Building an Innovation Ecosystem Part 4: Cross-Functional Teaming
By Jason M. Brown and Mike Stamat
Organizations have long recognized innovation happens when employees mix proverbial chocolate with some peanut butter. Arranging people with different expertise and capabilities into a purpose-driven unit has been a method for innovative problem solving long before “task forces” and “tiger teams” were ever a thing. It seems this idea of cross-functional teaming, as we now call it, has become more common and more necessary as the Information Age matures.
Cloud computing, collaboration tools, and other technologies that facilitate teaming at scale and across distances has something to do with it. But the real imperative for cross-functional teaming today is the need for organizations to speed their ability to observe, orient, decide, and act (OODA). Speeding the OODA loop, a concept made famous by Air Force Colonel John Boyd, has become a guide to advance learning, gain competitive advantage, guard against external disruption, and foster innovative thinking.
Our organization, like many others, uses cross-functional teaming as a way to purposefully accelerate and scale innovation. In part 3 of this series, we defined innovation as Airmen at every level having the ability to lead 1) capability development, 2) organizational problem solving, or 3) policy/process change. For this post, we will focus on our lessons using cross-functional teaming to fuel our innovation ecosystem.
Cross-Functional Teaming for Capability Development
Many organizations today speed their OODA loop by organically creating products, services, and capabilities to shape their operating environment. In particular, high-performing companies that develop software debunked the old belief that speed detracts from a project’s stability, cost, or quality. As software eats the world, most organizations (including ours) realize they must understand and, to some degree, adopt the methods software companies use to team and innovate.
How developers and their customers interact to create software has become as much a movement as a method of teaming. As we’ve learned by interacting with companies in Silicon Valley, developing software requires the tight integration of several disparate concepts. These include Lean (to know what to innovate/create in the first place), user-centered design (to determine how the product should look/function), Agile product management (to know what steps to take for development), and DevOps (for continuous iteration and delivery of software). A software “product team” typically includes members educated and experienced in each of these concepts. It’s worth noting only half the team actually codes, while the other half discovers value for beneficiaries (e.g., product designer) or determines how software is delivered (e.g., product manager).
Modern software development shows a structured and disciplined method of cross-functional teaming. We can’t yet claim to do the same, but our Airmen strive to apply those methods as they create new capabilities using scripting environments embedded within existing software suites (VBA, PowerShell, and Python for example). These shadow IT operations demonstrate the art of the possible while we pursue cloud-based architectures, tools, and pipelines to scale and accelerate tech-related innovation efforts. These pipelines both depend on and enable cross-functional teaming by baking security and other compliance policies into the development effort.
While dedicated resources, infrastructure, and education is critical to creating capabilities organically, teaming is the the biggest driver of success. When investing in Airmen-led innovation efforts, we ask if the team has the right mix of expertise, experience, and determination to evolve, scale, and integrate their home-grown capability. Of course, creating capabilities is only one way cross-functional teaming contributes to innovation. How an organization teams also determines how successful it will be in solving problems to shape or respond to change.
Cross-Functional Teaming for Organizational Problem-Solving
The purpose of any organization is to create value by providing order or opportunity for others. Achieving that aim is increasingly dependent on an organization’s ability to quickly and creatively tackle the problems it faces. Cross-functional teaming promotes creativity by drawing out strengths from the experience and expertise that exists within an organization.
Two examples within our own organization show how cross-functional teams consistently tackle problems in innovative ways. The first is our Airmen Resiliency Teams, or ARTs, which are a small cadre of medical, mental health, and chaplain professionals at each of our locations. Teammates within each ART draw on each other’s expertise to see the connections between factors affecting the well-being of our Airmen. If these professionals organized functionally, they would focus on triage and stabilization. In other words, they would be reactionary. Teaming allows these professionals to view fitness and welfare holistically, enabling them to be proactive in creating programs to enhance resiliency and performance. In short, cross-functional teaming led to innovative approaches to caring for Airmen, creating a more powerful value proposition.
