Fast Teaming: How to Get People Working Together Quickly

One Tale: When Teaming Speeds Up

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For years, the focus for “building teams” has been carefully designed teams - on stable structures, clear membership that are built to last. Then Amy Edmondson shifted the conversation.

She describes teaming as a verb — not a stable entity, but a dynamic activity. A process of quickly coordinating across boundaries to get something important done.

Today, that kind of fast, fluid teaming is the standard.

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Teaming to survive

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Marks & Spencer - the UK retailer - was recently hit by a major cyber attack. Bad actors used phishing tactics to gain their initial foothold into a supplier’s systems exploiting a weak link in the supply chain.

The entry point was an external partner which just goes to show how porous organisation boundaries have become. The impact was everywhere. Teams needed to mobilise.

What followed was an organisational stress test.  IT scrambled to contain the breach. Operations worked to keep stores functioning. Comms reassured customers. Legal navigated regulatory exposure. Leaders fought to protect brand trust.

But things moved quite slowly. Insiders told Sky News that M&S “had no plan for cyber attacks… with staff left sleeping in the office amid paranoia and chaos.”

The reported cost? Around £300m in profit.

The cyber security breach wasn’t just an IT issue - it became a live experiment in cross-functional teaming under pressure.

One of the major lessons was that fast teaming works best when the groundwork is already in place — clear roles, defined escalation paths, agreed decision rights.

Without them, urgency turns into scramble - and that is expensive.

Teaming to grow

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Teaming isn’t just defensive. It’s increasingly how growth happens too.

When generative AI accelerated almost overnight, several tech giants hit their own internal panic buttons. Google reportedly declared a “code red” after ChatGPT’s release. Meta reorganised its AI efforts to compete more aggressively.

All sending the same signal: we cannot move at yesterday’s pace.

Leaders had to make sharper calls about where to play. Which bets truly mattered? What could wait? And just as importantly: how should teams now work together?

In many firms, sequential handoffs have given way to real-time collaboration. A senior design leader at Anthropic recently described how, a few years ago, 60–70% of their time was spent mocking up concepts before passing them to engineering. Now, far more time is spent pairing directly with engineers — sometimes even building together. The work has become integrated, not staged.

In “code red” moments, the question stops being:

“Who owns this phase?”

And becomes:

“How quickly can we combine our expertise to ship?”

That shift — from coordination to co-creation — is fast teaming in action.

It’s no longer reserved for crises. It’s become the operating model for anyone who wants to keep up.

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This Isn’t New

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Tech may be the loudest voice pushing speed right now. But this kind of fast teaming isn’t new.

Fast teaming is the capability to create clarity, trust and coordinated action quickly — even when the team is temporary, fluid or newly formed.

In some environments it’s been common for decades:

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• Fire crews assemble in response to danger.
• Airline crews meet for the first time in the cockpit.
• Surgical teams form around a patient.
• Consulting teams spin up around a client problem.

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There are lessons to be learned on how to align and perform fast.

1. Clear roles and protocols (Surgery. Aviation.) When something goes wrong, people rely on checklists, training and escalation paths. Speed comes from preparation — not panic. More preparation would have helped at M&S.

2. Voice over ego (Emergency services.) Hierarchy exists. But speaking up is essential. Say what you see. Expertise outranks ego.

3. Sharp problem framing (Consulting.) Pause to ask: What are we solving? For whom? By when? Poorly framed problems waste time — and time is the one thing you don’t have.

These days leaders don’t always get to choose the team the work with but they need to influence how quickly it aligns and new skills for fast teaming are required.

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One Tip: Start With a Problem Worth Sharing

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If fast teaming has a secret weapon, it’s this: a clear problem statement.

We are trying to solve X for Y in order to achieve Z by when.

It sounds simple. It rarely is.

In practice, it forces the conversations that matter:

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• Are we solving the real problem — or just a symptom?
• Who is the real “Y” — customers, regulators, internal teams?
• What does success actually look like?
• And how urgent is this?

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The key is to make the conversation natural, not performative.

Try saying: “Can we pause and make sure we’re solving the same thing?” Or, “If we had to write this in one sentence, what would it be?”

Fast teaming runs on shared clarity.  Before you move quickly, make sure you’re pointed at the same target - even if that target may change.

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One Truth: Teams Are Changing, but the Fundamentals Still Matter

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For years, team research — led by Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman at Harvard — focused on real teams: clearly bounded, stable groups with shared goals over time.

It was excellent, groundbreaking work, and it shaped how many of us still think about “building teams” — as if they are solid structures to be carefully designed and maintained.

Amy Edmondson shifted the lens. Talking about teaming — a verb, not a noun. People coordinate quickly across boundaries to get important work done.

Data from: Teams in a New Era - Some Considerations and Implications Lauren E. Benishek and Elizabeth H. Lazzara - shows this is the current reality:

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• 84% of teams change membership. Most don’t stay intact.
• 81–95% of professionals work on multiple teams. The “one team” model is fading.
• Teams move from solo work to real-time collaboration — often in the same day.

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In short: teams used to be stable structures. Now they’re fluid systems.

The principles of working in teams hasn’t changed — alignment, clarity, shared norms — are still required. The way we do it has to change.

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• Purpose becomes a rhythm, not a retreat.
• Familiarity is built through working professionalism, not years of shared history.
• Norms live in how meetings run and decisions get made — not in workshop posters.
• Membership is fluid, so roles and responsibilities must be explicit.
• Strategy shifts from periodic deep dives to continuous sensing and adjustment.

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Less depth, maybe. More clarity in motion.

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The future won’t be built by perfect teams. It will be built by those who can align fast on the hard stuff — and realign just as quickly.

Read more over here.

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