Businesses Have a Lot to Learn From the Impromptu ‘Teaming’ That Happens in Theater

The way teamwork works (or doesn’t) has changed in the past 50 years. Across all sorts of offices and industries, it used to be that stable teams could build trust by working together over time. In the fast-paced world of work today, however, the members of a team change constantly; people partner up impromptu with others they haven’t met before, and communication happens across industry sectors that might not share assumptions and vocabularies. Then, a team disbands just as quickly as it linked up—on to the next project, the next team.

Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School calls this brave new behavior “teaming”—teamwork without a well-defined team. A “team” is a noun—it’s a thing. “Teaming” is a verb—something you do. It’s the difference between the teamwork that happens in sports, where a relatively stable roster of players and coaches practice together over time to create cohesion and ensure quality, and the teamwork that happens during a medical emergency, where a revolving door of staff, nurses, doctors, administrators and family members must communicate and coordinate to ensure quality care—sometimes without knowing each other’s last names. In the business world, innovation often involves what Edmondson calls “extreme teaming,” where emergent challenges and opportunities bring together a hodgepodge of specialists from vastly different industries who must figure out how to collaborate because they are developing something the world has never seen before.

This kind of teamwork isn’t business-as-usual, and it doesn’t come naturally to most people. You have to learn to team, which has sent CEOs and scholars in search of new models and metaphors. One comes from a surprising place.

Theater is ground zero for impromptu collaborative creativity. Experts from different sectors—writers, actors, directors, costume designers, set builders, lighting technicians, marketers, vendors, patrons, sponsors, audiences—come together under a shared vision, stage a performance, and then move on to the next project just as fast as they came together. With the heightened emotionality and vulnerability that comes in artistic expression, staging a play requires a balance between appreciating peoples’ contributions to the creative process and having conversations that improve product quality for audiences. Theater provides businesses with much more than just a new set of best practices. It offers a radical new mindset: teamwork is an act of creativity.

How Shakespeare was an expert at teaming

William Shakespeare started his career teaming with older, more established writers. In The New Oxford Shakespeare, scholars using computer-aided analysis that identifies an author’s writing style determined that at least 12 of Shakespeare’s plays were written with others. He is thought to have started as the junior collaborator on a play called Arden of Faversham, which most people have never heard of. The following year, some scholars suggest, an older playwright named George Peele wrote the first act of Titus Andronicus, then passed the play off to Shakespeare. These collaborations could have been what teamwork scholars like James Thompson call “sequential interdependence,” where Person A completes their work then hands it off to Person B. Or it might have been “reciprocal interdependence,” where everyone’s work is contingent upon everyone else’s, requiring constant communication, mutual adjustment and joint decision-making.

History plays were brand new, an emerging market. In the view of some scholars, the young Shakespeare teamed up with Christopher Marlowe and possibly another writer for a play about the Wars of the Roses—we now call it Henry VI, Part 2. Then they wrote a sequel— now known as Henry VI, Part 3. Around two years later, Shakespeare continued the story by himself with Richard III, making a trilogy of plays. Then Marlowe and a writer named Thomas Nashe are thought to have written a prequel to the trilogy—Henry VI, Part 1—which Shakespeare later revised. After that, Shakespeare wrote a set of four history plays by himself, now called his “second tetralogy,” to serve as a prequel to his “first tetralogy.”

Teaming helps talent rise to the top. Shakespeare is now celebrated as a genius. But at the start of his career, Shakespeare’s talent was teaming. And he excelled at collaborative innovation—recognizing a new market, coordinating people to address it and project managing his way into literary greatness.

In his middle years, researchers say Shakespeare served at times as a script doctor, adding a scene to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and teaming with six other playwrights on the play Sir Thomas More. During his later years, Shakespeare is thought by some to have turned to collaborating with younger writers, like Thomas Middleton for Timon of Athens, George Wilkins for Pericles, and John Fletcher for some of his last plays, Cardenio and Henry VIII.

After the plays were written, Shakespeare teamed with actors to rehearse, such as leading man Richard Burbage and comic relief William Kempe, both part of the acting company Shakespeare belonged to, called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The group became the King’s Men after they teamed with the new King James in 1603. Then, as recounted in Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells’ 2015 book The Shakespeare Circle, they teamed with theater producers to perform the plays, which required government approval, meaning extreme teaming across industries.

Popular plays were printed in books, which needed financiers, printers, booksellers and more government approval. As Chris Laoutaris relates in his 2023 book Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio, our most extensive record of Shakespeare’s writings— the First Folio edition of his complete works—only exists because seven years after Shakespeare’s death two of his acting colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, collaborated with a father-son pair of printers, William and Isaac Jaggard, and bookseller Edward Blount.

Shakespeare’s greatest collaborations were with his audiences. In contrast to contemporaries like Ben Jonson—who told his audiences, basically, Sit down, shut up, and enjoy the glory of my words—Shakespeare repeatedly went out of his way to ask audiences to be active participants in the creation of his plays. “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,” he asked in Henry V.

