Shared reality

This page is about one of the four Guiding Principles of TeamOps: Shared Reality. To learn more about the other three principles, return to the main TeamOps page for a complete overview of TeamOps.

While other management philosophies prioritize the speed of knowledge transfer, TeamOps optimizes for the speed of knowledge retrieval in company-wide documentation.

All teamwork must be based on and informed by an objective — and shared — reality. A collective team member experience that your team shares to develop trust, direct contributions, motivate productivity and empowers new team members to quickly ramp up in their roles. Typically, this shared reality is composed of three elements:

• Information - All team members should be able to autonomously consume the information and resources that enable productivity in their role.
• Objectives - Ironically, the day-to-day of your shared reality is usually defined by what you are trying to bring to reality – a result that you’re collaborating to develop.
• Values - Team member experience is influenced by more than company operations, it’s most directly manifested as team behaviors which can be observed, recorded, and quantified.

Once defined and activated, this reality then is preserved for continuous and universal access and accountability through documentation in a knowledge management system, or “single source of truth.”

Action tenets of building a Shared Reality, including real-world examples of each, are below.