From an organizational point of view, teams are the most useful unit of analysis for work. Just assign a mission to a team and expect a result that other parts of the organization use as part of an overall work process. All the really messy complexity of how something gets done is held within the team and its immediate local network of teams.

Purpose for a team has two parents: (1) a mission directed from a vertically-linked executive sponsor and (2) a result that is meaningful in the horizontally-linked workflow sequence from suppliers to customers. These are the simplifying external relationships that characterize the whole organization’s structure and process. From a team point of view, of course, this externally-driven purpose is only the beginning of the journey.