Mapping the unmanaged team across to a people space

Examining the details of examples and case histories of win-win situations and unmanaged teams is helpful only if you want to copy the same situation. To be able to find new situations, create them or take part in them, it is necessary to have an all purpose, mental model that can apply to any situation.

This needs the Zen-ness that has been mentioned several times in this book: the mental model that allows us to be at the right place at the right time and make the right decisions. To create such a model, we need to start with a basic abstraction that can visualise an overall commercial system. From there, we can move on to appropriate communication strategies that can be used to form or take part in any kind of co-operative group.

When buying costume jewellery for the counter in Hyper Hyper, I had been creating an unmanaged team of people every time I went to Berwick Street. These virtual teams were formed on the basis of people taking part in a win-win situation: taking part in a process of supplying costume jewellery that people wanted. We were all profiting from this strategy.

First, consider the people who were invited in. They were wholesalers, and as wholesalers they were representatives of other virtual groups: i.e., the manufacturers. This structure is similar to the structure of the groups of managers in the hierarchical system of managed groups in the corporate world. The power of each person in the group is based upon the pyramid of groups below them. In the case of the wholesalers, their power is based upon the power given to them by virtue of their relationships with groups of manufacturing contacts.

The corporate system is based upon managed groups, the costume jewellery buying system is based upon unmanaged groups. In the corporate system, the groups have a relative permanence and people are trained, coerced, manipulated and provided with rewards and incentives. In contrast, unmanaged groups are temporary, and come together simply as a result of sharing in the profits emerging from the common business activity. Each type of group comes together because the people in them can directly contribute in some way.

Another difference between the two types of group is the need for a group leader. In the corporate world of managed teams, great emphasis is placed upon the role of leadership. Countless training manuals try to define this ephemeral quality; even though nobody is really sure if people are born to be leaders or whether people can be trained to be. Probably it is a bit of both, but, the essential point here is that leadership, in the context of a managed team, is a quality that is usually equated with management. So, does an unmanaged team need to have leadership?

This question is at the core of understanding how complex systems work. It is also at the core of understanding how to create viable e-business and e-commerce solutions. To get at the root of the problem, consider the definition of a leader: it is someone who leads the way. This is a great thing for a group to have, but, only if the leader can lead effectively. If the group is working in an environment where the right way can be judged or calculated in some way, good leadership is realisable. But, what if it isn't possible to find out the correct, or even the best way? What value does leadership have then?

This is the situation that exists in the chaotically changing environment of the Internet and is the crux of the difficulty in creating e-business and e-commerce solutions. The rapidly changing technology, the every increasing amount of information available, the plethora of fast adapting competition, reduces the value of leadership to a point where leadership can actually become a handicap to a group. This implies that the type of group that would be most appropriate to cope with the chaotic environment of the Internet should be leader less.

To the thinking of the Industrial Age, with their systems based upon managed teams, the idea of a leader less group is an oxymoron: a nonsensical concept that is a contradiction of terms. However, let's apply this thought to the unmanaged groups formed in the costume jewellery business strategy. Was there a leader in these groups?

After the jewellery counter had been going for a while I became interested in other things and to save having to spend time in Berwick Street, I gave the job of buying the costume jewellery over to the girl who was running the jewellery counter. She had direct access to the customers and knew even better than I did what they wanted. She bought the stock in exactly the same way as I had.

The arrangement worked extremely well, yet, by no stretch of the imagination could she be regarded as managing or leading these virtual teams. She was simply playing a role in a series of different unmanaged teams that manifested each week as a direct consequence of what customers want. She didn't even have to choose the wholesalers - the members of the virtual teams - these were chosen for her by her customers' requirements. They were not being selected according to her judgement, but, because they had the stock her customers needed. She didn't have to lead the activity of the wholesalers, but, simply pass information on to them that she herself had received from her customers.

These virtual teams that were created each week for the purpose of buying jewellery were thus unmanaged and leader less. They were virtual objects that were responding to messages emanating from customers with a need to communicate messages to their peers. Each of the unmanaged, leader less groups were virtual objects, each made up of other objects that were also virtual objects.

Although many of the virtual objects involved in this complex system of communication were managed teams, the system itself consisted of unmanaged, leader less teams. Whether managed or unmanaged, each team or virtual team is represented in the system by a human. As the team, or, group that each person represents can be treated as an object then the person representing that team or group can be treated as an object. In this sense, the system consists of people objects that exist in unmanaged, leader less teams.

Taking this abstract view of the system, all activity can described in terms of the linking together of two solution points in a Solution Space. One point is where people are saying what they want and the other is where people are saying they've got it. In this way, the system can be viewed as a complex environment of inter linked groups brought together and driven by customer demands.

Such a system consists of nothing but people and communication messages and can be mapped across to a Hilbert Solution Space where the dimensions are people. With such an abstract model in mind, the whole of any e-business or e-commerce enterprise can be modelled as a network of communicating people and any business plan reduced to that of strategies of communication.

It is this trick, of abstracting away from the actual details of a real life situation that can lead to the seemingly mystic quality of Zen-ness. With such Zen-ness it is possible to create appropriate communication strategies for any kind of e-business or e-commerce project.