Billion Dollar EdTech Idea 6: Behaviour Led Accountability for Synergy in Teams (BLAST)
According to a McKinsey study, 90 percent of investors think the quality of the management team is the single most important non-financial factor when evaluating an IPO. An implication that’s very much extendable to all teams across a company.
Yet most teams in an organisation don’t work as teams but as working groups, which is a big problem. A working group is like a golf team, where players go off and play on their own and then get together and add up their scores at the end of the day. A real team is more like a basketball team, one that plays together simultaneously, in an interactive, mutually dependent, and often interchangeable way.
Most teams end up becoming working groups because they are evaluated by aggregating KPIs (key performance indicators) - the ‘what’ of their individual work. Instead, to make teams more cohesive, they should be measured collectively on KBIs (key behavioural indicators) - the ‘how’ of their working together.
This shift from measuring performance to behaviours presents an opportunity to create a new ‘team learning model’ where learning gets embedded into the flow of everyday work, in which:
Learners get onboarded as a team as opposed to individuals, with each team being assigned an AI coach and a set of behaviours.
Journeys are designed as challenges / levels using weekly behaviour sprints.
By using the right mix of motivation, triggers, insights and prompts, the AI coach keeps the team accountable and helps them practice the behaviours.
Content formats expand from videos and podcasts to include team generated content.
Progress happens with the team giving each other instant feedback (using ratings and emojis) on the demonstration of behaviours in everyday meetings.
Author Patrick Lencioni passionately argues how it’s difficult to overstate the competitive advantage that an accountability-friendly organisation has over one where teams don’t hold one another accountable.
Whether it’s a lack of attention to details, poor discipline in making calls or setting the right expectations with stakeholders, a meaningful drop in measurable performance can almost always be traced back to behavioural issues that made the drop possible.
Great teams are accountability-friendly and confront one another about those behaviours early because they see the connection between the two and care enough about the team to take that risk before the results begin to suffer.
