The Field Guide › Paper
Examined teams with low stability and shifting membership — groups that come together, disband, and reunite at punctuated intervals. Found two primary responses: delaying work to build relationships first, or diving immediately into joint problem-solving. Counter-intuitively, it was the latter that enhanced performance. Relationship-building was unhelpful when membership was constantly shifting. The paper has direct implications for contemporary remote and hybrid work: foundational assumptions about team stability — shared history, established norms, clear membership — may no longer hold, and the conditions enabling effective team learning need to be rethought accordingly.