How Organizations Can Survive & Thrive With Small Groups

Organizational survival and adaptation is on many organizations’ agendas right now – and the stakes have rarely been higher. John Hagel of the Deloitte Center for the Edge has studied groups that perform well in extreme environments and offers some simple but powerful advice.

Key to performing in extreme circumstances is coming together in small groups.

Small groups that regularly gather, where members challenge each other to keep improving their performance, and where people support each other when things get hard; that’s what Hagel says his research group sees across a wide variety of contexts. Deloitte is one of the largest consulting firms in the world and John Hagel is a key thought leader there. He was a guest on a pre-pandemic episode of the Sprinklr Coffee Club in early March.

Often these small groups are informal working groups. Working groups, Hagel says, are between individuals and departments, are thus rarely managed or measured. But they are the key level at which improvement occurs in organizations, he argues.

Here at Sprinklr, we love our small, informal groups – and we work to create them across departments whenever possible, too. We draw a lot of inspiration from our customers, who use Sprinklr’s unified platform to share data and insights across formerly siloed groups in their organizations.

Isn’t it empowering to think about the best lever for performance improvements, even in large organizations, being such a manageable size?

Small groups:

• Coming together regularly

• Pushing one another to keep improving

• Supporting one another when things get hard

That’s what John Hagel says is found across all kinds of groups that thrive in extreme situations!

That’s a powerful recipe.