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Collaborative Intelligence: Using Teams to Solve Hard Problems
Intelligence professionals are commonly viewed as solo operators. But these days intelligence work is mostly about collaboration. Interdisciplinary and even inter-organizational teams are necessary to solve the really hard problems intelligence professionals face. Tragically, these teams often devolve into wheel-spinning, contentious assemblies that get nothing done. Or members may disengage from a team if they find its work frustrating, trivial, or a waste of their time. Even teams with a spirit of camaraderie may take actions that are flat-out wrong.
But there is also good news. This book draws on recent research findings as well as Harvard Professor Richard Hackman’s own experience as an intelligence community researcher and advisor to show how leaders can create an environment where teamwork flourishes. Hackman identifies six enabling conditions – such as establishing clear norms of conduct and providing well-timed team coaching – that increase the likelihood that teams will be effective in any setting or type of organization.. Although written explicitly for intelligence, defense, crisis management, and law enforcement professionals it will also be valuable for improving team success in all kinds of leadership, management, service, and production teams in business, government, and nonprofit enterprises.
But there is also good news. This book draws on recent research findings as well as Harvard Professor Richard Hackman’s own experience as an intelligence community researcher and advisor to show how leaders can create an environment where teamwork flourishes. Hackman identifies six enabling conditions – such as establishing clear norms of conduct and providing well-timed team coaching – that increase the likelihood that teams will be effective in any setting or type of organization.. Although written explicitly for intelligence, defense, crisis management, and law enforcement professionals it will also be valuable for improving team success in all kinds of leadership, management, service, and production teams in business, government, and nonprofit enterprises.
237 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
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561 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 30, 2024
Big problems – the kind that societies face – often require an approach like Aesop’s fable. A bunch of blindfolded folks touch different parts of an elephant and describe them to each other. No one can make sense about what the reality is because they’re all describing different things like a tail, a trunk, a belly, or a foot. It’s only when they combine their descriptions into a consistent framework that they can gather that it’s an elephant.
To achieve this insight, though, people have to collaborate in a constructive way. When people seem to bicker or pontificate endlessly like on TV, how can we get there? Collaboration expert J. Richard Hackman shows us how to design teams to address hard problems like these by analyzing teamwork in the intelligence community (e.g., CIA, FBI, etc.).
Though this book’s specific use case consists of intelligence professionals, Hackman’s lessons of teamwork far surpass this one instance. “Intelligence professionals” could just be a stand-in name for a community of informed people. The scholar Hackman cuts to the heart of helpful collaboration through this specific field of high stakes and high impact. I don’t work in the intelligence community, but I found plenty of applications to my work life. His six core principles can be applied to almost any team situation.
His main insight is that a team’s design has an incredible influence over its outcomes. To him, leadership is not something that’s built through charisma – something we all seem to want more of – but rather through arranging circumstances to enhance that chances of a team’s success. When a team encounters problems, he suggests that we look not at individual teammates, nor at a supreme individual leader, but at a team’s design.
Anyone looking to take part in their team’s shared leadership should heed this book. It’s not just for intelligence professionals, and it’s not just for titular leaders either. It’s for people who want to usher in a more effective team that accomplishes a task together through information exchange. Although we Americans like to think of ourselves as self-reliant individuals, much of our impact comes via community efforts. Succeeding at these efforts requires effective teamwork that this book shines a light on how to create.
To achieve this insight, though, people have to collaborate in a constructive way. When people seem to bicker or pontificate endlessly like on TV, how can we get there? Collaboration expert J. Richard Hackman shows us how to design teams to address hard problems like these by analyzing teamwork in the intelligence community (e.g., CIA, FBI, etc.).
Though this book’s specific use case consists of intelligence professionals, Hackman’s lessons of teamwork far surpass this one instance. “Intelligence professionals” could just be a stand-in name for a community of informed people. The scholar Hackman cuts to the heart of helpful collaboration through this specific field of high stakes and high impact. I don’t work in the intelligence community, but I found plenty of applications to my work life. His six core principles can be applied to almost any team situation.
