Working in small groups and teams has been essential for humans from the beginning of our existence, and it is now more important than ever. While the need for teams has always been there, the exponential changes we live with today are having a dramatic impact. As we write this, the world has been ravaged by a global pandemic and has seen a potpourri of responses, fundamentally changing the way we work. A war is raging in Europe and climate change is intensifying, putting the current world order in question, with implications for organizational life that are hard or impossible to predict. The recent human experience is deeply disorienting, even disturbing. This context presents monumental challenges—and only teams, with their diverse talents and the ability to realize their potential, are equipped to take them on.

We wrote the first edition of X-Teams sixteen years ago. Both of us are still professors at the same institutions as we were then, Deborah at MIT and Henrik at INSEAD. However, the world was unmistakably a different place then, which makes looking back at the original edition a daunting task. Is the book still relevant? We think so. It’s even more so, in fact, considering that the forces driving the emergence of x-teams as a critical vehicle for distributed and innovative leadership have only accelerated. Furthermore, recent research has supported our original x-teams theory, while adding some exciting new twists.

We have been encouraged to continue and expand our work on x-teams by the stories of the thousands of people who have benefited from our model: x-teams bringing new public-private partnerships to countries suffering in a postpandemic world, nonprofits finding better ways to teach children, big pharma pursuing biotech innovation, hospitals improving patient care, and banks increasing diversity. It has been incredibly rewarding to watch as people “x-ify” their teams, be it by changing an ongoing team, creating a new project group, starting an x-team program, or shifting the entire organization to be nimbler and more entrepreneurial. We are also encouraged by the incredible leaders across industries who have stepped up to take on the enormous challenges of this sometimes dystopic world to make a difference. These are the people doing the work—we see your faces in everything we do—and we are happy and challenged to continue to set up the guideposts.

We have updated and shortened this edition, replacing material that we found less relevant in today’s landscape with novel examples from around the world that illustrate the new reality of x-teams working in a global and virtual context. We have added new research findings and provided a new chapter 6 to guide people on their x-team adventures. In substantially rewritten final chapters, we provide guidance on setting up an organization-wide x-team program (chapter 7) and crafting an infrastructure for innovation by creating an environment where x-teams thrive (chapter 8).

Rewriting this book, writing this new preface, and making edits large and small has been a gift for us, an opportunity to reflect on our work in the context of an exponentially changing world. The revision process helped us see that there are still many ways to update the common conceptualization of what a team is—even as people remain stuck in a more traditional view. Together with our colleague Mark Mortensen, we recently took stock of the research on teams that has been done to date.¹ We found that the developments of the last decade, notably the pandemic, sped up some trends (which we call evolutionary changes) and introduced others (revolutionary changes). Let’s take a look at them.

Evolutionary Changes

Several evolutionary changes were already underway when we wrote the original X-Teams book, but the uptake has increased exponentially. These changes are now firmly embedded in organizational life.

• From stable membership to dynamic membership. The traditional model of teams assumed a stable set of members for life, which is rarely the case anymore. In pushing people toward working remotely, the pandemic reduced the cost of switching membership, accelerating fluidity.
• From one team to multiple teams. The traditional organization assigned employees to one team at a time, but now most employees are balancing multiple memberships. The pandemic and other forces have expanded this trend as organizations seek resilience and efficiency through cross-staffing.

In addition to asking individuals to work on multiple teams, organizations increasingly ask teams to work with each other—in what are often referred to as teams of teams—to take on challenges that are too complex for one team to tackle on its own. Often these teams of teams work across organizational boundaries to bring combined resources to the challenges of the day.

