Cohesive

Across Boundaries

There's a science to navigating, integrating and orchestrating across boundaries.

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The cross-boundary imperative

Change creates seams

Markets change fast, yet structure has inertia. Emerging opportunities and threats span existing categories. Disruptive competitors recombine capabilities across prior business models. New discoveries scramble existing fields of expertise.Organizations are compelled by change to act across their seams. Across units, functions, geographies, time-horizons and knowledge domains.

The rise of Cross-boundary teams

Companies create teams

Re-organization is too slow, so companies create teams. Cross-functional teams, agile pods, transformation offices, and global councils are all attempts to manage across boundaries. As the pace of change has risen, so has the prevalence of cross-boundary teams.Cross-boundary teams are improved by refining team composition, collaboration norms, psychological safety, trust, charters, incentives, reporting relationships and other elements. Optimizing interpersonal dynamics, team structures and procedures.

the cross-boundary challenge

The Missing methods

Established methods help improve team process and dynamics. Collaboration software to ease shared work, skilled facilitation to give everyone a voice and achieve consensus, voting apps to help gauge team sentiment and make majority decisions. But those assume the cross-boundary challenge is primarily procedural and interpersonal. The missing methods are those that address the cognitive challenges of cross-boundary problems: the framing, logic, testing, synthesis, orchestration and other elements that lead to the best answers with the greatest impact for the enterprise.Cohesive develops and teaches cognitive methods for cross-boundary management.

establishing the effort

Mandate to transcend

The most important cross-boundary problems can't be solved by aggregating each unit's perspectives, by averaging them, or taking a vote on which unit's goals should dominate. They require new thinking, above the piece parts, creating in new space. No matter how complete the membership of the team, it will not match the scope of the challenge. The team's mandate is to transcend its components, not just convene them. Establishing this expectation is a necessary condition for the most successful cross-boundary efforts.

integrating knowledge

Commitment to AI

Historically, cross-boundary teams invested time translating language and sharing knowledge across domains. The ideal team members were "T-shaped" with deep expertise in one domain but able to bridge to others. Immersion sessions aimed to steep team members in each other's knowledge. Now AI significantly accelerates knowledge access, retrieval and integration across domains. Cross-boundary teams need methods for integrating knowledge. These days that means a commitment and a plan for deploying AI.The work of the team should focus on the cognitive agenda above what AI can provide.

probing the context

exploring shifts in value

The technology and market changes that create cross-boundary challenges have deep, layered impacts beyond their surface symptoms. They involve shifts in value creation (what creates value), value capture (who benefits), and value clockspeed (how quickly). That context needs to be probed to understand the full scope of the challenges to be addressed by the cross-boundary team. Initial signals alone do not provide a sufficient foundation.

Solving the right problem

Multiple impact frames

The nature of cross-boundary changes means the problem to be solved is almost never fully defined by the initial team charter. The right set of problems to be solved needs to be discovered. That involves examining the impacts of change through multiple frames, including:
Ambition: opportunity and the upside of winning
Paranoia: threat and the downside of losing
Uncertainty: limits of prediction and the need for adaptability
Addressability: required capabilities and the scale of investment.

setting direction and speed

defining the vector

The team's output needs to set a direction and a speed -- that is, a velocity or vector -- for the enterprise to follow in addressing the cross-boundary challenge. The vector is based on a theory of when, where and how value will be created and captured. It reflects the team's thinking on ecosystem moves by current leaders and new disrupters, the evolution of control points and other sources of advantage, the types and levels of uncertainty identified, required investment and risk. It sets the firm's course and pace for winning in the anticipated future.The cognitive load is very high, requiring integrative thinking; creative challenge to apparent trade-offs; orienting to multiple time horizons; theory-building ahead of data; curiosity, courage and patience to hold out for better solutions.

identifying the steps on the path

Refining the sequence

Cross-boundary problems require the vector to be de-biased and error-corrected, with tests identified to falsify the team's prior theories and assumptions. Uncertainty needs to be translated into in-flight adaptation options along the vector. The vector's implications for opportunities to acquire undervalued assets, pursue markets not yet visible to all, and recruit future scarce talent, all need to be explored.Iterated cycles of judgment shape the sequence of concrete actions through which the vector will unfold.

orchestrating change

Design to govern

Cross-boundary issues by definition challenge the existing organization's ability to execute: capabilities, talent, budgets are fragmented across current boundaries; cultural norms don't favor the new ways of operating. The cross-boundary team's work is therefore not finished until it has translated its choices into a governance system for driving coherent action across boundaries. This takes a well-articulated plan, with precise logic, milestones, budgets, measures and signals that would trigger adaptation. Organizational behaviors, incentives and structures that may derail the plan are diagnosed. The governance system mobilizes and empowers the organization to act, and inspects and sustains execution.

Across Boundaries