In order to meet demands in terms of performance, change management and innovation, businesses are increasingly organized around project teams. These teams must plan to meet high demands, mainly linked to the reduction in time to market, shrinking budgets and strong constraints in terms of supply management. They suffer a high failure rate, mainly linked to coordination faults: collective skills and intelligence are difficult to build in a context in which career plans and individual expertise are emphasized, frequently to the detriment of the construction of a collective [FRO 15].

By asking the question “how can teams coordinate themselves in extreme environments?”, this book has aimed to offer businesses insight into now to improve coordination within their teams. It has, therefore, offered a thorough analysis of coordination practices developed by military personnel when they are subjected to the pressures of uncertainty, change and risks (which characterize extreme environments), emphasizing the main challenge that teams must face: managing the sudden switch between a routine operation and the different unexpected situations likely to call their standard action modes into question. They succeed by articulating communication reflexivity and socialization practices that they develop and shape according to their cultural values and the context’s demands.

Based on these observations, this book has suggested three concrete avenues through which managers facilitate coordination within teams in extreme environments: putting an “immediate” feedback process into place so as to favor the emergence of collective skills and encourage can to act together actors to meet shared goal, exploit the opportunities offered by decision support systems, particularly in terms of collective creativity; and finally, support the work done by professional communities by building a dedicated digital architecture and offering collaborative tools.

In order to develop more flexible work collectives that are capable of managing the unexpected and reaching a high level of performance, businesses have everything to gain from studying military experiences. They can seek inspiration from their successes, and transpose, and adapt, the devices and good practices deployed by armies in order to support coordination in their project teams.