Another example are analysis and reporting teams we created years ago, which include intelligence experts with varying backgrounds. Intelligence organizations often organize by function — placing analysts with the same tradecraft or area of expertise in the same section. Carving out a cross-functional team of intelligence analysts was controversial at first, but the teams instantly demonstrated their value by rapidly integrating intelligence data in ways the traditional stovepiped structure could not. Lately, the teams added Airmen with cyber expertise to their ranks — essentially mixing new ingredients with the chocolate and peanut butter as it were — to discover new ways of creating value.
Ultimately, we believe diversifying teams helps overcome biases and limited perspectives about value and what we need to create it. Delivering value is ultimately an exercise in creative problem-solving, and cross-functional teams are inherently problem-focused. Tackling a set or series of problems, however, often requires a change in policy or process. Along those lines, we found cross-functional teaming can similarly lead to innovative approaches.
Cross-Functional Teaming for Policy/Process Change
We don’t often think changing policies or processes as innovation, yet adapting or creating a policy or process can be just as important to speeding an organization’s OODA loop as any game-changing breakthrough. Employees execute a process or policy as predefined work hundreds if not thousands of times a day, and any change (even if seemingly insignificant) can have profound impact. A cross-functional team can be incredibly innovative in this area if the team has the right purpose, composition, and authority to make changes quickly.
Of course, changing policy or process doesn’t always require establishing a tiger team or task force. But when compliance regimes and regulations compound over time, the arteries of an organization will inevitably harden to the point of requiring a bypass. Policies and processes also become stale or deviate from their original purpose whenever there’s a change to the environment in which we organize and operate. In either case, an organization’s OODA loop slows, making it more vulnerable to disruption. This is where a cross-functional team can create fresh start.
Designing a framework that leverages cross functional teaming is essential a adaptive policy/process change. That framework should leverage perspectives from multiple levels and functions, and should follow a structured methodology to innovate new solutions. We found a vertical team that included technicians, project managers, and operations directors can quickly identify pain points, necessary tasks, and policy/process solutions. Lately, our teams apply an I-Corps (Lean) methodology to structure their approach when innovating new policy or processes.
Of course, throwing various experts into a room and expecting magic to happen is not a recipe for success. Leaders within an organization have to set the conditions for cross-functional teaming. They must define the purpose and scope for the team, while providing a methodology to follow. Ultimately, the existence of cooperative culture — facilitated and reinforced by leadership — will determine whether a team innovates or not.
Parting Thoughts
The interdisciplinary approaches sweeping through Silicon Valley are by no means the first example of people realizing the power behind the diversity of thought. Mankind’s willingness to blend disparate concepts and ideas led to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Age. On a smaller scale, cross-functional teaming has the same paradigm-shifting effects when it comes to creating value. But it also generates the type of controversy we find in history whenever someone decides to mix chocolate and peanut butter for the first time.
People are hardwired to flock with others of the same background and mindset. This bias affects how we organize professionally. An organization’s ability to speed its OODA loop and create value in new ways requires overcoming this bias to generate new perspectives and solutions to problems. Cross-functional teaming draws outs creativity and innovation in ways that functional teaming cannot, because it is inherently focused on outcomes over outputs. We found organizations embrace cross-functional teams whenever the outcomes are clearly seen and measurable. Often, the biggest challenge is simply getting started.
Building an innovation ecosystem requires leaders to incentivize forming and entering cross-functional teams — especially those that create capability, solve problems, or set policy. These teams must also be flexible enough to change as the problem changes. Cross-functional teaming requires the right culture to thrive, and at the same time, cross-functional teaming can change an organization’s culture. Leaders ultimately have many incentives to move their organization into this virtuous cycle and to shed the functional stove pipes holding them back. Finding that teaming sweet spot can shift the focus from following processes to creating value, which, ultimately, is the key to organizational relevance and growth.
Three books have significantly influenced our thinking when it comes to cross-functional teaming: Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World: by Gen Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy by Amy Edmondson, and Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim.
The views expressed are ours alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Air Force or Department of Defense.
