The Science of Success: In this series, we’ll scan the latest scientific, academic, and professional literature, looking at everything from psychology to physics to bring you new insights on how to be more successful.
Ours is the Project-Based Economy: tasks once performed by steady teams of professionals working together over long periods of time are now frequently met by groups of employees assembled on short notice and entrusted with completing one project quickly before disbanding and continuing on to the next.
There are many advantages to this type of dynamic approach, from letting employees work with diverse groups of people within the company to setting a quick, energetic pace. But there are also some major setbacks, as Harvard’s Amy Edmondson and Stanford’s Melissa Valentine learned firsthand when they went to the emergency room.
The two scholars were observing a hospital in the southeastern United States whose emergency department seemed to be a touch chaotic. Each patient was seen by a nurse, who then scribbled on the patient’s chart and left it behind for whichever physician happened to be on call. The nurses had no idea which doctor might end up caring for their patients, and the doctors had no idea which nurse had already seen the sick people in their care.
Not surprisingly, this system proved utterly inefficient, as doctors and nurses didn’t really communicate clearly, and patients often ended staying in the emergency room for much longer than necessary.
To solve this problem, the hospital conducted a simple experiment. It divided its emergency department into four “pods,” independent units with all the necessary equipment to treat any kind of patient walking through the door. At the beginning of each shift, a team of three doctors and three nurses was assigned to each pod, and each team received its own dedicated patients.
With each team so clearly structured, the doctors and the nurses found it much easier to coordinate with one another; even though they were assigned to their pods for short shifts that lasted only a few hours, they grew attached to their group affiliation and began competing with other pods. Soon, the time it took before the average patient was treated and released was reduced by an astounding 40 percent.
“The big ‘aha’ was how very little structure this is,” Edmondson told Forbes. “We still have no assigned membership to specific teams over time. I think it speaks to the subtle interpersonal challenges we face trying to catch and work with relative strangers, and that even those small moments of hesitation or miscommunication matter.”
In other words, a little structure goes a very long way.
Referring to this sort of low-key structure as a team scaffold, the management scholars celebrated these intermediate fixes as effective measures that enable any team of employees undertaking any project to “take the form of an actual team process with team-level prioritizing, updating, and helping, based on new-found accountability, overlapping representations of work, and belonging—despite the lack of stable team composition.”
No matter how quick the engagement, the team’s members, if given just a touch of order mimicking the more stable and long-term structures at the workplace, will come together much more efficiently than they would have otherwise. No need to be overly engaged here: just like on a construction site, some scaffolding is all it takes to keep everything safe and clean.
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