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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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Teaming summary
Amy C. Edmondson
How To Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy
18 mins
Brief summary
Teaming by Amy C. Edmondson explores the dynamics of teamwork in high-performance environments, emphasizing the importance of learning, feedback, and innovation to cultivate a resilient and adaptive organizational culture in fast-paced industries.
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Teaming
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The new face of teamwork
Watch any great sports team and you’ll see something remarkable: players who seem to read each other’s minds, anticipating moves before they happen. Where does this kind of seamless coordination come from?
It comes from two sources. First, the thousands of hours of practice together, building trust and understanding through experience together. And second, from a stable set of rules and objectives – the same game played again and again.
But in today's fast-moving organizations we have neither of these luxuries. Instead, we have an ever-changing, dynamic set of complex problems, which requires teams coming together dynamically, again and again.
In the early days of industrial management, Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing by breaking work into simple, repeatable tasks. Their approach worked brilliantly for making Model T’s, but it created deeply rooted habits that now hold organizations back. For example, many organizations still treat failure as mistakes to be avoided rather than opportunities for learning. They track individual performance meticulously while neglecting to measure team collaboration. And they reward people for following procedures rather than for improving them. These habits aren’t just outdated – they actively hinder experimentation and collective learning.
What makes these shifts even more important is the complexity of modern knowledge. Take medicine. In the 1960s, a doctor could stay up-to-date by following a few key journals. Today, medical knowledge doubles every few months, with thousands of new clinical trials published annually. No single person can keep up. So success requires not just continuous learning but collaboration across disciplines.
This new reality creates different demands at each level of work. Some tasks remain relatively routine and benefit from standardization – think basic manufacturing or transaction processing. Other tasks involve complex operations where established procedures meet unexpected challenges, like managing a hospital emergency department. Still others push into entirely new territory, requiring discovery and fundamental innovation.
Most large organizations today handle all three types of work, often simultaneously. A pharmaceutical company, for instance, needs simple efficiency in its manufacturing plants, adaptability in its clinical trials, and pure innovation in its research labs.
In this environment, the key to success isn’t working harder or being smarter but learning faster. Organizations need to build their collective capacity to experiment and continuously share knowledge. This means creating environments where people feel safe to take risks, where mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, and where collaboration across boundaries is the norm rather than the exception.
At Pixar Animation Studios, for example, artists regularly share unfinished work – rough sketches, half-formed ideas, incomplete animations. This is encouraged and even built into their creative process. The view is that early feedback, even when it means showing imperfect work, leads to better final results. This stands in stark contrast to traditional organizations where people often hide their work until it’s “perfect,” fearing criticism or negative consequences.
The challenge organizations face is changing mindsets from one of individual expertise to one of collective learning and adaptation.
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What is Teaming about?
Teaming (2012) explores why traditional team structures are no longer sufficient in today's rapidly-changing business environment. It examines how organizations must shift from static teams to dynamic collaboration, demonstrating through real-world examples how successful organizations create environments where fluid collaboration and continuous learning become the norm rather than the exception.
Who should read Teaming?
- Senior executives and organizational leaders seeking to transform their companies
- HR professionals responsible for organizational development
- Middle managers seeking to build more adaptive, collaborative teams
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