Is the X-Team for Your Company?

X-teams are particularly valuable in today's world (many companies already deploy

X-teams without calling them that), but they are not for every situation. Their very nature as tools for responding to change makes them hard to manage. The membership of the X-team, the size of the team, the goals, and so on keep fluctuating.

In a traditional team, coordination is mostly internal to the team. It involves a clear task and the interaction of a limited number of members. In an X-team, coordination requirements are multiplied severalfold. The X-team's internal coordination involves more members, more information, and more diversity. On top of that are the external-coordination concerns. Executives considering X-teams must be sure the potential benefits are great enough for them to justify the extra challenges.

The IDEO product-development consulting firm thinks they are. IDEO, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is an example of a company that depends on the innovativeness and agility of its teams. During brainstorming, experts from multiple industries serve as outer-net members soliciting unique information. Team members go forth as "anthropologists" to observe how customers use their products and how the products might be improved. Employees at IDEO also have been busy creating a knowledge-distribution system they call Tool Box, which uses lively demonstrations to communicate learned knowledge and expertise.^[5]

We recommend using an X-team when one or more of three conditions hold true. X-teams are appropriate, first, when organizational structures are flat, spread-out systems with numerous alliances rather than multilevel, centralized hierarchies. Flat organizations force teams to become more entrepreneurial in getting resources and in seeking and maintaining buy-in from stakeholders.^[6]

Second, X-teams are advised when teams are dependent on information that is complex, externally dispersed, and rapidly changing. In such cases, it is critical to base decisions on real-time data.^[7]

Third, use X-teams when a team's task is interwoven with tasks undertaken outside the team. For example, if every new product that a team works on is part of a family of products that others are working on too, teams need to coordinate their activities with what is going on around them.^[8]

Increasingly, modern society is moving in a direction in which all three conditions are routinely true. That's why we believe that, ready or not, more organizations will have to adopt the X-team as their modus operandi.

^[5]Sutton and Hargadon 1996.

^[6]For a recent interpretation of power dynamics in organizations, see Yukl (2000).

^[7]Consistent with this logic, John Austin convincingly demonstrated how team members' knowledge of the location of distributed information has a positive impact on performance; see Austin (2000).

^[8]For an insightful account of how different tasks require different models of team management, see Eisenhardt and Tabrizi (1995).