TBM 256: The Slide

The problems compound in a diverse, cross-functional team such as a management team. Each team member carries his or her own, predominantly linear mental models. Each person’s mental model focuses on different parts of the system. Each emphasizes different cause-effect chains. This makes it virtually impossible for a shared picture of the system as

communication among nodes is stretched across many degrees of separation—much as teams are in Weberian bureaucracies. From communication on strategic alignment to coordinating collaboration among different teams to the communalization of desired behaviors, conversations percolate step by step through an organization’s complicated structure, inevita

All too often, teams in business tend to spend their time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team’s collective strategy—maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team.

On the ground, our teams were seeing what appeared to be isolated problems in our external environment but were actually individual nodes of the same complex, interconnected problem set—that of extremist networks scattered across our various realms of operation. Much as any large organization’s frontline elements are biased to see their part of the