February 2025
Service Design
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“It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”
While listening to the NN/g podcast series, Sarah Gibbons (VP @ NN/g) talked about the importance of design having “a seat at the table” in terms of company strategy. She cited this book: “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” as an essential read for those looking to make more sense of less mature organizations.
As someone who has worked in less orthodox design atmospheres, I decided to give it a read and see if I had truly experienced some of the dysfunctions Sarah mentioned in the podcast.
1. Absence of Trust
2. Fear of Conflict
3. Lack of Commitment
4. Avoidance of Accountability
5. Inattention to Results
“[Teams] admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”
“trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group.”
Symptoms include: hesitation to ask for help/feedback, dreading meetings and avoiding spending time with teammates, concealing weaknesses and mistakes from one another
“If we cannot learn to engage in productive, ideological conflict during meetings, we are through.”
“Healthy conflict is actually a time-saver.”
Symptoms include: ignoring controversial topics that are critical to team success, failing to tap into opinion of team members, creating environments where back-channel politics and personal attacks thrive
“If we cannot learn to engage in productive, ideological conflict during meetings, we are through.”
“the two greatest causes of the lack of commitment are the desire for consensus and the need for certainty.”
Symptoms include: creating ambiguity concerning direction and priorities, revisiting discussions and decisions again and again, encouraging second-guessing among team members
“the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team.”
Symptoms include: creating resentment among team members who have different standards of performance, encouraging mediocrity, missing deadlines and key deliverables, placing undue burden on team leader as primary source of discipline
Symptoms include: stagnation/failure to grow, rarely defeating competitors, losing achievement-oriented employees, encouraging team members to focus on their own careers and individual goals
1. They trust one another
2. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas
3. They commit to decisions and plans of action
4. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans
5. They focus on the achievement of collective results
This book follows the story of a new CEO entering a company and doing the very difficult task of bringing all parties into alignment on company goals. At times, I found this book to be incredibly realistic - particularly when team members withheld disclosing opinions concerning quality of work. This book perfectly highlights the difference between critique and feedback (in my opinion). Critique is more professional and ideological; it centers around constructive criticism associated with quality of work. On the other hand, feedback can be, at times, more destructive and sometimes even personal/emotional.
While this was not the sole intent of the book, I found it to be one of the biggest takeaways when applied to a design. Design can often be treated as a creative field - one that lacks attachment to real-world business decisions and this book does a great job of restoring that notion and ensuring opinions are heard in a constructive, professional manner.
Another vital takeaway of this book is that “healthy conflict is a time saver.” Depending on personal upbringing, conflict is often something that people want to avoid at all costs - understandably so. However, it is often indicative of power imbalances and a lack of trust within a group of people. This is something that will remain with me throughout the rest of my career - especially in a somewhat creative field.
Overall, I understand why Sarah Gibbons regarded this book as “a classic.” It outlines that “teamwork ultimately comes down to practicing a small set of principles over a long period of time.” Depending on the company, this can look very different but it seems that the continuous investment in teams is absolutely vital to real-world success; organizations must account for human behavior rather than discard it.
10/10.
