When a team is established, its task must be clarified and understood.
The task’s boundaries have a major impact on the task itself. In IT we would describe such a boundary as an interface. Teams have several boundaries, usually they are located between the team and its stakeholders.
Boundaries are permeable, a place of contact and exchange.
The task itself is structured by the input and output passing through these boundaries.
How clear a task can be depends on the context the team finds itself in.
A newly established team has not yet experienced contact with its different boundaries. These interfaces are neither clear nor defined. Despite the competence and knowledge, the team might have, everything is new. It is new, as the team is presenting itself as a new entity. But it is also new because the context in which the team placed itself discovers what the team represents. Other teams start to imagine what the new team will do.
It is a period full of projections, imagination, hopes, discoveries, and disappointments.
This is hoe a big difference can appear between a team that has a mostly unknown context like a startup and a team that is established in a large organization.
Large organizations have a lot of processes established that involve a variety of teams and connect them. The new team thus finds itself in a context with other teams that already produce results and information. As the new team establishes itself it learns to know the existing processes and uses this learning to determine a map of its context. As other teams realize the existence of the new team, they will start to interact with it, ask for input, or support them. The map that establishes itself for the new team immediately starts to shape the way the new team approaches its task. It provides a structure.
For some, this will seem to be rigid and hierarchic. At the same time, it is a support structure reducing the amount of energy needed to become able to start working on the task.
A startup that has an idea in mind and establishes itself will have a network with which it is loosely connected. It is a context in which hardly any processes exist. All the interfaces need to be established. In other words, relationships need to be found, trust needs to be earned, and the content of the relationship needs to be negotiated.
Some will glorify this setup as they’ll see its agility and endless possibilities. At the same time, it lacks much of the support structure of a large organization and requires investing a lot of energy to set it up.
Whatever the setup a team finds itself in, it comes with its own limitations, benefits, and risks.
Assuming a different reality than the one that exists and hoping that one doesn’t have to bear the costs of one’s choice probably is the biggest source of problems for newly established teams.
