ALISON BEARD: I am Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius. And this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: Adi, do you remember back in 2022 when we were thinking about our first all-day live virtual leadership conference? And we really didn’t know what we were doing at all, but we hired a freelance consultant and we pulled together people from around the company who were experts in various things, us in editorial, others in marketing, product development, design production and then we actually put on the event a few months later?
ADI IGNATIUS: And it went really well. I remember that extremely well. And it’s one of my best experiences at HBR was partly because it was an all-volunteer team, pretty much of people who had other jobs, but who came together for this really important task and we pulled it off.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So that is what our guest today would call a flash team. And she has studied groups like this who are pulled together very quickly. They don’t normally work together, and they develop a camaraderie and teamwork. They collaborate to put out a product or develop an idea more quickly than one would normally be able to in an organization.
You can do this within organizations like we did at HBR, but you can also now, thanks to the internet, thanks to online labor markets, you can search all over the world for the right kind of expertise you need. And you can also get really granular about the type of skills that you’re looking for and what’s more, artificial intelligence can help you do all of this.
ADI IGNATIUS: So it’s interesting because when we formed our own ad hoc events team, we wondered, look, we probably need to set up a proper permanent team. So I’d be really interested in the calculation, which is more effective, which is more cost-efficient, whether you have the full-time team or whether you just do it on a kind of ad hoc basis as needed.
ALISON BEARD: My guest today is Melissa Valentine. She’s a professor at Stanford University. And I think her argument is that because work is changing so quickly and you really don’t know the skills that you’re going to need tomorrow, it actually is more cost-effective, more time efficient to build a business around Flash Teams.
It’s not necessarily outsourcing the work, but it’s having a really good idea of the talent that you can access outside and inside your organization, what skills they have, and then staff every single project really appropriately. So I learned a lot. I think it’s something that we might want to experiment with more at HBR.
She, in addition to being a professor, is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence with Michael Bernstein of the book Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI Enhanced, On-Demand Work.
ALISON BEARD: What exactly differentiates the kind of flash team that you’re talking about from an ad hoc project team that might be put together within an organization?
MELISSA VALENTINE: So teams are recognized to be super valuable because you get lots of smart people, they get together, they collaborate. So it’s different about a flash team is we started to recognize how technology can give teams different properties, different superpowers. So one of the technologies is actually just the internet. And because of the internet, it means that there’s millions of people all over the world who are expert in something that you might need. So with the internet or with online labor markets like Upwork, the search for who’s available to help join your team is so much broader.
Two is we’re all a lot more comfortable with remote work now. So you can search from millions of people online, you can pull them together in a remote way. And then AI is also available now to help us do the things that make a good team, find people, bring them together, optimize the team staffing, help them talk to each other, help manage the team. It is a project team, but it’s like now with superpowers because of technology.
ALISON BEARD: Why do you think it’s important for both organizations as a whole and then individual managers to learn how to source and manage teams in this way right now?
MELISSA VALENTINE: Well, it’s funny because when I wrote the flash teams book, it wasn’t like the book the world was necessarily asking for, but now that it’s out, I’m seeing it’s the book that the world needs because it is a moment where people are really worried about jobs – will we have jobs in the future? And I think what the Flash team’s idea really shows is all of us are entrepreneurs.
Even if you’re in a big company, not necessarily at a startup, all of us have ideas. All of us can see here’s a problem that could be solved, here’s an idea that could be brought to life. And so with Flash Teams, the barrier to what it takes to bring your idea to life or to solve a problem is so much lower. I could just get a team started, I could get a team together in minutes, and with all of these tools, I can be much more effective in solving problems.
ALISON BEARD: And so the idea then is that there’s huge both time savings and cost savings in assembling teams. This way, I can get it cheaper and I can get the project done faster.
MELISSA VALENTINE: It is definitely time savings, there’s possibility for real cost savings and I think there’s a hope that it can also be a lot more effective. There’s a lot of tools that can you get a better group together. Who’s going to have more likelihood of success?
Or when you’re in flight, you’ll have all these tools to help see how are things going, what’s the likelihood we’re going to be successful. There’s also definitely some performance help that comes with all of these tools.
We really wanted people to realize how accessible this idea is. So even if you’re not somebody who’s super tech-savvy or someone who’s really focused on software right now, sort of the mindset that we offer in the book is first recognizing, we call it experts everywhere all the time. It is really easy to find people to help. And so we try to help people just think about it in terms of problems and tools.
ALISON BEARD: It might help for listeners to just hear an example of a flash team that tackled a project that might traditionally have been handled within an organization drawing on people in different offices, maybe from that company, but instead, was outsourced to this global network that you’re talking about and able to accomplish those goals more quickly and more cost-effectively.