Individual genius is only part of the story of Shakespeare’s success. We should also celebrate his talents of teaming. At the start of his career, he knew how to jump from one impromptu working group to another. In the middle, he could efficiently lend expertise to massively collaborative projects. By the end, he could scaffold and manage cross-sector teams of people who shared little common ground other than a commitment to making creative ideas into new realities.

The ability to team effectively with others is often thought of as a personality trait—either you have it or you don’t. The strategic methods of theater-makers from Shakespeare to 21st-century directors reveal that teaming is a skill that can be learned, needs to be practiced and will deliver results. Teaming takes talent and also identifies talented people in an organization.

Like Shakespeare, we are especially adept at teaming during our apprenticeship periods and the twilight of our careers. If teaming up involves newcomers bringing energy and an eagerness to collaborate with seasoned veterans, teaming down is about leaders advanced in their careers structuring work to maximize opportunities for the next generation to learn.

Practice makes perfect

Rehearsal is all about what Edmondson calls “organizing to learn.” In contrast to “organizing to execute,” where a factory line of workers divide labor to efficiently manufacture products and realize management’s vision, rehearsal allows directors to learn new things about their plays.

When rehearsals begin, directors are bringing together people who may or may not have worked together, and these actors are bringing their own experiences and ideas to their performance. Rehearsal requires what Edmondson calls psychological safety—the knowledge that, if I make a mistake in this space, it won’t be held against me. Most new things actors try in rehearsal don’t work, but breakthroughs aren’t possible without creative risks. Edmondson calls it the science of failing well. Something that actors do by mistake or on a whim during rehearsal could become part of the show.

The last collaborator in theater is the audience. The cast and crew get so much information from when the audience laughs, cries or applauds. Businesses do market research all the time, but audiences aren’t thought of as collaborators. Theaters that do staged readings, tech runs and previews provide a model for teaming with consumers who can, as Shakespeare said, “piece out our imperfections with [their] thoughts.”

From collaborative creativity and cross-sector partnerships to market testing and quality improvement, teaming is how learning happens in new product development.

The show must go online

Crisis offers opportunities for innovation because limitations lead to creative solutions. During the Covid-19 lockdown, the web series “The Show Must Go Online” featured performances of each of Shakespeare’s 36 plays, one per week, over Zoom.

Actor Maryam Grace started with a small role in Henry VI, Part 1. “It was very hard at first,” she told me, “without physically being in a room with people. As creative people, we feed off the energy of others. We’re pack animals.” The challenge of innovation is heightened when it’s a global team meeting through digital technology. Teaming must become more deliberate, more explicit, more clearly scaffolded and more deeply ingrained in the culture of the group.

Performances were on Wednesdays. Casts were announced ten days before the show. They’d get exactly one week to rehearse. “The speed of it actually worked in our favor,” said Grace. Shared challenges create group commitment. “You’ve got that deadline. Next Wednesday night, we are going to be performing live in front of thousands of people. There’s nothing like a bit of pressure to get you in gear.”

How did they pull it off week after week? “Just having trust in the process,” Grace said, which is actor-speak for finding a way to project manage a diverse set of creative people from around the world who haven’t met before but must come together quickly to produce something new on a tight deadline.

Theater is massively collaborative. There’s also a firm deadline. Those forces pull theater-makers in different directions: Team-building takes time, but opening night doesn’t care. The immoveable inevitability of the performance—when the project must be ready—prompts theater-makers to reverse-engineer clear timelines, ambitious benchmarks and a joint-problem-solving orientation.

Actors can trust each other, even when they haven’t worked together before, because theater has a well-known process. But you can only trust the process if the process provides structured flexibility for creative people to take risks and contribute to the vision.

Grace was noted for showing what Edmondson calls “small-l leadership”—initiating collaboration when not in a defined leadership role. That earned her the lead in Macbeth. Then, she became the first person in the company other than founder Rob Myles to direct a Shakespearean play, Pericles.

“I had a mini-meltdown when we started rehearsals,” she recalled. “What if everyone thinks I don’t know what I’m doing? What if everyone hates this? What if I’m a terrible director?” Zoom flattens vibes. You can’t read people’s body language. Grace called Myles. You don’t need to have all the answers, he told her. People will tell you if it’s not working. That’s how our process works. Trust the process.

Innovation needs direction because creating something new involves, by definition, working with creative people. “We are a very particular type of person,” Grace said. “You can spot creative people a mile off.” As much as creativity is a prerequisite for innovation, direction of creativity toward the project vision is essential. “Creative people have a way of thinking that is abstract and different and brilliant,” Grace said, smiling. “You also get strong personalities, people who have their own process, and, yes, a little bit of ego as well.”

Tensions while teaming test and improve product quality, but only if the creative process includes a system for managing conflict toward a shared vision.

A structure that efficiently turns blazing creativity into quality products through people and project management—that’s what “the process” is. Trust the process.