To enable our global team to function with maximum efficiency, elegance and interdependence, VDS will leverage the X-Teams paradigm to provide a common unerstanding and approach to team activities. While every group is absolutely encouraged and supported in their efforts to maximize local strength, we believe this set of working principles provide a solid foundation from which to leverage our collective wisdom, insight and expertise. VDS is indebted to Prof. Deborah Ancona, the MIT Leadership Center, and the work that has gone into development of the X-Teams framework. For more information on X-Teams than we will provide here, see the book X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate and Succeed by Debora Ancona and Henrik Bresman.

X-Teams leverage all available resources to innovate and leverage change. They are dynamic, brilliant, and robust. They are both internally and externally developed. They are VDS teams. The following few pages outline specific activities we expect of all VDS teams as they develop their subsystems, documentation and team structure.

X-Team Principles

Principle 1: External Activity
High performing teams not only function internally, but also manage interactions across their boundaries. They reach out for needed information, strive to understand the context in which they work, work to get support for their ideas from external influences, and coordinate with all groups that influence their own steps. There are three main mechanisms for accomplishing this:

• Scouting: the process of gathering critical external information.
• Ambassadorship: the process of maintaining a positive image of the team and it’s work to outside influences and using that to facilitate progress
• Task Coordination: Task coordination is the process of managing the array of interdependencies with other parts of your organization (here your institution and the rest of VDS) to facilitate accomplishing your own task.

Principle 2: Extreme Execution
Large amounts of external activity also require effective internal processes and distributed group leadership. Extreme execution is the ability to coordinate external activities, allocate work most appropriately, and strategizing to effectively deal with new information. Leaders of X-teams are responsible for 1) creating a safe culture for extreme execution, and 2) putting in place the tools for extreme execution.

Creating a Safe Culture

A safe culture for extreme execution includes one with:

• Psychological Safety where team members feel the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, thereby allowing a frank exchange of views on various aspects of the project, and the bringing up of potential problems on the horizon
• Team Reflection where team members are allowed, and in fact encouraged, to take time to reflect on their strategies, actions, and goals.
• Team Knowledge where the team has a shared sense of what each member knows. A good team will make sure individual expertise is shared and integrated into a well-tuned system that effectively complete tasks.
  

Tools for Execution
There are some tools to help your team accomplish extreme execution:

• Integrative Meetings where can update their peers on recent findings, individual findings are integrated into un updated team plan, and team progress against tasks, goals, and milestones can be gauged.
• Inclusive and Transparent Decision Making Processes that give members a say in decisions and keeps them informed about the reasons behind design choices.
• Heuristics, or rules of thumb, that give guidelines and boundaries in various team processes.
• Shared Timelines which keep the team synchronized as the team diverges to engage in various activities.
• Information Management Systems which ensure that each member has timely, updated information.