MELISSA VALENTINE: So we actually worked with a doctor who worked in an emergency room. So he was one of our early users and he had this idea for an app in the hospital that was going to really help patients. So his idea was that when ambulances were approaching the hospital, they could have a GPS signal that was displayed on the emergency room wall that was showing when the ambulance would show up. Because what he had noticed is that ambulances would show up and then people would gather all the right doctors and the right equipment and stuff, and he was like, what if we use that 10 minutes to get ready?
So that was his simple idea of what if we could build that app. Typically, the way that would work in an organization is he would pitch it to his boss who might pitch it to his boss, they would finally talk to IT, and then IT would be like, that’s not on the roadmap. So it would never get about, because even though it’s a very simple idea and would actually help, it’s just not an organizational priority necessarily.
So this doctor, he was super entrepreneurial and he wanted to just build this app. So he did convene a flash team using our approach and using our software. And within six weeks, they had built the app. It was a functional prototype, they’d actually tested it with some ambulance drivers and the doctor’s local community, and it was pulled together with 30 experts from all over the world.
I think that he ended up having a CTO, we would call her, who was an engineer in Bangladesh, and she oversaw the whole thing. So anyways, that was one of the really fun ones because of how cool the idea is and then how entrepreneurial the doctor ended up being.
But what was really cool about that one is just how quickly it came together. He had the idea, he started using this approach and then within six weeks, he has this functional app that he was taking around to VCs and stuff.
ALISON BEARD: But it is something that theoretically, he could have pitched to maybe only his manager to take out of some discretionary budget that they might’ve had at the end of the year. Have you seen that approach work within organizations or companies where because it’s a smaller investment, it’s easier to get approval for an individual manager to create a flash team to work on a particular project that they’re excited about?
MELISSA VALENTINE: Yeah. Yeah. You’ve got totally the right spirit with it. Since then, we’ve seen so many examples across so many companies where people are doing this. So that’s a great example. Maybe a manager has a smaller fund that could be used for it, but across all of the different examples, it can be a big company like a Google for example. We met people who were doing essentially Flash Teams within Google.
And so in that case, you’re not searching across the whole internet to find someone to come build something with you. You’re just looking across the whole Google workforce and then using some of the tools of optimizing the team staffing, figuring out who’s available when, and all of that is algorithmic. You can use AI to do it better. You can use large language models to do it easily.
ALISON BEARD: Do you see this as a tool or process or strategy that is for technology-forward companies or does it work really across industries?
MELISSA VALENTINE: One of the things that has been most exciting about Flash Teams is when we present this to groups, almost everybody has an idea of what they would do with the Flash team.
Somebody was an employee at the Minneapolis DMV and they just sent a LinkedIn DM and was like, we could do a process redesign, we could fix this dashboard or whatever. There was a group of mental health experts in Australia who were like, we could do Flash Teams of mental health triage a huge continent. So how do they find each other?
And it really highlights the spirit of the book is that we’re all entrepreneurs, we are all problem solvers. The takeoff so far has certainly been more within software. But there’s examples of Flash Teams of business models, and there’s a company called Catalant that does Flash Teams of MBAs, basically. There’s a company called Chief Outsider and they’ll pull together a flash team that will make brand or marketing for you. So it’s really taken off across different industries.
ALISON BEARD: So I want to dig into some of the practicalities of doing this, and let’s talk about recruitment first, the idea of assembling your team. We’ve talked about those online labor markets like TaskRabbit and Upwork, and I know there are different ones around the world.
How exactly do you start the process of saying, I have this idea, I don’t even know what types of people I need to help me build it. Which market should I go to? How do I advertise the project? Just walk me through that process.
MELISSA VALENTINE: So having done it a bunch now we instinctively and intuitively know how to think about looking for people to help recognizing the need for help. There’s probably an expert who could help me with this. There’s probably somebody who knows how to do this.
And then starting to kind of formulate the first question that you have in this day and age, the cool thing is you can even take that to a large language model. Who would be the first team member if I wanted to make this software app? And I do that with my exec ed classes now.
I’ll ask people what problem would you solve and who’s the first expert? And honestly, just asking that question to something like ChatGPT gets you a pretty good sense of the expertise you’re looking for. The next thing that we tend to do is look to something like Upwork, like a large, an online labor market.
And what I like to show people is that Upwork will have these really helpful profiles that tell you a lot about who the person is, and sometimes it will even have a little area that says available now and then you can just interview that person for 15 minutes. You pay them for your time, and you just get an idea. You say, I want to be the first generative AI use case in my company, what should I do? And you find the right expert and they can give you a sense of spend 50 minutes talking to them and you have a decent sense of it.