• From clear boundaries to fuzzy boundaries. The traditional model assumed clear team boundaries, whereas we now see many contexts in which team membership itself is contested. Remote knowledge work and multiple commitments mean that members have differing views about who is actually on the team. Now there are people working part-time, cycling in and out of the team, or simply advising. Are these team members? This trend has undoubtedly been increasing over the past few years.
• From humans only and machines only to humans and machines. The trend toward increased reliance on technology in teams has been underway for a long time. However, this development has sped up dramatically. Witness how Zoom turned into a household name and a verb seemingly overnight; how AI prompts help us write emails and finish tasks; how robots advise us on improving team dynamics. As we rewrite this book, the jury is still out on whether other ideas from the technology world, such as decentralized autonomous organizations (or DAOs), will make their presence felt in the world of organization design.²
• From internal focus to internal and external focus. As the first edition of this book made clear, the traditional model of teams, which focuses on internal composition and dynamics, is no longer enough—an external focus is critical too. Adapting to a postpandemic world in which technology and markets change in an instant is just one way that the new environment will require sensemaking and collaboration across boundaries.

In short, the world of stable teams with fixed boundaries, an internal focus, and a clear mandate was already on its way out when the first edition of this book was published, and by now it has been all but obliterated. Our x-team model takes these trends into account with an external perspective (a view we call out before in), flexible and changing membership, fluid boundaries, and pulsed activity that enables rapid learning and response to changes in the outside world.

Revolutionary Changes

While the shifts described above are evolutionary, there have also been some significant disruptions to the ways we work and teams operate.

• Hybridity. Remote work that relies on mediating technology is not new, but what is new is that what used to be a domain of a few is now the reality of many. With a massive proportion of the workforce now doing their jobs remotely, we are faced with fundamental questions about how to structure and manage collections of teams in a way that drives integration, collaboration, and identification across those in and out of the office. How should we design tasks to best utilize the dynamism of hybridity while managing the challenges?
• Decontextualized socialization. Scholars have long argued that socialization is critical to establishing solid teams. While technology helps, many people have lost their felt experience of work. Not being physically present in an office poses new challenges for team members around joining and understanding the context in which they operate.

These disruptive changes notwithstanding, we believe that the story of the last decade is not one of moving from one state to another but rather one of a long-shifting arc of change. Indeed, we believe that externally oriented teams will remain the indispensable agent of action and change, because our challenges are more complex than ever. We remain convinced that these challenges can never be successfully taken on by one or a few leaders at the top of an organization. Instead, leadership needs to be distributed at every level, and the best vehicle for such distributed leadership is teams—at every level.

This conviction is supported by continued academic research, which we cite throughout the book. Some of this great work by others we bring in more fully. For example, Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety is a cornerstone of the robust internal context needed for effective external outreach. Mark Mortensen’s work on hybrid teams and “fuzzy” boundaries has challenged us to think more deeply about the changing context facing teams today. Relatedly, Christoph Riedl and Anita Woolley’s research on collective intelligence, nudges, and “burstiness” has focused our gaze on the technological and temporal aspects of context. Furthermore, we have benefited tremendously from many scholars who have advanced our knowledge of multiteam systems over the past decade.³

In the practitioner community, the upsurge in the agile organization of teams illustrates the value of relying on externally focused teams, which we argued for in the original edition. While agile frameworks have sometimes been limited to short-term creative teams, x-teams can bring agile frameworks to the full organization. They are part of this revolution involving sensing the environment, hearing the voice of the customer, and moving quickly. Indeed, one important reason the first edition of this book resonated widely in the practitioner community is that it introduced an effective approach for moving from agile teams working on their own to systems of agile teams working together, relying on the x-team model as the basic structure.

Our faith in the x-team model was further reinforced, with gratitude, by the decision of our publisher to republish the book with this new preface. The editors encouraged us not to make too many substantive changes to this edition. We were happy to hear that the book holds up well as it is.

Reading, writing, consulting, and teaching about x-teams over many years and with many people has been a humbling experience. The dedication, creativity, and drive that we have seen as people own the x-team model has been remarkable. We, like them, continue to experiment and learn as the conceptual frame and its applications continue to evolve in the face of uncertainty. We are proud that the core idea has stood the test of time, while expanding to take on new challenges.