Despite the best efforts of hundreds of the world's top managers and consultants, creating an effective, repeatable roadmap for navigating major organizational change has been elusive.

There have been successes, but they appear driven by the individual, intangible genius of a few business superstars. These leaders not only drive change, but also successfully manage the process of change to solve problems of physical infrastructure, strategic planning, and the riddle of how to adapt and optimize the human capital of their organizations. What do these leaders use to produce results and how can their successes be translated and taught to others?

The answer lies in understanding the part of individual, team, and organizational behavior that remains a constant before, during, and after the change process. Little has been done to quantify the problems caused by change, much less the solutions. Most advice on the subject appropriately revolves around the need to operate in the dynamic environment of teams. Virtual teams - those constantly formed and reformed - were supposed to be the answer. They were supposed to be more nimble than the traditional military command and control structure with clear, and unbreakable, lines of authority. Yet, teams proved a drain on resources when they involved many people getting bogged down in the rehashing of problems.

People more often than not seemed to produce more working on their own than when asked to work cooperatively. A problem for teams as big as the lack of improved productivity was managers' inability to predict whether a team would succeed. Was it the right group of people? Would they work well together? What kind of conflicts would they have? Would they end up in analysis paralysis? Might they form splinter groups? Would team members obsess on some problems and overlook others?

There was no telling what would happen. Managers were forced to leave people in roles that were comfortable and predictable or run the risk of shuffling the deck and perhaps being dealt a worse hand. The United States Department of the Navy reported in 1998 that goal attainment depends increasingly on the effectiveness of teams, but it noted, "A specific problem in improving team effectiveness is the lack of diagnostic tools to determine which team characteristics need improvement to make the team more effective." (Office of Naval Research, November 1998) Retreating to individual cubbyholes is not the answer when we are waging a war with the massive force of change. We must build strength around it and recognize the magnitude that we are attempting to withstand. Marketplace victories simply require figuring out how to make teams work.

The longest tradition in team building has been to put people together because they have the skills or experiences necessary to get the job done. Specialization allowed for success and efficiency. If you were climbing a mountain, it's been understood that you need at least one person who knows about weather conditions, one who manages supplies, someone to do the cooking, and an expert on climbing who knows the terrain as well. But teams put together with great regard for such learned or cognitive abilities alone often still failed.

So the conventional wisdom began to include recognition of the importance of attitude. Organizations spent untold sums on what came to be known as feel-good seminars. If you were going to risk your futures together, the message was that you should try to like and trust team members. Programs sprouted up that engaged work groups in everything from walking on coals together to painting pots that symbolized their unity of purpose.

Still, if we do not know how well a group of people is likely to perform without these interventions, how do we know if the dollars spent will improve the odds of success? With few diagnostic tools available to measure team effectiveness, the common sense approach has been to query team members on their satisfaction with the results. Did they get more done working together than they would have accomplished on their own? (They usually say team meetings were a burden and team issues a distraction.)

Skills are essential. Attitudes matter. But the only way we will ever be able to make teams more effective is by putting teams together with the right mix of natural abilities. Managing by instinct makes it possible to predict whether a team will reach it goals. People strive in natural patterns, or MOs. The modus operandi of the individual is ingrained; it's an innate ability. Therefore, you can trust it. Because it doesn't change, it is both predictable and reliable. You know what each team is going to do, regardless of the changes that come about.

Since team members will perform true to form there is at least one constant leaders can depend upon. Just as teams require differing skills (the cognitive domain), and shared values (the affective domain), so do they need a diversity of instinctive approaches (the conative domain). Conative actions are those derived from instincts. Striving instincts are subconscious and therefore immeasurable, but the conative actions derived from them are now quantifiable.

Conative assessment allows us to ensure a team has an appropriate balance between inclinations to innovate and to stabilize, between those who will justify and those who will simplify, between contributions of organized systems and of the ability to adapt systems to change, of tangible and intangible solutions. Changes, without recognition of the importance of instincts for dealing with them, can mean a constant churning of roles with such negative effect that retention becomes a pervasive problem. Keeping a team together - viability - relies on leaders being able to assign specific, though changing tasks, that fit the person's MO. Skills can be taught as required, but instincts don't change. Teach people the best ways to utilize their natural abilities and training dollars will be more effectively spent, people will have a greater joy of accomplishment, and productivity rates will improve as much as 200%.

Instinct-based management is not a vision for the future. Over 500,000 case studies prove it is a capability on which leaders of today can be trained. Leaders of the teams that will take advantage of opportunities for the future will not fear change. Successful leaders control change by giving people the freedom to operate according to their instinctive strengths.

(Walt can be reached at walt.kehn@trainingemporium.net)