If every member of a team was replaced, one by one, is it still the same team?
The Ship of Theseus is a classic thought experiment which asks if you changed every piece of the ship, plank by plank, and if every part is replaced. Is it the same ship?
Does this apply to teams?
A team is more than its constituent parts, it has an identity in its own supra—identity, based on its purpose, the rules, behaviours, unspoken rules, idiosynchries and the context in which it lives.
The team almost has a ‘spirit’ of its own.
Deep Purple famously managed to change just about every band member multiple times but still managed to create a albums and keep ‘rocking’ as Deep Purple over the course of thirty years.
Conversely, every couple of years the England football team has fresh faces, and yet over decades still trip up when it comes penalties, like sort of cultural nervous tick.
But what if all the members have changed? What happens to the identity: does it persist and, if so, how can it.
I’ve been in teams where I was the only remaining member that originally started.
But I’ve also observed how even one new person can radically change the dynamics of how a team interacts and behaves.
Changing a plank is one thing, changing a team member in the context of complex knowledge based work, is quite another.
Although the Ship of theses is a good thought experiment, I’m attracted more towards the energy which creates the vortex within an eddy which is more dynamic and susceptible to changes in energy and flow and still continues the paradox of changing and being the same at the same time, perhaps described best by Herman Hesse in Siddhartha:
“He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment!”
For teams, significant changes like new people can introduce new degrees of entropy – they can disrupt the flow and the direction of the flow. Likewise a new person can also slot in and continue the flow.
How to create this alignment to continue the flow?
We have promoted that a ceremony such as a Liftoff at the start of a project helps teams to start well and sustain the team’s momentum across time. The same approach can be used as a re-start to bring alignment and, equally, to reassess any habits that are no longer sustaining the team.
If you would like to find out more, we will doing workshop soon about these topics. Register your interest to find out more.