ALISON BEARD: And are there really enough people who are making themselves available for gig work aren’t full-time employees at other organizations to be your expert on any topic?
MELISSA VALENTINE: I like to do a fun exercise with my undergrads where I’ll tell them, you need a professionally designed team logo before class is over, go. And they all start being like, there’s no way. And it’s stressful. But in every case they’ve found somebody within 80 minutes, every team, every undergrad has found somebody. What I’m trying to illustrate with that is yes, something like Upwork has millions of people who are available. It’s a very live dynamic network, so finding people to talk to and who want to help out, it’s very fast, it’s very dynamic.
ALISON BEARD: For managers who are trying to assemble this crack team of experts from around the world, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see them run into and how do they overcome them?
MELISSA VALENTINE: One of the chapters in the book, we have a phrase that I just cannot underline enough, which is you have to get the launch. So if you put a lot of thought into the launch, things are going to go much better. So things like what software are we going to work on? What are some of the team norms? What is some of the team structure? Just having that place for people to land.
So they show up with all of this entrepreneurial energy to help solve a problem, but it’s helping them know how to get started from the beginning and not spending a lot of time being like, are we on teams? Are we on Google Meet? Are we on Slack? Whatever it is, you deploy this suite of communication tools and the knowledge repository. You just have that going at the start and then people get together and they just go.
ALISON BEARD: And are there ever problems in that you’ve hired the wrong person and have to get rid of them and replace them? Or a person’s skills don’t really match the project you’re working for?
MELISSA VALENTINE: If a manager is really leaning into the flash team model, there’s two ways that I think they have to be ready to adapt fast. One is your plan is certainly not right. Your plan will certainly need to adapt the moment you get there. So you spend a lot of time getting the launch ready, you push play, and then somebody shows up and they don’t have the skill set or one of the tools is down or the internet is out somewhere. And so from day one, you have to be ready to adapt.
But then the second piece is because you’re hiring so fast, sometimes it’s not the right fit. Maybe it’s the wrong skill set, maybe it’s the wrong fit. But when you’re going really fast and doing a six-week sprint when just everyone’s trying to get things together, we sort of have this hire fast, fire fast.
Now, I do need to do a big asterisk here. We have a whole chapter about being a good manager, being good to people, so the gig economy can be exploitative. And that’s certainly not the intent here. The hire fast, fire fast is not intended to be exploitative. It’s intended to be: people really believe in the idea and you’ve given them a chance to really help build something that you also really believe in that the group just coheres. It’s been really fun to build and see how much solidarity can develop in these kinds of groups when people are just really building together.
So if somebody is out of sync with the group, it doesn’t feel good to them. It doesn’t feel good to the group. So just recognizing where the energy is really flowing and where things are really working, and then just not letting something introduce a lot of dysfunction into a group that’s pretty task focused.
ALISON BEARD: Don’t let things fester. Taking a step back, these online labor markets also make it very easy to enter into contractual relationships with people such that you’ve agreed to pay them for a certain amount of hours or for a certain block of work. So that is handled up front.
MELISSA VALENTINE: Yeah, so that’s one of the technological capabilities online labor markets will give you. They will do the contracting, they’ll know things about the local labor laws, they’ll handle the IP or the NDA and stuff like that.
So a lot of that is handled in the labor market, which makes it really fast to just get started. We also see the application of this idea in just large companies already. I mentioned a few of them, and there you already have full-time employees who are already on all the platforms. So in that case, you’re just pulling together a flash team internally. Then that’s also all taken care of already.
ALISON BEARD: And then as a manager in that launch process, that’s so critically important. You and your co-author talk about establishing clear roles at the start, which is sort of advice for any good project manager. Everyone needs to know what they’re doing and have clear assignments and no overlaps. And when there is an overlap, it’s acknowledged and just set out that framework before everyone starts.
MELISSA VALENTINE: Yeah, Flash Teams really brought our attention to the idea of role clarity, which is as you’re saying, I mean that’s a management classic, always a good practice to have. And the reason it’s so important with Flash Teams is it’s a group of strangers, so they’re coming together, they’ve never met before, and it’s already instantly clear who has what expertise, what they’re responsible for, so they can immediately start working as a team.
And there are a lot of good examples of that happening in different places, like on film crews or in hospitals. So those are places where you have temporary teams like this. But I’ll say the other thing that’s super helpful about role clarity, because talking about not every manager knows exactly who to hire. If you’ve never done software before, maybe you don’t know what is the difference between UI user interface and UX user research, but you can just ask somebody that they already know. They have a lot of role clarity so they can start to teach you who they are, what their responsibility is, the kinds of decisions you’ll make, and they’ll just help you, they teach you their roles.
