Clever

4 BREAKING THE CODE OF CLEVER TEAMS

IN CHAPTER 3, WE LISTED lots of issues that seem to arise when you bring clever people together to work in teams, and, as we showed, there are a variety of clever teams that exhibit different kinds of problems. These issues revolve around the tension between answering, “What needs to be done?” and the critically important “How should we do it?”

Now, we’d like to be more positive and suggest some leadership actions, which can help clever teams to perform more effectively. In order to do this, we must be absolutely clear that we have adequately diagnosed the underlying problem. At its core, the issue is this: there is a fundamental contradiction between the social processes characteristic of clever teams and ...