‘Teamdom’ — A New Term for Team-Friendly Environments
By: Timo Toivonen
Tags: Teamwork, Organization Development, Teams And Teamwork, Agile, Team

Every journey deserves a good start. The first post in this blog proposes a new team-related term and explains why it matters. This article leans into philosophy and post-agility.

Behind every great team there’s…?

Anyone who’s ever been part of a great team knows how magical it feels. Great teams can come into being in surprising ways but a systematic team-evolution requires a specific environment. The modern leadership focus has shifted from people management to environment fostering. We have become gardeners. But yet, we often refer to these environments ambiguously, without naming them. Here are a few recent examples:

“Create a safe environment for them — an environment rid of formal “leads”, hierarchy, and demotivators.” — Konstantin Razumovsky & Gunther Verheyen/editor (97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know, 2020) “When an organisation switches their focus from managing for results to designing environments where teams can create results, great teams flourish.” — Geoff Watts (Team Mastery, 2020) “effective teamwork […] to meet changing demands in the environment, and improve the environment.” — Lanz, Ulber & Friedrich (The Problems with Teamwork, and How to Solve Them, 2020)

The message in these excerpts is clear: teams not only deserve a fertile environment but are co-creators of it. Perhaps we could summarize the current paradigm as: “behind every great team there’s an environment where teams can flourish”. The message was different some twenty-thirty years ago when authors wrote about ‘creative-’ or ‘team-friendly environments’ but saw them as products of smart leadership and not particularly worth defending.

Although the concept of a team is old, it was the agile era (2000–2020) within IT-industry that really made teamwork sexy. We IT-agilists are on the leading edge but not all professional domains are this far, some are still living the pre-agile era (1980–2000). Now that we’re tipping our toes into the post-agile era (2020-), we should, for the sake of the laggards, aim to describe what we are experiencing, including environments.

Here lies the problem I’m addressing today: we are missing some generic terminology around teams. For this reason, I’d like start putting stakes in the ground. My proposal for referring to team-friendly environments is ‘teamdom’.

What is a ‘Teamdom’?

The new word that I’m proposing, ‘teamdom’, refers to an environment where teams can flourish. In there, team building isn’t a constant uphill battle and teamwork isn’t a demoralizing drag. In a teamdom everybody wishes teams nothing but the best and makes effort towards that best. In a teamdom, healthy teamwork is the King.

A ‘teamdom’ is a kingdom of healthy teamwork.

The image below illustrates two environments in a naive but truthful way. On the left, a ‘groupdom’ is composed of pyramid forms, representing hierarchical people-units that float around self-obsessed, uninterested about other units or the external world. On the right, a ‘teamdom’ is composed of circular forms, representing equality-driven people-units that are interconnected with other units and curious about the external world. Both domains can be thought as a physical (a workplace) or metaphorical (a realm, a kingdom).

These two domains are different like Mordor and Rivendell — one desolate (team-hostile) and the other invigorating (team-friendly). I admit that this separation is slightly biased (me sprinkling fairy dust over teamdoms…) but it’s not about making judgements as much as about observing fundamental differences in structures and interactions.

Here are a few ideal characteristics of a ‘teamdom’:

Idea of teamwork is enjoyed as much as actual teamwork

is enjoyed as much as actual teamwork Teams are first-class citizens enjoying process-freedom

are first-class citizens enjoying process-freedom Team building is seen as a strategic investment

is seen as a strategic investment Teamwork is self-organizing, self-facilitating and self-healing

is self-organizing, self-facilitating and self-healing Team health is taken seriously and seen as a precursor to performance

is taken seriously and seen as a precursor to performance Leadership is distributed and not in the way of value creation

is distributed and not in the way of value creation Environment itself is valuable and worth protecting

Many possible teamdoms exist, implemented either by a few loose organizational principles or by a formal organization development (OD) doctrine. Here are a few “known teamdoms”:

Agile organization (many authors)

Sociocracy (Endenburg) & S3 (Bockelbrink et al.)

