X-Teams

Deborah Ancona: X stands for external, so an X-team is an externally oriented group. So rather than focusing just on its internal process, X-teams reach out from day one, kind of their modus operandi is to go out beyond their boundaries in order to understand the environment, what’s going on out in their external environment, both in their organisation and beyond the organisation. They are also stepping out for political reasons to gauge who their supporters are or not and also to create synergies and coordinate with other parts of the organisation.

Female interviewer: And why did you and your co-author Henrik Bresman decide to actually write the X-teams book?

Deborah Ancona: Well, basically we decided to write it because we were kind of angry. I mean, there is a huge amount of research that suggests that teams, many teams tend to be internally focused. In fact I have led hundreds of groups and every time I ask what makes a group effective, the answer I get is all focused on internal process, so clear goals, clear roles, clear agendas, making sure the team knows how to trust one another and solve problems and work together effectively. And all that is important, but research suggests that if teams are too internally focused, they are not as productive as they could be, particularly in the world we live in today which is global and fast paced and lots of change going on. Teams need to have their fingers on the pulse of that change. So we wrote the book in order to really shift practice. Most of the bestselling textbooks on teams focus on internal process. Most of the billions of dollars that are spent on team training are spent teaching teams how to work better within their boundaries and we just think that’s wrong and, I mean it is not totally wrong, of course you have to work well within your boundaries, but you have to add the second component of external work within the team.

Female interviewer: And Deborah, who is your audience then? Who do you feel that "X- Teams" is primarily written for?

Deborah Ancona: It is primarily written for people who are on teams or who manage teams or who are interested in using X-teams as a vehicle for organisational change. So it is meant for practitioners, it is meant for people who say, you know, ‘My team is not working real well, and so what can I do?’, or ‘I want to create an organisational change in my organisation, what is a lever of change that can help me to do that?’ So it is practitioner oriented, managerial oriented. So it can be for anyone from someone who is just a member of a team to a leader of a particular team, to the leader of multiple teams.

Female interviewer: Deborah, you said earlier that many teams often have far too much of an internal focus and that can have an impact on their success. What do you think the reason is for that?

Deborah Ancona: I think it sometimes happens because there is often a lot of anxiety when a team gets started, will the team work, will we be able to meet our goals, will we be able to do something here? And so there are a lot of phenomena where groups try to build cohesions so they feel better and they get into a mindset of what is called solution mindedness, kind of let’s get moving, let’s get answers, let’s put ourselves into some kind of order so that we can move toward our goal. All of which is good but if you don’t reach out, very often you can kind of build a wall around the team by virtue of having had that internal process as your mode of operating. And then you can miss out, you can create a product that doesn’t meet competitive standards because you really didn’t understand what those competitive standards were or you miss a trend in the environment where things, for example, might be shipping out of China because prices are going up in China or there is some political upheaval on moving to another place. And so you miss key technological trends, market trends, political trends, because the team is wanting to get moving or create a cohesion together rather than figuring out ‘Well, what’s the context, and then let’s set goals and do our planning.’

Female interviewer: So a successful X-team is really about having an external focus, but there is also much more to it than that. Could you maybe talk me through the key principles that really lie behind a successful X-team?

Deborah Ancona: Absolutely. So, the first one, and that’s the one we have been talking about, is this notion of external activity from day one, so you might think about if you start a team, rather than doing a lot of team building, break up into sub groups and go, inner view, leaders and managers and the company, experts outside, analysts outside, whatever it is, but there are multiple other principles.

A key second principle is that unlike traditional teams, team composition can change a fair amount in an X-team so the idea is bring in the people you need. If you need to be creative, bring some creative focus in or people who think differently so that you can brainstorm and be effective at that when it comes to implementation or you want to be really good on execution, bring in someone who really knows how to execute. So there is the shifting of the people who are part of the team based on what the team needs to do at any particular point in time.

A third thing is that you want to have great internal process because you want to organise the team to go out but also then as you bring information and expertise into the team, you have to be able to process it and use it, share information and data with other people on the team, so you have to work those internal as well and really move back and forth between and external focus and an internal focus.

And then the fourth thing that is really critical is phases. More productive X-teams work through three phases. We call them explore, exploit and export. So the first, explore, is when you want to build in the creativity. So X-teams are very creative and innovative. And so you want an explore phase when you are going out and thinking broadly and thinking ‘What are all the possibilities, what can we do here, what’s a great product, what’s a great service, how can we change this organisation, what are other people doing?’ So just that, explore is a very creative time.

But if you are always in creative mode you never get much done so you have to stop that process and move to exploit where you think about ‘What’s the one thing we are going to do here, and can we do it really, really well, how do we organise for really implementing the one idea that we have?’ So it’s a shift in the process, it’s a shift towards instead of thinking divergently about lots of different ideas, it is converging on what’s the one thing we are going to do and how do we do it really well.

And then the third phrase, because you can always add more bells and more whistles and more thought to whatever the team is doing, the third phase is exportation. So that’s when you export whatever the team has created, whether it’s again a product or a service or a change idea, to the rest of the organisation. And many teams fail, even if they have done a great job, because they haven’t been good at getting the rest of the organisation or the marketplace excited about what they do.

