This article is part of a series called Surface Tension - What invisible force holds your organisation together—and might suddenly tear it apart? You can find an index and introduction to all articles when they are published here .

When Team Building Fails: The Illusion of Surface Solutions

A familiar scene exists in organisations worldwide: A team spends thousands on a retreat featuring trust falls, personality assessments, and inspirational speakers. Everyone leaves energised with certificates and action plans, only to return to the office and slide back into the same dysfunctional patterns within days. Despite the investment, nothing fundamental changes.

This is surface tension at work in its most literal form—like a water strider insect that appears to walk on water while never penetrating beneath the surface. Conventional team-building activities and motivational talks create temporary ripples but rarely break through to affect the powerful forces below.

Most organisations invest in these above-the-waterline activities because they're visible, structured, and comfortable. They provide the illusion of progress without the discomfort of addressing what determines team function—the unconscious dynamics that operate beneath the surface. Studies consistently show that over 70% of team-building interventions fail to create lasting change precisely because they don't address these deeper patterns.

Meanwhile, the fundamental forces that hold your organisation together—or might suddenly tear it apart—remain untouched. These deeper currents—who plays what psychological role, how power flows versus what the org chart indicates, and what topics remain undiscussable—are the true determinants of team success and business outcomes.

The Two Layers of Team Dynamics: Surface and Depth

The field of group relations, pioneered by the Tavistock Institute in London following World War II, reveals how groups operate on two simultaneous levels: the conscious "work group" focused on tasks and the unconscious "basic assumption group" driven by emotional undercurrents.

Through decades of research and experiential conferences, Tavistock practitioners discovered that organisations develop sophisticated psychological systems to manage collective anxiety, often at the expense of effectiveness. This is the actual surface tension in organisations—the forces maintaining apparent stability while concealing turbulence below.

These unconscious dynamics explain why rational strategies and conventional team-building efforts fail despite competent execution. While motivational speakers and team activities address surface behaviours, the real drivers of team performance lie in these deeper patterns that silently dictate who can say what, which perspectives are valued, and how conflicts are managed.

These insights from the Tavistock research show that groups unconsciously assign psychological roles to members far beyond formal job descriptions. These roles serve as containers for collective emotions that the group struggles to process. Understanding these dynamics gives leaders a powerful lens for improving team effectiveness that conventional approaches miss entirely.

The Shadow Org Chart: Unconscious Roles That Hold Teams Together

While the organisation chart is published and easily understood, alternative roles are alive, well, and seldom published. When you see the roles below, you will immediately recognise them and be able to identify the people in your organisation who play them. These roles are seldom brought up above the surface and spoken about constructively. They mostly lurk in the depths, significantly influencing behaviour from the shadows.

Emotional Management Roles

Power and Process Roles

Projection Roles

When these roles become fixed, the organisation loses flexibility and innovative capacity. No amount of team building or motivational speaking can break through this surface tension. The person always cast as the critic can't champion new ideas, and the optimist can't raise legitimate concerns. The group becomes stuck in a psychological straitjacket of its own making—a rigid surface tension that maintains apparent stability while preventing genuine adaptation.

Companies that have broken through the surface

Oticon's "Spaghetti Organisation"

The Danish hearing aid company Oticon tackled this challenge with a radical approach that deliberately broke through the surface tension of fixed roles. CEO Lars Kolind didn't invest in conventional team building; instead, he entirely abolished traditional departments and fixed roles, creating a "spaghetti organisation" where responsibilities continually shifted based on project needs.

More significant than the structural changes was the psychological shift this created. By refusing to allow people to settle into fixed roles, Oticon disrupted the surface tension that had kept unconscious patterns in place and limited innovation capacity. The result was dramatic—they reduced product development cycles from years to months and introduced groundbreaking products that competitors couldn't match.

Notably, Oticon didn't achieve this through motivational speakers or team-building retreats but by fundamentally altering the unconscious forces that had maintained its organisational surface tension.

Microsoft's Penetration Beyond Surface Culture

Even without radical restructuring, organisations can improve group dynamics by penetrating beyond surface-level interventions. Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft didn't rely on conventional team building to transform its culture. Instead, it dismantled its win-at-all-costs culture by championing a move from a "know-it-all" to a "learn-it-all" ethos that directly addressed the underlying psychological patterns.

Line graph showing Microsofts stock price from 1985 to 2025, with CEO tenure periods marked. The y-axis represents stock price in USD, and the x-axis shows time. Three vertical lines mark the start of each CEOs tenure. Bill Gates is depicted on the left before the red dashed line marking Steve Ballmer’s start around 2000. Ballmer is shown in the centre, serving until around 2014, where a green dashed line marks the beginning of Satya Nadella’s tenure. Nadella’s image is on the right. During Gates’ tenure, the stock rose steadily. Under Ballmer, it plateaued. Under Nadella, it surged sharply, peaking near $450. The chart visually correlates leadership transitions with stock performance trends.

This included using data from tools like MyAnalytics and Viva Insights to reveal who was involved in meetings and highlighting overlooked and overused voices, helping leaders spot imbalances in participation—making visible what had previously operated beneath the surface.

The result was a culture that stopped hiding problems and started learning from them. At Microsoft, surfacing issues replaced silent competition, and many staff reported more inclusive, generative meetings. The company's financial turnaround speaks to the impact of breaking through the surface tension of unconscious dynamics and shifting them towards healthy collaboration.

Implementation Insight: Breaking Through Your Team's Surface Tension

Unlike conventional team building that merely ripples the surface, addressing unconscious dynamics requires going below the surface to affect the currents below:

Separate from your usual team meetings, spend time in a neutral environment mapping the informal roles in your team—who plays the critic, the peacemaker, the visionary, the cheerleader, the optimist, and the pessimist?

See the list above and describe the roles in a way that matches your organisation's language. This process of naming alone often creates powerful shifts as people recognise patterns they've been blind to—like suddenly seeing what has been holding everything in place.

Then, deliberately disrupt these roles and the patterns they produce by creating projects where people must operate outside their typical roles. This breaks the surface tension that has maintained your team's psychological status quo. It might mean:

This intervention creates turbulence in the previously smooth surface of team dynamics, allowing new patterns to emerge. Unlike conventional team building that reinforces the existing surface tension, this approach transforms it.

Looking Ahead: From Surface to Depth

As seen throughout this series, surface tension in organisations requires multiple approaches to understanding and transformation. We've explored developing an X-ray vision to see beneath surface behaviours, creating containers for anxiety, and now, moving beyond conventional team building to address unconscious role dynamics.

In our next article, we'll examine Strategy Four: Building Intelligence Through Pause—how deliberate reflection strengthens your organisation's capacity to penetrate beneath the surface tension of daily operations and develop deeper awareness.

While today's focus has been on breaking through the rigid roles that maintain surface appearances, next week, we will explore how creating space for collective thinking allows organisations to work with the deeper currents that truly determine outcomes.