His main insight is that a team’s design has an incredible influence over its outcomes. To him, leadership is not something that’s built through charisma – something we all seem to want more of – but rather through arranging circumstances to enhance that chances of a team’s success. When a team encounters problems, he suggests that we look not at individual teammates, nor at a supreme individual leader, but at a team’s design.
Anyone looking to take part in their team’s shared leadership should heed this book. It’s not just for intelligence professionals, and it’s not just for titular leaders either. It’s for people who want to usher in a more effective team that accomplishes a task together through information exchange. Although we Americans like to think of ourselves as self-reliant individuals, much of our impact comes via community efforts. Succeeding at these efforts requires effective teamwork that this book shines a light on how to create.
June 11, 2021
Well this is an outstanding book on how teams work and it is a must read for team leaders. Based on author’s research - leaders cannot make great teams but can enable a context (6 enabling conditions); team harmony and good atmosphere are more an outcome than a cause; 60% of the performance of the team depends on the leaders' pre-work, 30% on the initial process of launch and 10% on the coaching during the work. Last but not least - In a group, stupidity condense (Finnish proverb). My PERSONAL recommendation for this book: If you read about 10 books a year, this book should be one of them👍
June 27, 2017
A superb book on how teams work and how to help them work really well. Highly recommended, especially to anyone in charge of any sort of team. It's based on thoughtful, high-quality empirical research, and overturns much conventional wisdom/practice. That said, it also points out the truth of conventional wisdom.
July 19, 2023
Although written for the intelligence community, as a member of the tech community I found this book to be valuable. Because it comes from a different perspective, this book helped me to understand what elements of teams are fundamental and which are incidental to how tech thinks about teams.
In the intelligence community, teams are not a given, so this book encourages leaders to think about the different types of teams and the conditions that make them more or less useful. Not all groups are teams. Depending on their purpose, groups can range from communities of interest and practice to semi-permanent work teams. Teams and individuals have different strengths. Teams have more resources and more flexibility. They have a broader knowledge base and can work on larger scale projects. However, teams also come with overhead, so they should only be created when those benefits are relevant to the project at hand.
Teams can have different structures. They can be synchronous or asynchronous. Real time interactions are valuable when high bandwidth communications are necessary such as in crisis or time sensitive situations. Async teams can pull in a larger, more diverse, more knowledgeable team (not limited to local availability) but have more coordination overhead.
The team can be responsible the the whole outcome or individual members can be responsible for just their parts. Individual ownership of outcomes can be valuable when work can be easily parallelized since it allows minimal coordination overhead and maximal velocity. However, if work needs to add up to more than the sum of its parts, then team responsibility for an outcome allows team members to use each other as a "social prosthetic system" and enhance each other's capabilities.
Team success is defined by whether or not the team's work was successful (from the point of view of the end user of the work, not the team or even its manager), whether or not the team grew as a team, and whether or not the members grew as individuals. However, these are lagging indicators, so the authors identify leading indicators that can be intentionally fostered. These include level of effort and commitment displayed by the team, whether or not the team utilizes effective performance strategies, and whether or not the team has the knowledge and skills necessary to perform the job. In each of these areas, a leader has two goals: avoid performance losses, negative outcomes that cause a team to perform worse, and realize performance gains, positive outcomes that allow a team to do even better than they would on their own.
As a side note, this book has a very strong focus on process and effectiveness, not interpersonal dynamics. The authors point to research which indicates that while effective teams are more harmonious than ineffective teams, it seems that high morale and harmony seem to be a consequence of excellent performance, not the cause. Thus, focusing on helping the team improve performance is often more effective than working on improving interpersonal dynamics effectively.
The bulk of the book goes over the six enabling condition for team performance. These are best achieved by leaders setting up the conditions that allow the team to meet these condition. Leaders should not micromanage these conditions and get in the way of team execution.
Teams need to be "real teams": intact social systems whose members work together to achieve a common purpose. They need clear boundaries, interdependent work, and moderate stability.
