Most teams have a pattern
A way of structuring themselves and dealing with uncertainty, but they often lack a precise way to see it, talk about it, and decide what to do with it.
The Team Type Diagnostic makes that pattern visible. It examines how a unit actually operates. A unit can be any coherent working group whose members share goals, constraints, and decisions on a regular basis. This may be a team, a business unit, a function, or a cross-functional group.
The diagnostic maps the behaviour of this unit onto a compact structural model built from five axes. These axes capture how the unit relates to its environment, commits to action, interprets uncertainty, coordinates internally, and responds to signals.
To give an intuition for these axes, we use four orienting questions about the unit’s everyday reality.
Environment. Does the unit operate in a stable, well defined context, or in a messy, turbulent one with many stakeholders and shifting demands.
Uncertainty. Does it mostly rely on known models and convergent evidence, or does it work with bets, possibilities, and incomplete information.
Commitments. Does it prefer to lock in decisions and drive them to completion, or keep options open and adapt as it learns.
Action. Does it buffer and stage its actions, or respond quickly and directly to environmental signals.
These intuitive questions correspond to the model’s underlying five structural axes, which the diagnostic measures in a more rigorous way.
Team types, layers, and variants
The framework recognises sixteen team types. Each type is a coherent structural configuration that reflects consistent positions across the five axes. Every type also has two variants that express the same underlying pattern under different environmental conditions, governance constraints, or uncertainty profiles. Variants do not change the core logic of a type. Instead, they describe predictable differences in emphasis that arise when the same structural pattern is expressed in different contexts.
Each type has an inner layer, which defines what the unit optimises for internally, and an outer layer, which describes how it engages with its environment. Variants inherit this structure but accent it differently depending on context.
The diagnostic helps a unit make its structural pattern explicit, understand the characteristic strengths and tensions of that pattern, and consider whether an alternative type or variant may offer a better alignment with its environment or objectives. People can say “we are this kind of team unit, operating in this kind of environment, which explains these pains” instead of “everything is a mess”.