One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams

Like colocation, an O&I forum needed to fill two functions: to provide a means for boundary connectors to be created from any individuals in any team and to allow an organization’s aligning narrative to be directly recommunicated by strategic leaders to an entire organization. The O&I was purpose-designed to serve these ends.

An O&I is a virtual space wherein an organization’s leadership can create, with the required regularity, conditions for the organic interaction of all of its teams, and reiterate an aligning narrative to the assembled organization.

A team of teams model creates decentralization and empowerment, but personnel in the system still need to be regularly resynchronized on key insights and strategic intent if their actions are to sit within risk thresholds. Finding this balance—between synchronization and action—will become one of two major practices to control for risk within a tea

An O&I is a virtual space wherein an organization’s leadership can create, with the required regularity, conditions for the organic interaction of all of its teams, and reiterate an aligning narrative to the assembled organization.

space. I began to understand that there were culture carriers who connected the organization and shaped our dotted-line connectivity. It was important to recognize who the influencers were in each organization, to empower them to reach across boundaries between teams, and to create an environment that would allow all members of the organization to

the balance between creating shared consciousness and opening windows of highly decentralized decision making (which Team of Teams dubbed “empowered execution”). This balance is what we’ll refer to as an organization’s operating rhythm.

While the world we lived in was full of ever-changing life-and-death issues, we committed ninety minutes every day to a conversation.

Many teams in your organization are likely frustrated with the bureaucracy while also subconsciously comfortable with their solid-line leaders filtering and contextualizing relevant information, despite the easily offered complaints. Bureaucracy can be frustrating to individuals in the system, of course, but their complaints are overlain by a sense

“If it’s broke and it works, it’s not broke.”