Teams must have a compelling purpose that is clear enough to orient the team, challenging enough to energize the team, and consequential enough to engage members' talents. A compelling purpose is specific about the ends but open-ended about the means.
A team must have the right people. It needs to be the right size: large enough to get the job done but not so large that communication overhead diminishes effectiveness. A bit too small is better than too large. It also needs the right mix of people. Each person needs to have the right task expertise. They need to be effective on working on teams. However, beyond that, teams should be as diverse as possible to ensure that the team is bringing a broad set of experiences and skills to bear.
Teams should have clear norms which are well enforced. These norms reduce the amount of time the team spends actively managing behavior. Norms should include those that promote effective performance strategies and working well together, where "well" means utilizing the breadth of skills effectively, not shallow surface harmony. Perhaps surprisingly, teams with the best people but ineffective norms seem to perform worst of all, perhaps because the team members actively get in each other's way.
Teams need to be supported by the organization. They need access to the information and material resources they need to do the work. Like with team size, once sufficient resources are available, it's better to err toward too few resources (which encourages creativity) rather than too many (which encourages complacency). They need reward systems focused on team performance, not individual performance. This includes avoiding incentives that pit people in the team against each other, like unequal distribution of a limited reward pool or recognizing individuals for work the whole team did. Teams need educational resources that make sure they have the skills to do the job.
Finally, teams need effective coaching that focuses on avoiding process losses and realizing process gains. Coaching needs to be targeted to the project life cycle. Early in a project, leaders should provide motivational coaching to make sure the team is aligned on direction. Mid-way through a project, teams often naturally start to course correct, so this is when leaders can effectively provide process consultation coaching. At the end of a project, they can help teams reflect and provide educational coaching. For ongoing projects that don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end time based boundaries can provide this structure (e.g., quarterly or monthly or per sprint).
How should a leader influence the team? As a rule of thumb, they should spend 60% of their time on pre-work which helps set up teams by making choices about team purpose, composition, and process design. Even for semi-permanent work groups, leaders do this sort of pre-work on a project by project basis. 30% of their time should be spent on launching the project team. The leader needs to make sure that the purpose is clear and that the team is on its way to understanding the unique strengths of the members and setting up clear norms to use them effectively. Only 10% of their time should be spent on coaching while the team is executing, which the coaching focused on the the right type given the project life cycle.
Finally, although this book focuses on what leaders can do to create effective teams, the burden of creating effective teams does not fall exclusively on leaders. In fact, peer coaching can be even more effective than leadership actions for establishing norms, growing people, motivation, and effective working processes. A leader creates the conditions that make this possible. A well-designed organization enables peer coaching which fosters performance effectiveness.
Whatever your field, this book provides a well structured model for thinking about what makes teams effective. Some of the elements which I appreciated because they pushed back against common assumption in tech are:
- Teams or lone geniuses are not the only options; there are other ways to structure group work effectively
- The book is surprisingly blunt about saying that some people are destructive to teams and should be redirected to individual work
- Interpersonal harmony is likely an effect of high performance, not a cause
- Individually focused incentives can be actively harmful to interdependent team work
- Erring on the side of less (resources, team size) is better than erring on the size of more
This summary only begins to scratch the surface of the actionable insights this book has to offer. I recommend it!
In the intelligence community, teams are not a given, so this book encourages leaders to think about the different types of teams and the conditions that make them more or less useful. Not all groups are teams. Depending on their purpose, groups can range from communities of interest and practice to semi-permanent work teams. Teams and individuals have different strengths. Teams have more resources and more flexibility. They have a broader knowledge base and can work on larger scale projects. However, teams also come with overhead, so they should only be created when those benefits are relevant to the project at hand.
Teams can have different structures. They can be synchronous or asynchronous. Real time interactions are valuable when high bandwidth communications are necessary such as in crisis or time sensitive situations. Async teams can pull in a larger, more diverse, more knowledgeable team (not limited to local availability) but have more coordination overhead.
