Networks and teams have become central in the way we organize ourselves inside and between organizations. With Kurt Lewin’s idea that there is nothing as useful as a good theory, it is remarkable that both the concept of networks and the concept of teams often are defined very implicit and seldom are used consistently.
In this article I will address some of the reasons creating this situation. The main reason is that we in the western hemisphere is in the middle of something Peter Senge calls Galilean shifts, where our traditional worldview no longer is sufficient to explain phenomena like networks and teams.