Self-organized criticality

How does all this relate to team flow? When teams have high levels of trust, they decide more quickly, and attempt bigger challenges. In other words, high trust means lower thresholds for action. Inevitably, however, a team that is tackling bigger challenges, will create hierarchical roles and structures based on distribution of skills that are asymmetric, and needs and wants that move out of alignment. This creates tension and conflict, and decreases trust. A useful analogy here is to think about power asymmetry as a spring. It is a spring that is being stretched between trust and action thresholds. As trust rises, action thresholds lower, and the spring stretches out. But there is a limit to how much tension the spring can hold before it springs back. The system reaches self-organized criticality at the point where the system springs back. Figure 3 illustrates these dynamics:

Figure 3 Self-organized Criticality in Team Action Potential

At the beginning of state A, team trust is on the rise, so actions thresholds start to drop. Here is where teams start to gain momentum, represented as the yellow sections in figure 3. As the power asymmetry stretches, momentum reaches a point of maximum tension. The team has organized itself into a critical state. This is the juncture where either teams enter into optimal flow states or regress through phase transition to lower action potentials. Figure 3 illustrates the phase transition from State A to State B, from gaining momentum, to a crisis of organization. Trust falls sharply, and action thresholds rise, as people find it impossible to agree on decisions or make decisions unilaterally.

What happens at this juncture depends upon how the team, coach and or manager responds. Conventionally, managers resort to sorting out the tensions by fixing functional roles and power status according to skills and merit. This is a good formula for simple or best practice situations where the operational tasks are known and repetitive, and where outcomes are fairly predictable over a longer time-frame. In this case, trust is never fully established, rather it is substituted by predictable roles and fixed power relationships, and trust networks regrow in deviant ways. Also, in this case, action thresholds never fully recover, because the roles and power structures set up complicated dependencies and decision paths that obstruct fast response times and local, agile action. Furthermore, because compensation tends to be based on these fixed roles, people who had been energized and collaborative around project outcomes, become apathetic and turn toward career-focused strategies and political tactics. IOW, managers who respond this way turn agile teams into conventional organizational departments.

Team Action Potential

The question here is how do we maintain high team action potentials and have a better chance to enter optimal flow states?

At this point I need to introduce some of the terms derived from Safi Bahcall’s research on team potential. Bahcall uses the term “E” to represent project “Equity” or the amount of “skin in the game” for the whole team. This is contrasted with the term “G” which is the amount of “Gain” an individual person can earn from a role promotion. A team will endure more local tension and stay coherent as long as project equity provides the greater incentive for doing so. On the other hand, when the gain from a promotion is the bigger incentive, people will “break rank” and advocate for their individual performance to be rewarded by a vertical move.

But of course, it is not simply just the relationship between E and G. E is more attractive when the chance of success is greater than the risk of failure. We also need to take into account the relative needs of the individuals, which will attract them to one or the other incentive. Bahcall uses a term call “position fit” which represents the balance between skills and needs. The more the skills and needs fit the project and position, the greater the fit. A perfect fit = 100% or 1. In other words, Fit = skills/needs, which is also our metric for individual power. Therefore, when teams are comprised of people all of whom have a good position fit, that means that the power asymmetry between them will naturally be low.

Finally, Bahcall’s research shows that “management span” plays an important part in team coherence. Management span is defined as the number of people (span) that report directly to the management position. If a manager supervises 4 people, the span is 4. If there are 80 people under one management role, the span is 80. Research show that the greater the span, the less promotion gain (G) matters to people. Intuitively we can see why this is so. If you are part of a small team, then each individual perceives a greater chance of success when promotional opportunities arise. Whereas if you are a member of a large group of people occupying the same level, then the manager is not only less available for you to show off your merits, but the candidate pool is also much larger. (In some ways this is counter-intuitive, because the greater the span, the fewer the levels. For example, a company of 100 people and a span of 10 will have ten managerial levels; whereas a company of 100 people with a span of 25 will only have 4. The coherence of a team also depends upon how many levels of management there are. Research also verifies that if there are too many levels, there will be too little skill asymmetry between employee and manager, and hence, the employee will tend to go over the local manager’s head, making it more likely that they will be promoted in the manger’s place. Therefore, coherence varies indirectly with the 1/ (divided) # of levels. We can simplify this because span is 1/ (divided by) # levels, so that leaves us mathematically with S (Squared). With the notion of span and levels, we can see that the amount of “stretch” the spring in our phase system will endure, is directly related to span (Squared)

Now we have all the terms for our formula. Team Action Potential is the amount of power asymmetry or “stretch in the spring in our analogy” the system will endure, which can be represented by:

This is just a shorthand that tells us, the action potential of a team (the amount of power asymmetry a team can endure, or in our analogy, how far the “spring” can stretch without regressing to a lower action state)factors directly with the amount of equity the team shares in project outcome, the right skill sets of its members and the managerial span in the organization; while the team action potential factors indirectly with gains associated with promotion, and members’ needs that are unfulfilled by the current position.

In conclusion, then, team flow is a state that emerges from a “sweet spot.” It cannot be conjured up reliably, but it can be accessed more readily by maintaining a successful program for increasing project equity, carefully selecting for and improving team skills, while resolving unfulfilled needs of team members, and at the same time, limiting the gains that are offered for promotions, as well as structuring the organization so there is greater managerial span, and fewer vertical levels in which to move.