The team can be responsible the the whole outcome or individual members can be responsible for just their parts. Individual ownership of outcomes can be valuable when work can be easily parallelized since it allows minimal coordination overhead and maximal velocity. However, if work needs to add up to more than the sum of its parts, then team responsibility for an outcome allows team members to use each other as a "social prosthetic system" and enhance each other's capabilities.
Team success is defined by whether or not the team's work was successful (from the point of view of the end user of the work, not the team or even its manager), whether or not the team grew as a team, and whether or not the members grew as individuals. However, these are lagging indicators, so the authors identify leading indicators that can be intentionally fostered. These include level of effort and commitment displayed by the team, whether or not the team utilizes effective performance strategies, and whether or not the team has the knowledge and skills necessary to perform the job. In each of these areas, a leader has two goals: avoid performance losses, negative outcomes that cause a team to perform worse, and realize performance gains, positive outcomes that allow a team to do even better than they would on their own.
As a side note, this book has a very strong focus on process and effectiveness, not interpersonal dynamics. The authors point to research which indicates that while effective teams are more harmonious than ineffective teams, it seems that high morale and harmony seem to be a consequence of excellent performance, not the cause. Thus, focusing on helping the team improve performance is often more effective than working on improving interpersonal dynamics effectively.
The bulk of the book goes over the six enabling condition for team performance. These are best achieved by leaders setting up the conditions that allow the team to meet these condition. Leaders should not micromanage these conditions and get in the way of team execution.
Teams need to be "real teams": intact social systems whose members work together to achieve a common purpose. They need clear boundaries, interdependent work, and moderate stability.
Teams must have a compelling purpose that is clear enough to orient the team, challenging enough to energize the team, and consequential enough to engage members' talents. A compelling purpose is specific about the ends but open-ended about the means.
A team must have the right people. It needs to be the right size: large enough to get the job done but not so large that communication overhead diminishes effectiveness. A bit too small is better than too large. It also needs the right mix of people. Each person needs to have the right task expertise. They need to be effective on working on teams. However, beyond that, teams should be as diverse as possible to ensure that the team is bringing a broad set of experiences and skills to bear.
Teams should have clear norms which are well enforced. These norms reduce the amount of time the team spends actively managing behavior. Norms should include those that promote effective performance strategies and working well together, where "well" means utilizing the breadth of skills effectively, not shallow surface harmony. Perhaps surprisingly, teams with the best people but ineffective norms seem to perform worst of all, perhaps because the team members actively get in each other's way.
Teams need to be supported by the organization. They need access to the information and material resources they need to do the work. Like with team size, once sufficient resources are available, it's better to err toward too few resources (which encourages creativity) rather than too many (which encourages complacency). They need reward systems focused on team performance, not individual performance. This includes avoiding incentives that pit people in the team against each other, like unequal distribution of a limited reward pool or recognizing individuals for work the whole team did. Teams need educational resources that make sure they have the skills to do the job.
Finally, teams need effective coaching that focuses on avoiding process losses and realizing process gains. Coaching needs to be targeted to the project life cycle. Early in a project, leaders should provide motivational coaching to make sure the team is aligned on direction. Mid-way through a project, teams often naturally start to course correct, so this is when leaders can effectively provide process consultation coaching. At the end of a project, they can help teams reflect and provide educational coaching. For ongoing projects that don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end time based boundaries can provide this structure (e.g., quarterly or monthly or per sprint).
How should a leader influence the team? As a rule of thumb, they should spend 60% of their time on pre-work which helps set up teams by making choices about team purpose, composition, and process design. Even for semi-permanent work groups, leaders do this sort of pre-work on a project by project basis. 30% of their time should be spent on launching the project team. The leader needs to make sure that the purpose is clear and that the team is on its way to understanding the unique strengths of the members and setting up clear norms to use them effectively. Only 10% of their time should be spent on coaching while the team is executing, which the coaching focused on the the right type given the project life cycle.