Holacracy (Robertson)

Teal organization (Laloux)

Evolutionary organization (Dignan)

Cell-structured organization (Hermann & Pflaeging)

Exponential Company (Erich R. Bühler)

In other words, each of the above can bring about a teamdom. Teamdoms are great places to work in, but they mustn’t be everybody’s favourite. In fact, teamdoms are not suited for every psychology, every project or even every profession. Some organizations are groupdoms and some teamdoms and that’s ok because both are needed.

Why ‘Teamdom’ matters?

Oh no — yet another concept! What does all this mean practically? How is this word useful? And why do we need a new term for something obvious? Philosophers tend to put effort into naming things because a well-named concept serves many purposes: it enables meaningful discussions about a thing, distinguishes the thing from others, and helps finding the essence of the thing.

Teamdom is real

Environments that foster healthy teamwork deserve to be christened as ‘teamdoms’ because they are real things that are previously unnamed. They are real in a similar manner as for example the digit 8 or the American continent are real, both undoubtedly existed before they were discovered. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that academic alternatives would be ‘hierarchy’ and ‘heterarchy’. Albeit, I feel that ‘groupdom’ and ‘teamdom’ have more explanatory power for modern work.

Teamdom is a simple reference point

‘Teamdom’ is a bit like a reference architecture (in software architecture). It’s an easy-to-understand system metaphor that describes an ideal solution with some vocabulary. It’s a process-agnostic term that doesn’t invoke potentially complicated OD-doctrines or frameworks — no learning curve!

Simple discussions can also serve as a “poor man‘s OD-method” for organizations that are not yet ready for a big change. They can sneak in change through the kitchen door simply by improving their teams. Team science mustn’t be rocket science. Just build better teams and you’re good-to-go for almost anything!

Teamdom enables better conversations

Author Rickhard Hackman once wrote: “Conversations about teams can be frustrating because people have different things in mind when they talk about them.” I completely agree. With simple terminology we can ask fundamental questions, for example: Are our teams are planted inside a teamdom — and if they’re not, why not? We can lead these discussion on a neutral ground without finger pointing.

I often seek team-related discussions with common people outside agile/IT (think ‘groupdom’…). Very few of these conversation partners have showed any understanding of teamwork. With them, I’ve had little help from explaining teamwork in terms of agile practices or ceremonies. After leading with ‘groupdom’ and ‘teamdom’ (or Mordor and Rivendell) the response has been immediate; first their faces lit up as they understood the difference, and then they looked sad as the realization sank in: “I work for Sauron…”.

Teamdom raises the bar for teams

The agile era has done wonders for teamwork. It made teams presentable but also has been obsessed with processes and leadership theories. Now on the brink of the post-agile era, I’m hoping we might put teams back on the map. The word ‘teamdom’ both promotes teams and raises our game at the same time. It politely differentiates ‘teams’ from ‘groups’ and from other social creatures of the past.

To make sense of post-agility, we’d need new models. For example, the moment of a team becoming environment-aware (sort of enlightened) is a relatively undocumented moment. In my team evolution model this stage is called an ‘open team’ (more on that in later posts). This stage sees team health in a different way. Rightly understood teams can become healing places, going beyond mere happiness or workplace enjoyment.

To summarize, the word ‘teamdom’ matters because it refers to a real thing, it serves as reference point for substantial discussions and raises our game for the post-agile era.

What’s next?

The presented terms are the fundament upon which my other models and maps are based. But this is only a beginning! I don’t think for a second that we see the potential of teamwork clearly. No, there’s so much more to be discovered and many teams to be bio-hacked.

This post marks a beginning of a journey into the future of teamwork. My focus will be in this blog, but I did register a tweetbox and a website as well. I have zero plans other than getting my theories, models and maps out. The community has given me so much, now I want to give back.

I’m glad to have you on-board. Please share this information forward if you feel it’s the right thing to do. See you in a teamdom nearby - thank you!