NetAge Virtual Teams: Model 2.0
Three Perspectives
on the Networked Organization

People play a part in organizations through positions, teams, and organizations. Each of these types of organizational structures provides a different perspective on the whole complex organization.

A position, a job, that is occupied by a person, is the basic unit of organizations. It not only connects the social network of people to the organizational network, but positions represent teams as team leaders and they represent organizations as executives. Positions may carry all the linkages required to define organizational structures and processes. And they do that through teams.
Team Intelligence:
Model 2.0 for Virtual Teams and Teamnets

Teams are the fundamental working unit of organizations, the "middle way" perspective between the nested hierarchy of sub organizations and the personal-positional perspective from a particular job.

Small team networks connect through overlapping memberships and workflow relationships to many other teams inside and outside the organization of which they are a part. People play multiple roles in multiple teams while holding a singular job in a hierarchy of jobs. Each of these roles is represented by a team membership link connected to a person-in-a-position. In most cases, the membership link stays if one person leaves the job and another person comes into it.

While organizational workflow links are made between sub-organizations and teams, teams have an interior life where the real complexity of how something gets done is done. Historically, tacit how-to knowledge is used and passed on in shared face-to-face workspaces that changed relatively slowly. Now, in an historical moment, distributed teams are re-learning how to virtually socialize themselves, do work together, and pass on knowledge--all at an accelerated pace.

Authored by person, position, and role.

  • Teams are how people work together.
  • In a work context, each person sits in a specific position tied into the formal structure of organizations.
  • In a team, each person plays a role the team needs in order to be successful at fulfilling its purpose.

Thus every transaction and communication is simultaneously authored by a person, a position, and a role. In the real world, we track this immediately and mostly intuitively. To do it virtually, you need to get more explicit and more digital.

Virtual team rooms needed. Virtual teams must have team rooms that provide some privacy to prepare and develop their work product and to fully realize their potential. Organizations must interconnect and manage the knowledge of many team rooms.

These pages, together with the companion Network Model 2.0 section, provide a framework for the organizational network of working teams.