I should add that in the explore phase, the first phase, you also want to build your network of support because then it is easier to export if you have pulled people in from the very beginning and got them excited. In fact we argue when we create X-teams, if you don’t have a lot of support around the organisation for what you are doing, don’t even start because you will not get very far then at the end. So you want to spend a whole lot of time and explore, exploring the idea and possibilities but also creating a network, an external network of support of people who are excited about whatever the team is doing.

Female interviewer: In the book, Deborah, you talk about X-teams that have been created to fulfil a specific objective or to achieve a project aim. Does the concept of X-teams apply only to project teams or can we use the principles and apply them to everyday established teams as well?

Deborah Ancona: Well absolutely, in fact much of the original research that we did was not done in project teams. We have lots and lots of studies that suggest that sales teams, product development teams, hardware teams, software teams, top management teams, manufacturing teams that are not project teams but ongoing teams can also really benefit from these X-team concepts.

Female interviewer: I want to ask you a little bit more about some of the research that you have done with organisations. Can you think back to where the X-teams approach was particularly successful in an organisation and explain why that was?

Deborah Ancona: We did some work a while ago with Merrill Lynch for example, where they wanted to prompt some innovation in some of their product development and so we created a set of X-teams who went out and were externally oriented and used all the three phases and went back and followed all the things that I have been talking about, and they came up with all kinds of great ideas. For example, in Japan they went into their customer voice a little bit more and found that for the Japanese customer, the desire was for tangible assets, things that people could, you know, kind of think about and see and touch and so they developed a whole series of products around gold and those really took off. So in terms of sparking creativity, that’s one arena in which X-teams can be particularly useful. Switching to more recent work that we are doing, we just launched a set of X-teams at Li & Fung, which is a Hong Kong based company, and there they’re preparing for their three year plan, so how is the organisation going to move and change over the next three years, that’s how they function there.

And we have created X-teams to help them plan and get more people engaged and involved in that three year planning process in thinking about what should we do and how should we do it and what’s important, and in that way you get what we call distributed leadership, you get more people who know about products and services in the market and what customers are thinking engaged in the strategic planning process and that’s often very useful. People feel good about having more of a voice in strategic planning and the organisation gets more input from people who are really close to daily operations involved in the strategic planning process.

Female interviewer: So from the organisations that you have gone into and you have helped them create and implement X-teams, as you did this, did you become aware of any pitfalls or common barriers that these organisations faced as they began to establish and develop their X-teams?

Deborah Ancona: There are a number of different things. One is very often they are just under resourced and not supported well enough. You really need to support X-teams and by support I mean, giving them the time that they need to do the work of the X-team, you can’t just pile on additional teams without taking something else away.

Second is you need people in management levels higher than the X-teams to listen, to provide support, to provide additional ideas and insight. If you don’t have managerial support, it is much harder for X-teams to be effective.

Another problem is that there was no guidance. You sort of say, ‘Okay, you guys are X-teams, go’ and that doesn’t help either.

You need to help teams with deliverables, with deadlines, okay, to say to them, ‘We are going to monitor and make sure you move from explore to exploit, to export’, so you need to have tools to help the X-team along.

And then lastly, it’s rewards. People put in a huge amount of time, effort and energy and they need to be rewarded and that reward can be financial or it can be recognition or it could be just basically listening to what the X-team have to say and following through on some of their core ideas.

Female interviewer: And thinking at a kind of macro strategic level Deborah, what do you think organisations really need to do to help X-teams have the best possible chance of flourishing?

Deborah Ancona: First thing is when you launch the X-teams to have top management present and enthusiastic and really show their support for the X-team process. I think you need to do training because the X-team process may be very empathetical to the way that teams have been taught to operate, so you need to have some training. It might be, what I do is get everybody in the room and start getting them to think about three core external activities. So scouting, okay, so how are you going to go scout or look outside the organisation to understand the trends in the environment or who are your allies and adversaries? Again, there is tools. Some coaching if it is at all possible to get coaching so when X-teams stumble there is someone who can help them to figure out what’s going wrong whether it be an internal problem of one person doing all the work, or an external problem, they can’t meet with the people they need to meet with, whatever it is, they have some assistance in coaching along the way. And then finally again that reward and recognition for the hard work that people put in.

Female interviewer: And Deborah, if we could speak directly to line managers who are responsible for making X-teams a success on the ground, what would be your, kind of, three top tips or top pieces of advice for line managers to really help their X-teams flourish?

Deborah Ancona: I think for line managers, the first thing would be to kind of walk the talk as it were. So, they need to be out there advertising the X-team concept. Line managers need to make the pace as it were, so that they show that the organisation is actually willing to make this cultural shift to a more external focus. So that’s number one.

Number two would be, again, giving the teams the resources, the people, the money, the time, the energy, the coaching that they need to let those teams fly, as it were.

And the last thing I think would be really not to get in the way because X-teams may come up with ideas that are different and sometimes managers say ‘Oh, this is a great idea’, and then the X-teams start coming up with some ideas and then the managers go, ‘Oh, that’s not what I was thinking’, and so they silence the teams and I think it is really important that line managers learn how to listen. It doesn’t mean that they have to go with every single idea or plan or product that an X-team comes up with, but they at least have to be able to shift their mindset and be open to new ideas in order to allow creativity and new modes of execution and what I said before, distributive leadership, bringing more people into a leadership role than has been the case before.