ABSTRACT
Many modern forms of organizing focus on small teams as the basic task unit (Cash, Earl, & Morison, 2008; Edmondson, 2012; Hackman, 2012). Structuring work around teams allows organizations to bring diverse knowledge sets to bear on complex problems (Gardner, Gino, & Staats, 2012). However, the wisdom of relying heavily on teams for important decisions rests on the assumption that teams are able to synthesize their members’ diverse informational sets. This chapter explores the duality between how teams plan and how they should plan. We review the research on team planning, focusing on regularities and remedies. The regularities are five natural tendencies of teams that limit their planning capabilities. The remedies are evidence-based strategies for mitigating these harmful tendencies in order to optimize team-based planning.
