A couple of interesting studies have caught my eye recently.

A study by two INSEAD and one California’s Naval Postgraduate School professors found that, in fast changing environments, the experience a team manager comes with has little or no impact on the performance of the team. In fact, the performance of a team manager will be based on his/her mental model – i.e. the basic structure he/she uses to make decisions. When faced with radical changes to the environment or the conditions of a project, experienced managers tend to use the same kind of criteria for decision making as used before, even though they recognize the need for change. This makes them as effective as naïve inexperienced managers. And these wouldn’t fare too good either.

This suggests that even when people are able to learn new information and new concepts about the market, the clients, the products and many other factors, they will still have a difficult time changing the way they make decisions.

Another study, by Harvard Business School professors, looks into the impact of the fluidity in teams. Studies suggest that there could be a negative effect of isolation and accommodation in teams that stay together too long: but this impact would only become noticeable after five years (hardly a condition that would occur in today’s typical company). On the other hand, the effect of high member-turnover and rapidly changing roles on the team’s performance appears to be painfully negative.

The Harvard study reveals that a team’s performance is independent of the accumulated experience of the professionals, but it is very much affected by the amount of time that a team works together. Team familiarity, it seems, provides the psychological security for the individuals to learn better, besides improving coordination and the willingness to engage in relationships.

These two studies combined show us the true difficulties in developing changing and learning teams in today’s environment. In one hand, a team will not be able to adapt to full potential if it cannot find a way to change how to make decisions. And it will have a hard time finding new ways to make decisions if it cannot create the team familiarity necessary to learn better.