1. TEAMWORK
ON THE FLY
Ive Van der Auweraert– Jan Bal
Leadergathering 2016

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Water Cube
• A joint effort of dozens of people:
20 disciplines, 4 countries, 4 large corporations,
dozens of contractors and consultants.
• The goal was clear:
Build an iconic structure to reflect Chinese culture,
integrate with the site, and minimize energy
consumption – on time and within budget.
• But how to do all this was less clear …
• It was an unusual endeavor, but the strategy
employed to complete it—a strategy we call
‘teaming’—epitomizes the new era of business.

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To team
or not
to team…
Stable teams of people who have learned over
time to work well together can be powerful tools.
But given the speed of change, the intensity of
market competition, and the unpredictability of
customers’ needs today, there often isn’t enough
time to build that kind of team.
Teaming is a way to gather experts in temporary
groups to solve problems they’re encountering for
the first and perhaps only time.

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The new world
needs teaming,
not teams …

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So how to
tackle the
challenges?
Hardware &
Software
To “team” well, employees and organizations
must embrace principles of project management
— such as scoping out the project, structuring the
group, and sorting tasks by level of
interdependence— and of team leadership, such
as emphasizing purpose, building psychological
safety, and embracing failure and conflict.
This is the hardware and the software of teaming.

7. Teaming Hardware
Scoping – Structuring - Sorting

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SCOPING

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STRUCTURING (scaffolding)

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SORTING (prioritizing)

11. Teaming Software
Team leadership – emphasizing purpose – building
psychological safety – embracing failure and
concflict

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Emphasizing
purpose
Purpose is fundamentally about shared values;
it answers the question why we (this company, this
project) exist,
which can galvanize even the most diverse,
amorphous team.

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Building
psychological
safety

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Building
psychological
safety
In fast-paced, cross-disciplinary, cross-border
teaming situations, it’s not necessarily easy for
people to rapidly share relevant information about
their ideas and expertise.
Some people worry about what others will think of
them.
Some fear that they will be less valuable if they
give away what they know. Others are reluctant to
show off.
Even receiving knowledge can be difficult if it feels
like an admission of weakness.

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Embrace
failure

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Embrace
failure
Teaming necessarily leads to failures, even on the way
to extraordinary successes. These failures provide
essential information that guides the next steps,
creating an imperative to learn from them.

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Put conflict to
work

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Put conflict to
work
To move forward, all parties must be pushed to
consider the degree to which their positions
reflect not just facts but also personal values and
biases, to explain how they have arrived at their
views, and to express interest in one another’s
analytic journeys. In this way, people can put
conflict to good use.

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Behaviors for
successful
teaming

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Take time to
reflect on the
software and
hardware of
your team.
Did we speak up? Did we invite
people to speak up?
Did we take time to reflect?
Was there room for experiment?
Did people actually experiment?
Did you learn from these
experiments?
Did we intently listen to each
other?
Were we integrating ideas and
approaches?

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Want to
know more?
jan@beanmachine.be
ive@beanmachine.be