X-Team Principle 3: Flexible Phases--Changing the Team's Core Tasks Over Time

No matter what activity a team is assigned, whether it is creating a new product, suggesting a new organizational process, consulting to a particular geographic region, selling complex products, or writing software code, members need to shift their core focus over time. As the demands of the task change, team members must be flexible enough to shift gears and change what they do and how they do it. As this chapter illustrates, X-teams--high-performance teams that are externally focused--move through three phases, each with a different focus: exploration, exploitation, and exportation.