being aggressively solicited for a bank-provided credit card and then subsequently turned down for the credit card. The deeper failure analysis concluded that the problem lay in the bank's marketing department. Consequently, changes were made so the marketing department could do a better job of screening candidates for bank-provided credit cards.
P181. In my research, however, I've found that far too many experiments are designed to endorse or confirm for likelihood of success. Consider the way in which many pilot programs—a common example of experimentation in business—are devised and implemented. In their hunger for success, many managers in charge of piloting a new product or service typically do whatever they can to make sure it's perfect right from the beginning. Paradoxically, this tendency to make sure the pilot is widely successful can inhibit the more important success of the subsequent full-scale launch. Pilots should instead be used as tools to learn as much as possible about how a new service performs well before allowing shortcomings to be revealed by a full-scale launch. However, when managers of pilots work to make sure they succeed, they tend to create optimal conditions rather than representative or typical ones. Exhibit 5.2 offers six useful questions to help leaders design pilots that increase the probability of producing intelligent failures that generate valuable information.
P182. Designing Successful Failures:
Is the pilot program being tested under typical circumstances instead of optimal conditions?
Are the employees, customers, and resources representatives of the firm's real operation environment?
Is the goal of the pilot to learn as much as possible rather than to demonstrate to senior management the value of a new system?
Is the goal of learning as much as possible understood by everyone involved, including employees and managers?
Is it clear that compensation and performance ratings are not based on a successful outcome of the pilot?
Were explicit changes made as a result of the pilot program?
P198. Three Types of Boundaries:
Physical distance: Separation diversity includes differences in location—different time zones or the building down the street.
Status: Disparity diversity ranks people according to the social value of a particular attribute. Teaming often confronts differences in status between people who need to work together to get a job done.
Knowledge: Variety diversity describes differences in experience, knowledge, expertise, or education. When teaming, the major boundaries confronted in this category are differences in knowledge based on organization membership or expertise.
P203. Benenati put the need for knowledge sharing in blunt, practical terms: "In a company with 90,000 employees, solutions to the problems of one team are likely to exist elsewhere." To facilitate knowledge sharing and immediate collaboration among people in different locations, but with similar responsibilities, Benenati and his colleague, Frank Mougin, executive vice president of human resources, created what hey called Knowledge Marketplaces.
P213. To people cross boundaries, leaders must display and encourage genuine curiosity about what others think, worry about, and aspire to achieve. By cultivating one's own curiosity about what makes others tick, each of us can contribute to creating an environment where it's acceptable to express interest in other's thoughts and feelings, MIT professor Edgar Schein, a preeminent researcher on corporate culture, uses the term "Temporary cultural island" in his description of a process for sharing crucial professional and personal information in a multicultural work group.
P271. Despite the pedigree of the PSSC and Morath's compelling delivery, many pushed back against the idea of the initiative at first, reluctant to believe that errors were a problem at Children's. They believed the national statistics, perhaps, but they did not believe that these data applied to Children's. Tempting as it must have been for Morath to simply reiterate her message more forcefully—given that she understood that all hospitals, because of their operational complexity, were vulnerable to error—she did not try to argue the point. Instead, she thoughtfully responded to the resistance with inquiry. "Okay, this data may not be applicable here, "she concurred. Then she asked, "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 inquiry seems to have transformed the dialogue. Note its features. Her question is an invitation—one that is genuine, curious, direct, and concrete. Each caregiver is invited to consider his or her own patients and his or her own experiences in his or her own unit in the prior few days. Moreover, the question is aspirational—not, "Did you see things that were unsafe?" but rather, "Was everything as safe as you would like it to have been?" It both respects other's experience and invites aspiration. Too many would-be leaders forget about the power of inquiry and instead rely on forceful advocacy to bring others along. As Morath showed, inquiry respects and invites. As people began to discuss incidents with her and with others that they had thought were unique or idiosyncratic, they realized that most of their colleagues had experienced similar events. As Morath put it, "I found that most people had been at the center of a health care situation where something did not go well. They were quick to recognize that the hospital could be doing better."
P281. To say that people at IDEO speak up feely would be a gross understatement. Designers act on their ideas with little concern about what others, including bosses, might say. Meanwhile, bosses also are not shy about speaking their minds. Letting colleagues know that you think a design is flawed is a sign of respect. But not during brainstorming, where criticism is explicitly forbidden. These rules are not just widely understood; they are codified. Conference room walls at IDEO are stenciled with brainstorming slogans such as: "Be visual." "Defer judgment." "Encourage wild ideas." " Build on the ideas of others." " Go for quantity." " One conversation at a time." "Stay focused on the topic." It helps that IDEO's learning environment is one of self-proclaimed "Focus chaos," where taking interpersonal risks, such as offering crazy ideas, is part of the game.
P284. Execution-as-learning requires accepting that every process can be improved and some must be replaced altogether. It's not that the goal of learning is placed above the goal of meeting today's performance standards. Learning from the work is part of the work. Efficiency still matters, especially in routine operations where doing things faster and more reliably than the competition is critical. But even there, people must keep learning to achieve long-term success. And foster a culture of trust and respect where learning flourishes and pays off in even the most deadline-driven contexts.
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