Teamwork effectiveness models are based on accum­ulated empirical observations and reasoned arguments, and identify and describe key factors necessary for effective teamwork. Our model, tailored for Agile practitioners, offers insights into effective Agile teamwork and explains how certain Agile practices support it.

Customers are more demanding than ever. In this Executive Update, we explore two questions related to meeting customer expectations: To what extent are you incorporating your customers’ reality into your product development processes? How can a rigorous voice of the customer (VoC) solution help your company grow with significant and sustainable margins?

As we explore in this Advisor, machine vision systems employing machine learning and other artificial intelligence techniques are now bringing major benefits to automakers, dealers, and repair shops in the form of camera-based automated vehicle inspection systems.

In this Advisor, we discuss the idea that managers can and should use softer, psychological skills to build and maintain successful teams.

This Executive Update describes the strategy execution challenges companies face today and shares some ideas for bridging the gap. With a new vision for strategy execution, leadership, and a commitment to action, organizations can transform their end-to-end strategy execution from a disconnected set of activities to an organizational capability.

This Advisor looks at the key roles that AI can play in cybersecurity operations: behavioral analytics, threat intelligence, ransomware attack detection, smart identity governance, strengthening security of cloud applications, online fraud detection, defending against deepfakes, and risk assessment.

Cigdem Z. Gurgur describes how a blockchain-based Internet of Things (IoT) can push market systems toward sustainability. Blockchain offers new opportunities relevant to systems design. It connects stakeholders with multiple sources of verified information, generates a richer informational landscape for executing business processes, and enables secure transactions between untrusted actors. Trusted networks can reduce transaction costs, simplify processes, and reduce resource intensity compared to traditional transaction technologies. Gurgur explores the conditions needed to facilitate blockchain deployment in the next generation of supply chains, specifically through IoT technologies that have attractive applications for creating, monitoring, and enforcing sustainability standards.

Rohit Nishant and Thompson S.H. Teo discuss how to limit the negative impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption by using concepts from both regenerative and doughnut economics. These two approaches seek to reconstruct economic systems so they operate within the sustainable operating limits of natural systems. Pointing out that AI adoption threatens to exceed sustainable boundaries by increasing aggregate demand for energy and new materials, Nishant and Teo put forth a 3Rs framework with which AI adopters can keep the impacts of AI within sustainable boundaries.

Corporate innovation often produces severe, unintended social consequences. Even as innovation creates value for a firm, it can destroy value within other systems. Here, the authors propose that companies move away from the traditional innovation model focused on the firm to a systems innovation model focused on the firm and its products in relation to other systems.

Kevin Brennan outlines how Lean and Six Sigma process management systems could be changed to redefine waste in ways that capture environmental impacts. These models historically seek to eliminate waste in production processes by defining it as anything that does not contribute to increasing customer value. Brennan argues that this customer-centric definition of waste should be broadened to recognize that a focus on customer value leads to practices that reduce environmental quality.

The authors discuss how concepts like circular economy, degrowth, and post-growth redefine which materials are considered waste and which are considered useful. Circular economy and degrowth approaches could provide stronger sustainability outcomes by rethinking what counts as waste in supply chain analyses, operations, and management. The authors look at supply chain subsystems that support strong sustainability outcomes, using practical examples. They show how strong sustainability can support societal and economic resilience and identify ways to overcome challenges to changing market systems.

Himanshu Shekhar suggests a framework of “aligning with macro and accomplishing in micro” for controlled and sustainable future growth. Many businesses operate on the assumption that resources like clean air, water, and predictable weather are freely provided by nature. However, the planetary boundaries framework vividly shows that natural systems are limited in their capacity to provide these natural resources and ecosystem services. The combined impact of business activity is exceeding the limits on many of these systems. Businesses must update their assumptions about what nature provides “for free” and act to address growing scarcity concerns.

Saeed Rahman, Natalie Slawinski, and Monika Winn examine how pioneering companies in agriculture, agri-food, and other sectors can build and leverage ecological knowledge (knowledge about the very ecosystems they rely on) to develop innovative practices that help regenerate social and natural systems. In doing so, these companies can reap benefits for their business and help turn our unsustainable agricultural systems into systems that sustain a growing human population without severely degrading or destroying ecological systems necessary for agriculture and other industries.

