Mountain Quest Institute

ICAT (the Intelligent Complex Adaptive Team)

Teams and communities, units for managing relationships, are a central and fundamental element of organizational design. They have the ability to integrate and enhance cross-functional knowledge and cross-organizational perspectives to provide faster and more effective decision-making, problem-solving, and implementation. The use of teams and communities in organizations can be likened to the industrial revolution, when the assembly line replaced the craft shops where craftsmen individually made the whole product. The assembly line sped up production by moving the products around and having different elements of the products added by different individuals in order to achieve the whole. These individuals, then, became highly efficient in a small part of the process. On the negative side, this process reduced the amount of learning each individual needed, limiting their view and ability, and removing ownership of the whole product.

Today, where we have achieved a high degree of specialization in our career fields, teams and communities move information around much like the assembly line, with individuals adding their experience and perspective. The difference is that teams and communities provide a way to integrate individual pockets of knowledge. As information flows among members of a team or community, the individual has not lost it. Rather, an individual's knowledge is increased as each member contributes to, and gains from, the flow of thought, spreading ownership among all members of the team and/or community.

As we become a global world and the amount of available information increases, decisions are becoming increasingly more complex while simultaneously they must be made faster to ensure sustainable competitive advantage. It is impossible for a single individual to know everything needed to make the most challenging decisions. Effective teams are able to obtain and leverage knowledge that can significantly improve their creativity, problem-solving ability and decision quality. 

The intelligent complex adaptive team is a living system highly adaptive and responsive to both external (environmental) and internal (organizational) stimuli while sustaining a cone of direction cohesive with stakeholder intent and the organizational mission.

New organic concepts for teams introduced in this work include entanglement, structural coupling, porosity, emergence, and multidimensionality. Development is underway of a team quotient as a parameter for and measure of team health.

This Web Site copyright 2005 by Alex and David Bennet. For educational and knowledge sharing purposes in the context of knowledge management, permission is given to copy and distribute materials on this web site with attribution.

Send mail to adean@mountainquestinstitute.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: 10/11/05