Samuel Bacharach wrote about hot groups in the context of the Apollo 13 incident for Inc. com. Originally published February 28, 2018.
Everyone knows what a team is, and most of us work, to varying degrees, with teams. Often, an entrepreneur getting a start-up off the ground has a tight team. The finance group is a team. Even units and subunits sometimes operate as teams. Teams are relatively stable, and there typically is no formal start date or end date of when they will be in effect. That said, when there is a crisis, when you need all the collective adrenalin you can get, when you need to be intensely creative, when you need to readjust, and when time is short–you need a hot group. In all of these instances you need a supercharged team.
The term hot group is commonly used to describe teams who not only work tremendously well together, but also achieve great things in a relatively compressed time frame due to task-focused passion. Jean Lipman-Blumen and Harold Leavitt, authors of Hot Groups, maintain that “any group can be a hot group”–so long as it has the “distinctive state of mind,” which they define as “task-obsessed and full of passion…coupled with a distinctive way of behaving, a style that is intense, sharply focused, and full-bore.”
One of the most famous examples of a hot group is the NASA control room in Houston when the Apollo 13 crew faced a near calamity. When an explosion in the spacecraft damaged two oxygen tanks, venting oxygen into outer space, the mission to the moon became an emergency rescue operation. Quickly, the control room sprang alive becoming a miraculous, organic, problem-solving unit–essentially operating as an incredibly efficient hot group. All ideas focused on reaching a solution to the problem. Role differentiation vanished, task specificity became diffuse, and any notion of a plan went by the wayside. Flight director Gene Kranz gave the parameters of the assignment ahead of them: “Let’s work on the problem, people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing.” Working together, the team improvised ingenious solutions. Jack Lousma, the capsule communicator, recalls, “We just responded as we had to…It was dynamic, people working real hard to find out what the problems were. It was a bunch of people who were trying to solve these problems as they came up.”
This NASA team exemplifies the core elements of a hot group: the sense of the importance of their mission, passion, teamwork, hard work, and a cast of very skilled individuals. While many in the group were initially assigned to specific tasks, the rules of the game quickly changed. The mission became complex, urgent, and intensely captivating, pulling together resources and bright minds to work around the multitude of limitations. With incredible time pressure and an impossibly complicated task, the group worked feverishly to deliver results. According to NASA, “the most remarkable achievement of mission control was quickly developing procedures for powering up the CM [control module] after its long, cold sleep. Flight controllers wrote the documents for this innovation in three days, instead of the usual three months.”
While we don’t normally face crisis situations at the scale that NASA does, the principles of hot groups can be applied to some work situations. It is unrealistic to have a hot group that can stick together once a particular problem is solved. Hot groups are an assembly of the best and brightest, working in a tight frame. That said, they are often short-lived. They solve the problem. They come up with the innovation, and entropy sets in. The intensity cannot be kept up. The most successful organizations promote an environment where hot groups can form, solve problems, dissolve, and reform to solve new problems as they come up.
© BLG
