A Complex Systems Theory and Model of Distributed Team Development

Confidence in distributed or virtual team working is running high. However, some concern is evident that practice is leaping ahead of theories to guide its implementation. There are calls for new and improved theories to specifically embrace distributed team working. This chapter is a response to such calls, offering a complex-systems-based model of organization development. This model was originally designed to improve performance of the management of technology and innovation, but also underpins a methodology of community of practice and team development known as the KALiF System. The theory and model described here is mainly a synthesis of established team and community of practice theory, Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis, and elements of complexity science based on the work of the biologists and systems thinkers Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, and also Stuart Kaufmann on attenuated supracritical systems.