Finally, although this book focuses on what leaders can do to create effective teams, the burden of creating effective teams does not fall exclusively on leaders. In fact, peer coaching can be even more effective than leadership actions for establishing norms, growing people, motivation, and effective working processes. A leader creates the conditions that make this possible. A well-designed organization enables peer coaching which fosters performance effectiveness.
Whatever your field, this book provides a well structured model for thinking about what makes teams effective. Some of the elements which I appreciated because they pushed back against common assumption in tech are:
- Teams or lone geniuses are not the only options; there are other ways to structure group work effectively
- The book is surprisingly blunt about saying that some people are destructive to teams and should be redirected to individual work
- Interpersonal harmony is likely an effect of high performance, not a cause
- Individually focused incentives can be actively harmful to interdependent team work
- Erring on the side of less (resources, team size) is better than erring on the size of more
This summary only begins to scratch the surface of the actionable insights this book has to offer. I recommend it!
June 14, 2017
An interesting book on how to get effective teamwork. The title has to deal with the intelligence community setting, but the research is not that different how his other articles and books on teamwork. He mentions findings from various research studies, but I would have been interested in knowing more about the methodologies to see how convincing findings are. This is written in an academic style so it is not a breezy read.
I also had some difficulty in seeing how his research findings could be implemented in an actual job setting.
I also had some difficulty in seeing how his research findings could be implemented in an actual job setting.
June 29, 2018
A little bit more than "Leading Teams", but focused on Intelligence Teams. The new insights based on research in that context reveal that:
- Leaders cannot make great teams but can enable a context (6 enabling conditions)
- Harmony is more an effect than a cause
- 60% of the performance of the team depends on the prework the leader does, 30% on the initial launch and 10% on the coaching work
- Peer coaching has great effects
- Leaders cannot make great teams but can enable a context (6 enabling conditions)
- Harmony is more an effect than a cause
- 60% of the performance of the team depends on the prework the leader does, 30% on the initial launch and 10% on the coaching work
- Peer coaching has great effects
January 10, 2019
Key message -
Each person has a unique style of thinking, questioning and approaching challenges. To work together effectively it’s essential to understand your own ways of working and those of your teammates. Exploring the diversity of your group will greatly improve its ability to communicate and collaborate.
Actionable advice -
Create a collaboration handbook for your team.
Each person has a unique style of thinking, questioning and approaching challenges. To work together effectively it’s essential to understand your own ways of working and those of your teammates. Exploring the diversity of your group will greatly improve its ability to communicate and collaborate.
Actionable advice -
Create a collaboration handbook for your team.
August 1, 2017
Hackman's framework for sorting out enabling conditions for teams are top notch. It has really been useful for me. Not much new in this book though.
September 1, 2018
How do you work?
How do your teammates work? Collaborative Intelligence reminds us that each person is unique and so are their perspectives.
How do your teammates work? Collaborative Intelligence reminds us that each person is unique and so are their perspectives.
August 21, 2024
How do you give a book negative stars
September 12, 2024
If you’ve read other books or scholarly articles from Hackman, Gersick, or Wageman you’re not going to find ,ugh new in here.
November 24, 2021
Like many people, I enjoy action movies where there are terrorists trying to wreck our world and the lone hero – or hero team – that are standing in the breach between the terrorists and our way of life. However, I’ve never really given much thought to what it would be like to be in an intelligence community. I can quickly spot the flaws in a plot line but I’ve never given much thought to what would have to happen to prevent terrorists. However, I found the view of intelligence communities, provided through Collaborative Intelligence very intriguing. I didn’t pick the book up to learn about the intelligence community – I picked the book up to learn about team dynamics – but it was interesting.
Click here to read the full review
Click here to read the full review
November 22, 2014
Followup on his book "Leading Teams". Hackman dives into what makes great teams. Interesting approach.
Read
September 1, 2018Each person has a unique style of thinking, questioning and approaching challenges. To work together effectively it’s essential to understand your own ways of working and those of your teammates. Exploring the diversity of your group will greatly improve its ability to communicate and collaborate.
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