The Working Group

The ORCS team type, also known as "The Working Group," excels in structured communication and collaborative decision-making. These teams are adept at adapting their plans based on group consensus, which allows for broad-based responses to new challenges.

However, ORCS teams face specific challenges due to their reliance on key individuals for providing context, which can slow down decision-making. This dependency can create bottlenecks, leading to continuous planning with little execution. For example, an ORCS team might spend more time discussing campaign strategies than actually launching them.

Ordered

Communicators

Information is shared through defined processes and channels.

Relational

Processors

The source of the information matters when it is being evaluated.

Concordant

Deciders

Decision is driven by consensus among team members.

Spontaneous

Executors

Lightweight plans favor agility and adaptability.

A shared language

Words that typically describe ORCS teams.

Ordereddocumentationrecordedformatteddefined

Relationalpersuasiverelationshipssensitiveempathy

Concordantdebatingcooperationcamaraderieconsensus

Spontaneousadaptationevolvedfluidexperiment

Characteristics of ORCS teams:

ORCS teams flow information through consistent channels, ensuring quick sharing of information across the team.
These teams look to specific individuals for insight and context, which can create bottlenecks or–if individuals are asked to flex outside their comfort zones–bad decisions.
These teams prioritize broad involvement in decision-making. This ensures that decisions are widely accepted and supported across the team, fostering a strong sense of unity and buy-in.

Where ORCS teams excel:

Tend to thrive where responsibilities and knowledge domains vary widely across the team, and where considerations and input needs to come from a variety of stakeholders.
Excel in attracting and developing new team members, who can be quickly oriented to the team’s knowledge base and ways of working.
Excel in situations where input from many different stakeholders needs to be constantly incorporated and reflected in new paths forward.

Potential blind spots for ORCS teams:

Reliance on specific individuals who bring context to the group can hinder autonomous decision-making.
Group involvement in plans that are then inconsistently applied can lead to a perception of perpetual planning without sufficient follow-through (something that can be particularly grating for more action-oriented team members).
Specific individuals may serve as a bottleneck of information and context, potentially overwhelming those key influencers and delaying the translation of insights into action.

Areas of growth for ORCS teams:

Develop more people who can provide the context the team relies on to make decisions. Give them opportunities to lead discussions in their areas of expertise and help others understand what matters. This spreads responsibility for interpreting information, so decisions do not always have to wait for the same few people.
To prevent planning sessions from becoming unproductive (and never ending!), establish clear guidelines on when and how team members should contribute. This might include structured brainstorming sessions with specific time limits or assigning roles for each meeting to ensure that discussions remain focused and productive.
Implementing stricter time limits on planning phases can help ORCS teams avoid the trap of perpetual planning. By setting a deadline for when a decision needs to be made, teams are encouraged to focus discussions and make more timely decisions.

ORCS quick reference

Keep this overview handy for conversations about how your team works. It describes the team type, not anyone's personal results.

ORCS