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A crisis of teamwork
From research with interprofessional healthcare teams, complexity science, project leadership, and the cognitive science of how groups make sense of difficult situations.
A crisis of teamwork is unfolding in organisations. Team members are battling expanding roles and a shrinking sense of purpose, drifting toward the conclusion that they could move faster alone. The cost is exactly the thing teams exist to provide: new perspectives, better decisions, and the capacity to navigate problems no individual could solve.
What Actually Matters argues that the deepest teamwork failures are not failures of skill but failures of modal pivoting: the capacity to move between consolidated work, where teams apply what they already know, and innovative work, where they must discover what they do not yet know together. Most teams are trained in one mode and stranded in the other when the situation changes.
Drawing on research with interprofessional healthcare teams, complexity science, project leadership, and the cognitive science of how groups make sense of difficult situations, the book shows that team intelligence is not a skill set but an ecology of practices: a balanced cultivation of trust and belonging, adaptability and diversity, motivation and empowerment, each balancing the others' biases. When teams build this ecology, they gain something more than performance: they gain the capacity to pivot between modes as the work demands, and to grow wiser with each crossing.
Mode B consolidates to the next level of Mode A. Spiral up = knowledge creation = wisdom.From the book
The book's central insight, that wisdom is what a team accumulates each time it pivots and returns, reframes leadership development away from skills training and toward the cultivation of an ecology that makes the pivot possible. It offers a practical, deeply considered map of what team intelligence requires, and how to grow it.