P.J. Stephenson and Judith Walls call for a “new biodiversity paradigm for business.” They show that current corporate guidelines for engaging on biodiversity are inconsistent and confusing, leaving companies unable to manage nature-based risks, capture nature-based opportunities, and prevent disruptive climate change. To correct these inconsistencies, they identify fundamental issues that businesses and other actors must resolve in the links between market systems and the nature systems that generate biodiversity.

This issue explores how to make needed changes happen by examining three systems change topics. First, how can we use the linkages between environmental and economic systems to change market structure and, consequently, how actors compete? Second, how do we redefine waste to alter how market actors impact the natural environment through producing and disposing of materials? Third, what system changes can we accomplish through innovation or by using technologies like IT, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain to address unsustainable practices?

This issue explores how to make needed changes happen by examining three systems change topics. First, how can we use the linkages between environmental and economic systems to change market structure and, consequently, how actors compete? Second, how do we redefine waste to alter how market actors impact the natural environment through producing and disposing of materials? Third, what system changes can we accomplish through innovation or by using technologies like IT, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain to address unsustainable practices?

We believe that a radical shift in MBA education is needed. Instead of transmitting existing knowledge or developing a set of functional skills, students must become comfortable with the process of thinking based on America’s unique contribution to the history of philosophy: pragmatism. 

Companies continue to explore DEI and implement initiatives to create a culture of acceptance and understanding, while carrying out their missions and remaining profitable. But building an effective DEI strategy calls for a new mindset among business leaders if current and future initiatives are going to succeed. This Executive Update offers four “mini-starters” to explore the DEI issue in more depth.

Northwestern Medicine has developed a very innovative NLP application — integrated within the hospital EHR system — designed to solve a practical and pressing healthcare problem: missed follow-ups associated with incidental findings from diagnostic imaging. This Advisor explores the significance of this innovative artificial intelligence application.

The inner-leader journey will help you see reality more as it truly is and give you the insight, wisdom, and courage to share it with others. I believe it is critical for our teams and team members to make this shift in order to thrive and achieve success in a turbulent world.

In this Executive Update, we explore taking a process perspective to show how concepts such as sustainability and the circular economy look in the physical world. Making these concepts concrete reveals a singular criterion for achieving a circular economy: every output generated by every process should have a consumer who uses it productively. This criterion provides managers with actionable steps and ways to measure their organization’s progress toward sustainability.

In this Advisor, we talk about two of the near-term challenges in the pharma data processing space: data standards and data quality management.

Helen Chen brings our focus on process and mechanisms to the domain of market-based social activism (MbSA), in which a business seeks to align its activities with moral principles to drive positive change at the society scale. Chen presents the Pyramid of Forces for Good framework that can be used to better organize MbSA to develop a “market for virtue” in which morally sound business activities outcompete those that are morally questionable. A market for virtue applied to green performance is based on three building blocks: (1) valid and reliable green-performance measurement, (2) fair and equitable green-performance valuation, and (3) efficient and scalable green-value apportionment. Establishing a market for virtue would make green practices economically profitable, fundamentally changing the economic system that currently makes unsustainable practices more economically profitable than green practices.

Rachana Shah explores system stability and points of intervention in a specific, highly complex system: the New York City Waste system. Shah uses systems theory to analyze specific actors and their actions to reveal key leverage points for change within the system. She prioritizes the leverage points by their potential for impact on the system, elucidating exactly what each leverage point can change, who will be affected by the change, and what effect the change could have on the system. She then explores the negative feedback processes that resist systems change, pointing out that the higher in impact a leverage point is, the more a system will resist it. Shah’s analysis demonstrates how actors can decompose a system into subsystems, identify key change points, and prioritize each change point by balancing its potential for impact against its potential to generate negative feedback from the system that cancels out the impact of the leverage point. Her focus on actors and their actions raises a valuable point for systems analysis. The way you analyze a system influences what you believe to be the key leverage points in the system and influences the effectiveness of systems change strategies built from that analysis. Conceptualizing the waste system as actors and actions highlights leverage points related to actors themselves. However, this way of viewing the system may obscure system processes and leverage points not related to actors, such as technological leverage points around material production and distribution or biophysical leverage points around waste decomposition.

The authors argue that systems are designed to produce their results, even when their results are far from perfect. Systems also have internal “negative feedback processes” that maintain system stability by canceling out disruptions. Overcoming these stabilizing systems can be challenging, and pushing a system far enough to initiate change can result in sudden, highly disruptive shifts to a new system. Rather than cause such disruptive change, the authors advocate for incremental shifts to avoid the kind of wholesale disruption that could leave financial, social, and political systems in shambles.