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Each month we share new ideas, practical tools, and simple frameworks focused on how R&D teams can collaborate more effectively, thrive in complexity, and deliver faster for patients.

Email Jen

Are your ways of working implicit or explicit?

Every team has ways of working. How decisions get made. How information gets shared. How people raise concerns. Who needs to be involved and when. How the team handles disagreement. What happens when priorities change.

The question is whether those ways of working are explicit and shared, or whether everyone is operating from their own assumptions. This becomes even more important when a team has experienced significant turnover or, on the other end of the spectrum, when team members have worked together for a long time and many ways of working have simply become understood. Both are common in R&D.

Making those expectations explicit creates a shared understanding of how the team wants to work together.

And that understanding can keep evolving as the team, the work, and the context change.

What we're noticing

Most teams have ways of working. They just haven’t talked about them.

Instead, people learn them over time.

Who you need to talk to before a decision gets made. Which meetings really matter. When to escalate. How much debate is acceptable. Who expects to be copied on what. What can move forward without everyone weighing in.

Some of these unwritten rules work well. Others create friction.

And because they are rarely discussed, each person develops their own understanding of how the team works.

That may be manageable when the team is small and the work is predictable.

In complex R&D work, it gets harder.

Teams change. New people join. Priorities shift. Functions become more interdependent. The pace increases.

What once felt obvious isn’t obvious anymore.

The insight

When ways of working stay implicit, assumptions fill the gaps.

One person thinks a decision has been made. Someone else thinks the discussion is still open.

One person raises a concern early. Another waits until they have all the data.

One person expects to be consulted. Another assumes they only need to be informed.

None of these differences are necessarily wrong. They are simply different.

But when those differences stay invisible, teams experience them as friction.

The problem is often not the people.

The team simply hasn’t made its practices and agreements explicit.

The Plumtree Perspective

We help teams make their ways of working visible, practical, and specific to the work they need to do together. This isn’t about creating a long team charter that gets written once and forgotten. It is about agreeing on a small set of shared practices that answer questions like:

How will we make decisions?
How will we share information and context?
How will we surface risks, tensions, and different perspectives?
How will we involve each other without involving everyone in everything?
How will we respond when something changes? Or when something is urgent?
What tools will we use for what purpose?

We recently worked with a team where people were frustrated by how long decisions were taking. Everyone agreed they needed to move faster.

But when we unpacked what was happening, the issue wasn’t the decision itself.

People had very different assumptions about who needed to be involved, when input was needed, and when a decision was actually final.

Once the team made those expectations explicit, they had a shared way to work.

They didn’t need more process. They needed shared clarity.

That clarity helped the team stay aligned and make decisions faster.

What you can try

You don’t need a full-day workshop to make your team’s ways of working more explicit. Use 30 to 45 minutes in an upcoming team meeting, during a retrospective, or another natural moment in the team’s rhythm to reflect and try this simple sequence.

Step 1: Surface what’s implicit

Ask: What unwritten rules or assumptions shape how we work together today?

Think about decisions, meetings, communication, information sharing, escalation, disagreement, and how you respond when priorities change.

Step 2: Identify where there is friction

Ask: Where do our current ways of working help us move? Where do they slow us down, create confusion, or make the work harder than it needs to be?

Focus on real examples, not hypotheticals.

Step 3: Define what great looks like

Ask: If we were working together at our best, what would we consistently do?

Be specific. “Communicate better” isn’t enough. “Surface risks early, even when we don’t have all the answers” is something a team can actually practice.

Step 4: Agree on a few practices

Choose three to five ways of working that will make the biggest difference right now.

Keep them simple enough to remember and specific enough to use.

Step 5: Revisit and adjust

After 60 days, ask: What’s working? What’s not? What do we need to change?

Ways of working shouldn’t be static. They should evolve as the team and the work evolve.

The goal isn’t to create more rules. It is to make the team’s expectations visible enough that people know how to work together, especially when the work changes, gets more complex or team members change.

Plumtree Book Corner

What we’re reading right now:

The Seven Frequencies of Communication: The Hidden Language of Human Connection

InsidSuperteams:
by Erwin Raphael McManus

Think Again by Adam Grant

Why do some conversations create connection and momentum, while others seem to miss the mark?

Erwin Raphael McManus explores this question through seven communication “frequencies”: Motivator, Challenger, Commander, Healer, Professor, Seer, and Maven. Each represents a different way people naturally communicate and connect with others.

Three ideas stood out for us:

How we communicate is not necessarily how others need to hear us. Strong communication requires understanding the person on the other side, not simply delivering the message clearly.
Teams benefit from different communication frequencies. Some moments call for direction. Others require challenge, knowledge, encouragement, or a new perspective. No single approach works in every situation.
Adaptability matters. Understanding your natural communication tendencies is useful, but the greater opportunity is learning to shift how you communicate based on what the team and the moment require.

For teams working across functions, perspectives, and areas of expertise, communication is more than exchanging information. It shapes how people understand one another, work through tensions, and move forward together.

This book offers an interesting lens for noticing those dynamics more clearly.

Want to learn more? Click the image for the Amazon link.

Until next time!

If your R&D team is navigating complexity and you want support getting aligned and moving faster together, we’re happy to start with a conversation.

Plumtree is here to help teams and organizations work together at the speed of science.

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