You become kind of the general contractor, and then they teach you what their expertise is. They teach each other what their expertise is. So that kind of role clarity just makes the whole thing work together really easily.
ALISON BEARD: I love the analogy of a general contractor. You’re the same way a person would bring in tradespeople to do tile or carpentry or plumbing or electrical work. You’re doing the same thing for the project that you’re working on. It’s just instead of them coming to a physical place, they’re coming to your online work hub to do that work.
MELISSA VALENTINE: Exactly.
ALISON BEARD: Aside from I guess curiosity and adaptability, which you’ve addressed, are there any other key skills or attributes that you think really successful flash team managers have?
MELISSA VALENTINE: When you have energizing vision of what success is, if there’s somebody who’s there who’s like, this is what a solved problem looks like, or this is what it means for this idea to come to life, then that person is often playing a really key integrating function.
A risk with a flash team, people aren’t together. They might be on different time zones, is just that the effort gets fragmented. But if you have somebody who has that driving energy and they’re very passionate about solving this problem, then they’re going to play this integration role. They’re going to look at how all the pieces fit together, they’re going to troubleshoot, they’re going to problem solve. So there’s a bunch of studies that we’ve done over the last 10 years studying Flash Teams, and I think that that integrating manager role is really important. Without that, the flash team is much less likely to succeed.
ALISON BEARD: And you also address the idea that they have to insist on documentation. There’s a funny anecdote where the project managers just kept saying to everyone on Slack, just look at the docs, look at the docs, look at the docs because that’s where everything is recorded to make sure people stay on the same page, right?
MELISSA VALENTINE: That’s totally true. And that’s actually the story of the same guy that I was talking about at the beginning, and he’s one of our favorite examples. He was so patient throughout that and all of the back-channeling where he was asking all of these questions and when the answers weren’t coming together, he just stayed persistent, really playing that integrating leadership part. But you’re totally right. Documentation is absolutely key because everyone is online.
ALISON BEARD: And people in different time zones need to know what’s happened while they’ve been gone. I’ve interviewed leaders of all remote organizations and they say that’s absolutely critical because otherwise the lack of coordination creates overlap work, miscommunication, just a lot of mistakes that wouldn’t otherwise happen.
MELISSA VALENTINE: Yeah, totally. It is foundational to remote work, and I’m not sure if this is where we’re headed. The fun thing about it I think is that becomes the data source that then is feeding all of the AI tools that are going to help with more things like people knowing what they’re supposed to do, what decisions have been made and so forth. It becomes the trail of decisions and then also the data set that the AI will draw on to help people coordinate better.
ALISON BEARD: So talk about that, how you incorporate AI into designing a better, not just team because of the people you’ve recruited or AI agents you’ve recruited, but because of the way the team is working together.
MELISSA VALENTINE: Yeah. I was saying the launch is everything and sort of the individual onboarding similarly needs to be very effective. When we first at a Flash team, we were relying on 2017 UI, so it’s a description of what your task is, but now the onboarding is using LLMs. It can be very dynamic, very interactive.
You click into the Flash team, you’re brought to the platform where everybody is, and you’re welcomed by your own onboarding agent who tells you what you’re doing and what platform we’re on, who’s your manager, who’s your teammates, what everybody’s doing. And that is happening in non-Flash Teams too. Larger companies that kind of onboarding, very interactive onboarding.
ALISON BEARD: Are there tools that project managers or Flash team managers can use to foster the kind of teamwork you’re talking about, the launch and then the coordination?
MELISSA VALENTINE: One of the examples that we have is a bot that can help you decide how to experiment with your team design. So let’s say that you started out and you decided to launch your team pretty decentralized. And then over time you’re like, we’re not going fast enough. I think maybe we could try a more centralized or hierarchical team structure or whatever.
You could develop a spreadsheet using even ChatGPT that will recommend to you, when’s the right time to try a redesign? And then how do you measure how the redesign went, and then how soon can you try another redesign? And then how do you tell it how it went? So that kind of feedback loop for the manager, try something, collects information on how it went, try something else, that’s available to anybody.
And we really about just the capabilities and the easy software hacks that are in reach for anybody. And you can go pretty high-tech with some custom software as well. So our lab does a lot of proof of concept software. We’re not doing any enterprise grade software that somebody should come and buy if they want to support our research, that’s certainly available, but ours is very proof of concept. We’ll just be like, can you convene a team on demand hiring everybody in 15 minutes? And then we prove it’s possible.
