Supercharging Innovation with “Flash Teams”

I'm Alison Beard. And I'm Audie Ignatius, and this is the HBR Idea Cast. Mati, 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, you know, us in editorial, others in marketing, product development, design, production. And then we actually put on the event a few months later.

Yeah, and it went really well. I remember that extremely well and it's one of my best experiences of HP R and it was partly because, you know, 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. 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.

So it's interesting because when we formed our own ad hoc events team. We sort of wondered looking. we probably need to set up a proper permanent team, right? So I'm I'd be really interested in the calculation, you know, 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. So 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 gonna need tomorrow, it actually is more cost effective, more time efficient to

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