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Team Benefit during ‘Non-Triviality’Team Benefit during ‘Discomfort’Team Benefit during ‘Non-Locality‘Team Benefit during ’We Can’t Continue Like This’Team Benefit during ‘Not Knowing’Guiding Process Interaction PatternsTheory UWhy have Teams?

Team Benefit during ‘Non-Triviality’

During which decision-making situations can teams be of particular benefit for organisations? Decision-making theory can identify five particularly important ones. Here is one of the five:

Non-trivial situations are characterised by the fact that there are no clear causalities (when – then). As soon as a task (such as product development, marketing, logistics, production planning etc.) involves different expertise, solution logic, risk assessment, time structuring and progress indicators, an individual or a mono-functional team does not arrive at favourable decisions (even if they are prepared accordingly).

Teams that wish to master such complexity require interaction patterns which enable them to not negatively sanction great differences in thinking (How does one analyse the problem presentation?), nor the approach (What does one wish to do?), nor the emotional hotspots (What gets people worked up?), nor the attribution of significance (What do we consider important?) nor the success criteria (How do we determine success and failure?). Curiosity about difference, avoidance of over-identification with one’s own beliefs and the ability to allow questions to float, can be seen as core characteristics of teams (see Theory U) who master such decision-making processes more effectively.