ALISON BEARD: Are there any other ways that you see AI enabling more effective Flash Teams?
MELISSA VALENTINE: Well, a fun one that we’ve been talking about a lot lately is AI simulations. And my co-author will talk about them as what if machines. So using AI simulations, you can sort of take the five people you’re considering hiring, input their roles, some of their experience, and you can simulate what happens if this team is given this task, what happens if this team has this structure and you can sort of simulate whether it’s going to work, and then that helps you reverse engineer and design in a certain way. That’s been a pretty fun one.
ALISON BEARD: And what about incentivizing teamwork? Because you’re basically collecting a bunch of gig workers who are independent contractors and they want to get their work done, and ideally, I’m sure they want the project goals to be met, but once their work is done and they’re paid, they don’t necessarily need to see it through and help their colleagues who are on this flash team with them. So how do you make sure that people really do feel like a team?
MELISSA VALENTINE: Yeah, I think that the nature of remote work can lend itself to that sort of fragmentation. So part of the launch I think is thinking about where you need people to feel like they’re together, where you need cohesion and thinking about if there’s a way to, as you said, set up the incentives or the accountability so that it’s a group level incentive or a group level accountability
ALISON BEARD: And looking at all your experiments, looking at scenarios where this has been accomplished in companies, do you think that eventually, it could be applied to almost every kind of work that’s happening within our organization, provided people can work remotely to do it?
MELISSA VALENTINE: I think the vision that we have with Flash Teams, the vision of it, there’s all of this team science and organization science. There’s a recognition of how we’re effective together as a team or how we’re effective together as an organization.
And so the last part of the book really thinks about if you were to use AI to augment team science or use AI to augment organization science, then it means your teams are going to be much more effective. Your teams are going to act and coordinate much more intelligently. And also your organizations, the part where you get people together on the fly is important and recognizing that when they’re working online, you’re getting all of this data and the data can then be used as sort of a team science exercise. I think that’s the vision of where it could head. And so I think that for any industry, certainly they could be using data to structure and design their teams more effectively.
ALISON BEARD: So if you’re advising a C-suite leader who wants to bring the culture strategy of Flash Teams to the group, what do you recommend they do? How do they introduce the idea?
MELISSA VALENTINE: I think the first step to me would be looking at what data do you have on your workforce? So for example, do you already have a database that tells you everybody’s skills, everybody’s availability, their roles, their expertise?
Once you start to see a data set of a large group of people and you start to see how many skills and how much expertise there is, and then you can start to think about more dynamically matching people to problems, that tends to be the missing step that I see in a lot of companies.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, absolutely. And where the gaps are so that you do then turn to an online labor market to fill in people as needed, and then maybe one of those people who helps you for several projects is a good potential hire because you’ve already worked with them.
MELISSA VALENTINE: Yeah, exactly.
ALISON BEARD: So what about the broader implications here though, because you’re recommending that organizations try to move into this flash era, which inherently means that they have fewer full-time employees because they’re pulling together teams ad hoc with the skills they need at the moment, but what does that mean for workers in terms of job stability benefits like healthcare and retirement? How does that change the labor market?
MELISSA VALENTINE: I think there’s a real need and opportunity for society and leaders as a whole to look at this question of employment and look at all of the social safety net that goes with employment at present Society as a whole is thinking about gig work, full-time employee, temporary employment and all of that stuff.
I think that the flash team’s perspective, I think we’ve tried to really decouple that from full-time employment. You can take, for example, even just a job like Stanford. I do a different project every year, but I have full-time employment. So I think the pieces of Flash Teams that we see as visionary and we see as useful for society is solving problems better and using data, as I was saying, to structure your team better. However, it doesn’t need to play out in a way that is precarious gig work.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, as you said, it can be done within organizations. If you have a large organization, you can staff projects more dynamically almost in the way that consultancies always have, even though they’ve required physical presence generally to send client teams to a particular location or destination or group of C-suite executives that they’re working with. It’s like that model for any kind of work.
MELISSA VALENTINE: Exactly.
ALISON BEARD: Great. Well, Melissa, thank you so much for talking to me today and having me wrap my head around this whole idea. I hope I get a chance to experiment with a Flash Team soon. Good luck.
MELISSA VALENTINE: Thanks for having me on.
ALISON BEARD: That was Melissa Valentine, an associate professor at Stanford University and a senior fellow at its Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence. She’s the coauthor with Michael Bernstein of Flash Teams.
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Thanks to our team, senior producer, Mary Dooe, audio product manager, Ian Fox and senior production specialist, Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.