Working in teams, back pain, and the importance of the little things.
After four days of back pain, I decided to visit an osteopath — a physician specialising in the spine, joints and the muscles. I barely managed to crawl my way to her practice supporting myself with an umbrella. Once there, she started inquiring about everything from car accidents and stress to dental treatments and my love-life. If it wasn’t for her calm tone, reassuring smile, and her endorsement by a close friend, the questions could have seemed obtrusive. My back was killing me. Why were we investing time in such topics?
After a few more questions, she finally explained “the spine works all together. There are many parts, and a movement in one of them leads the others to change posture to compensate. The changes can be quite subtle, but they accumulate. Think of it as a large team working together”.
As an organisation and team designer, her metaphor resonated. Osteopaths are used to working with living systems. They start from a holistic perspective because they know the parts are connected.
In organisations, multiple individuals, each with their own needs and aspirations collaborate to attain a collective purpose. As difficulties arise, through growth, competition, or changes in the market, small teams adapt and often stretch to compensate for problems originating somewhere else. However, we rarely invest time to realign all the parts and tend to wait until we suffer intense pain… like in the case of my back.
When my pain was viewed holistically, I learned something surprising. A dental treatment I had over a month ago led my neck bones to adopt a strange posture, and that, plus some unusual stress and long hours working on my laptop, created the vulnerability in my lower back. When I helped a friend carry a heavy bag, my body passed the bill for the accumulated debt.
Analogously, a company I worked with recently had been forced to reposition their brand. I was brought in when the development of the new capabilities started lagging, thus endangering the company. I started by inquiring about the culture and the governance structure, not only the operating model, and was first received with puzzled looks. The looks intensified when I asked to attend some of their meetings as an observer and later questioned them about the salary structure.
A traditional consultant might have taken a less holistic approach. He or she would have looked at a spreadsheet, eliminating the “capabilities” that were no longer needed and hiring new ones. However, that would have caused animosity and fear among the employees and the loss of valuable tacit knowledge for the company. Even more dangerously, such a fragmented approach would only address the visible signs of a deeper pattern at play — why wasn’t the company able to see the need to change before and prepared for it? That would be like me doing only back stretches when a multifaceted approach was necessary to stop the pain from coming back.
In this organisation, like many others, years had gone by without the team discussing their past learnings as a team, what brought them together in the first place, or how they collectively thought the work should be done. Slowly, this had led to increasing misalignment in processes, systems, and metrics, which over time snowballed into conflicting incentives for employees and many blockers to efficiency and change. The organisation had accumulated quite a bit of structural debt, and the bill could no longer be ignored.
Once the pain has manifested, the corrective measures demand considerably more investment than keeping “a healthier lifestyle”.
In the case of my back, the osteopath recommended a posture I can adopt on a regular basis to avoid misalignments from accumulating (it is called the Alexander Posture for anyone curious) as well as frequent breaks between laptop sessions.
In the case of an organisation, “a healthier lifestyle” can be condensed into 6 functions that need reviewing on a periodic basis:
- Identity: who are we as a group and what do we value?
- Vision: how is the environment changing and what should we look like in the future to fit into that environment?
- Change: how do we go from where we are today to where we need to be tomorrow? (including “what do we measure and how to know we are on the right track?”)
- Coordination: how do we coordinate between our different teams and departments?
- Operations: what are the day to day areas of work that need doing?
- Support: how can we give our units (individuals, teams, or team of teams) the support they need to sustainably fulfil their role.
Each of these functions needs purposeful time dedicated to it. One of my clients, a remote-first team, working with multiple freelancers, organises a quarterly retreat where we facilitate different formats for Identity, Vision, and Change. For other organizations, the focus has been on developing a weekly coordination session and the supporting infrastructure, leveraging a monthly team meeting for Change, a yearly town hall for Identity and Vision and new process-design criteria to embed these in every team.
Finding an effective set-up requires some experimentation, which on itself is a good thing to remove the dust from an organization. High performance then depends on constantly learning how to do everything a bit better than we did before; while innovation depends on daring to set a bold vision and taking calculated risks in the form of further experiments.
Saying it is easy. Doing it well requires a lot more.
Here the analogy of a healthy lifestyle also comes in handy. Miraculous cures (often packaged as a shiny new software solution) rarely work. Instead, we must do the hard work of enabling our people to tackle incremental challenges. As the positive effects start to show, they motivate everyone to go further and the organisation learns to change itself.
The key is proactively investing in the six functions described above, instead of just reacting to fires. Like the Osteopath, as long as we do the hard work to understand the underlying patterns and build good habits, our teams won’t end up reduced to crawling, and we can soon run and jump, or in my case, go back to climbing.
