I’ve just read a wonderful research article called “Team implicit coordination processes”.* Most studies of how team coordinate have focused on planning and communication; these are both explicit coordination, meanint that everyone is consciously aware of what they’re doing, they’re trying to do it, and they’re talking about it. The authors of this article claim that explicit coordination only explains relatively static teams, when the situation isn’t changing very rapidly. Implicit coordination happens “when team members anticipate the actions and needs of their colleagues…and dynamically adjust their own behavior accordingly, without having to communicate directly with each other or plan the activity” (p. 164).
That’s exactly what goes on in a jazz ensemble or an improv theater group, the super-creative groups that I’ve spent years studying (see my book GROUP GENIUS). Teams have to implicitly coordinate to handle rapidly changing environments when their tasks are highly interdependent; teams that are implicitly coordinating talk a lot less about what they’re doing and what they should do next. (This reminded me of a conversation I had at Harvard recently with Professor Rob Huckman, who has studied surgical teams. Surgeons say that in the best teams, no one is talking…that’s implicit coordination!)
Teams that have this down do four things: (1) each member provides task-relevant information even before they are asked for it; (2) team members share the workload without being asked; (3) everyone is monitoring the progress of the activity and the performance of their teammates; and (4) each person adapts behavior to what they expect the others will do.
The authors argue that implicit coordination can only work if the group creates an “emergent team-level knowledge structure” that they call a team situation model. The model includes shared knowledge like the team’s goal and the roles of each participant. Because of my own studies of social emergence, I agree when the authors claim that the situation model is “an emergent group property characterizing the team as a whole” (see my 2005 book SOCIAL EMERGENCE for more details).
*Ramon Rico, Miriam Sanchez-Manzanares, Francisco Gil, and Cristina Gibson. 2008. “Team implicit coordination processes: A team knowledge-based approach.” Academy of Management Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 163-184.