Working in small groups and teams has been essential for humans from the beginning of our existence, and it is now more important than ever. While the need for teams has always been there, the exponential changes we live with today are having a dramatic impact. As we write this, the world has been ravaged by a global pandemic and has seen a potpourri of responses, fundamentally changing the way we work. A war is raging in Europe and climate change is intensifying, putting the current world order in question, with implications for organizational life that are hard or impossible to predict. The recent human experience is deeply disorienting, even disturbing. This context presents monumental challenges—and only teams, with their diverse talents and the ability to realize their potential, are equipped to take them on.
We wrote the first edition of X-Teams sixteen years ago. Both of us are still professors at the same institutions as we were then, Deborah at MIT and Henrik at INSEAD. However, the world was unmistakably a different place then, which makes looking back at the original edition a daunting task. Is the book still relevant? We think so. It’s even more so, in fact, considering that the forces driving the emergence of x-teams as a critical vehicle for distributed and innovative leadership have only accelerated. Furthermore, recent research has supported our original x-teams theory, while adding some exciting new twists.
We have been encouraged to continue and expand our work on x-teams by the stories of the thousands of people who have benefited from our model: x-teams bringing new public-private partnerships to countries suffering in a postpandemic world, nonprofits finding better ways to teach children, big pharma pursuing biotech innovation, hospitals improving patient care, and banks increasing diversity. It has been incredibly rewarding to watch as people “x-ify” their teams, be it by changing an ongoing team, creating a new project group, starting an x-team program, or shifting the entire organization to be nimbler and more entrepreneurial. We are also encouraged by the incredible leaders across industries who have stepped up to take on the enormous challenges of this sometimes dystopic world to make a difference. These are the people doing the work—we see your faces in everything we do—and we are happy and challenged to continue to set up the guideposts.
We have updated and shortened this edition, replacing material that we found less relevant in today’s landscape with novel examples from around the world that illustrate the new reality of x-teams working in a global and virtual context. We have added new research findings and provided a new chapter 6 to guide people on their x-team adventures. In substantially rewritten final chapters, we provide guidance on setting up an organization-wide x-team program (chapter 7) and crafting an infrastructure for innovation by creating an environment where x-teams thrive (chapter 8).
Rewriting this book, writing this new preface, and making edits large and small has been a gift for us, an opportunity to reflect on our work in the context of an exponentially changing world. The revision process helped us see that there are still many ways to update the common conceptualization of what a team is—even as people remain stuck in a more traditional view. Together with our colleague Mark Mortensen, we recently took stock of the research on teams that has been done to date.1 We found that the developments of the last decade, notably the pandemic, sped up some trends (which we call evolutionary changes) and introduced others (revolutionary changes). Let’s take a look at them.
Evolutionary Changes
Several evolutionary changes were already underway when we wrote the original X-Teams book, but the uptake has increased exponentially. These changes are now firmly embedded in organizational life.
In addition to asking individuals to work on multiple teams, organizations increasingly ask teams to work with each other—in what are often referred to as teams of teams—to take on challenges that are too complex for one team to tackle on its own. Often these teams of teams work across organizational boundaries to bring combined resources to the challenges of the day.
In short, the world of stable teams with fixed boundaries, an internal focus, and a clear mandate was already on its way out when the first edition of this book was published, and by now it has been all but obliterated. Our x-team model takes these trends into account with an external perspective (a view we call out before in), flexible and changing membership, fluid boundaries, and pulsed activity that enables rapid learning and response to changes in the outside world.
Revolutionary Changes
While the shifts described above are evolutionary, there have also been some significant disruptions to the ways we work and teams operate.
These disruptive changes notwithstanding, we believe that the story of the last decade is not one of moving from one state to another but rather one of a long-shifting arc of change. Indeed, we believe that externally oriented teams will remain the indispensable agent of action and change, because our challenges are more complex than ever. We remain convinced that these challenges can never be successfully taken on by one or a few leaders at the top of an organization. Instead, leadership needs to be distributed at every level, and the best vehicle for such distributed leadership is teams—at every level.
This conviction is supported by continued academic research, which we cite throughout the book. Some of this great work by others we bring in more fully. For example, Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety is a cornerstone of the robust internal context needed for effective external outreach. Mark Mortensen’s work on hybrid teams and “fuzzy” boundaries has challenged us to think more deeply about the changing context facing teams today. Relatedly, Christoph Riedl and Anita Woolley’s research on collective intelligence, nudges, and “burstiness” has focused our gaze on the technological and temporal aspects of context. Furthermore, we have benefited tremendously from many scholars who have advanced our knowledge of multiteam systems over the past decade.3
In the practitioner community, the upsurge in the agile organization of teams illustrates the value of relying on externally focused teams, which we argued for in the original edition. While agile frameworks have sometimes been limited to short-term creative teams, x-teams can bring agile frameworks to the full organization. They are part of this revolution involving sensing the environment, hearing the voice of the customer, and moving quickly. Indeed, one important reason the first edition of this book resonated widely in the practitioner community is that it introduced an effective approach for moving from agile teams working on their own to systems of agile teams working together, relying on the x-team model as the basic structure.
Our faith in the x-team model was further reinforced, with gratitude, by the decision of our publisher to republish the book with this new preface. The editors encouraged us not to make too many substantive changes to this edition. We were happy to hear that the book holds up well as it is.
Reading, writing, consulting, and teaching about x-teams over many years and with many people has been a humbling experience. The dedication, creativity, and drive that we have seen as people own the x-team model has been remarkable. We, like them, continue to experiment and learn as the conceptual frame and its applications continue to evolve in the face of uncertainty. We are proud that the core idea has stood the test of time, while expanding to take on new challenges.