Giving Compass' Take:

• Stanford Social Innovation Review discusses how organizations can be more flexible and adaptable by employing a "team of teams," in which a network of different groups within the org coalesce around a common goal.

• The rise of technology help us collaborate more efficiently, so many nonprofits may want to look at this model to see if it can help them achieve greater impact.

• Here's more about leadership priorities in managing nonprofits.

In 2013, Bill Drayton published an SSIR article called “A Team of Teams World.” Drayton, the founder and current chair of Ashoka, painted a picture of an emerging future in which shifts in how people work will have a profound effect on how organizations operate. “We are moving rapidly into a world defined by change, which is the opposite of repetition, … ” he wrote. “Value in this world comes not from providing the same thing over and over to a client, but from managing kaleidoscopic change processes that are busily bumping one another. Because one now needs to see and seize ever-changing opportunities, the new organizational model must be a fluid, open team of teams.”

In our research, we investigate the elements of performance that enable certain nonprofits to achieve outsized impact. As we noted in a recent article, three of those elements — the ones in which nonprofits are most likely to struggle — are board governance, funding, and impact evaluation. Another crucial element involves organization and talent. In studying this element, we learned that the team-of-teams model is emerging as a critical factor in organizational success. In the coming years, we believe, it will become a standard throughout the social sector.

The team-of-teams model emphasizes decentralized autonomy, meritocracy, and a sense of partnership. Instead of maintaining a traditional structure in which people work in hierarchies based on a function or a formal business unit, an organization operates as a constellation of teams that come together around specific goals. At the center of this constellation is a coordinating executive team, but the composition of each project team shifts over time. Teams and team members work together in continuously evolving ways.

Read the full article about the team-of-teams model in nonprofits by William F. Meehan III & Kim Starkey Jonker at Stanford Social Innovation Review.