Hello friend,

Welcome to Theory of Change. This edition takes 4 minutes to read.

Each week, I break down a helpful framework and show how you—as a journalist, social entrepreneur, changemaker, or nonprofit leader—can use that framework to build an organisation of purpose.

I’m not an organisational culture consultant. Reorgs, new team structures, conflict resolution… I’ve always found this work hard in my own organisations and I claim no expertise or silver bullet. However, I have picked up a number of tactics over the years that can be deployed at critical moments to gain a deeper understanding of what might be blocking a team.

I often refer back to Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a practical tool for diagnosing and solving common team problems. While originally designed for corporate settings, this model offers valuable insights for nonprofit organisations and community newsrooms too. It’s not perfect, but today I’ll cover how you can use this pyramid to identify what’s holding your team back.

🛼 FROM FRICTION TO FUNCTION 🛼 

What is it? Lencioni’s pyramid describes five dysfunctions that frequently undermine teamwork. 

1. Absence of trust: Without vulnerability, true collaboration can’t happen.

2. Fear of conflict: When teams avoid hard conversations, key issues fester.

3. Lack of commitment: A lack of buy-in makes decisions ineffective.

4. Avoidance of accountability: Team members let problems slide.

5. Inattention to results: Personal priorities overshadow collective goals.

Why it’s useful. Nonprofit teams and community-driven newsrooms often face unique pressures—limited resources, mission-driven stress, and high emotional investment. These dynamics can intensify dysfunction, particularly when communication breaks down or accountability gets tricky due to informal hierarchies.

Lencioni’s model helps to directly diagnose where breakdowns occur, allowing you to identify specific barriers to effective teamwork. For example, if there’s a lack of commitment to initiatives, you might trace it back to fear of conflict around strategic priorities or limited trust within the team.

Why it works. Nonprofits and newsrooms often depend heavily on collaboration, more so than top-down directive structures. The Five Dysfunctions model helps ensure you’re not overlooking foundational team issues, like trust and accountability, which can be make-or-break for mission-driven work. By working through the pyramid, you can address the root causes of issues and build more resilient, unified teams.

(That all said, though Lencioni’s model remains a powerful tool, it has its limitations. It’s somewhat old-fashioned and rooted in traditional hierarchical structures, where leadership is clear-cut, and teams follow conventional top-down decision-making processes. Read on for some alternative structures.)

When to apply it. Use the pyramid to diagnose and propose solutions for any team issues that involve mistrust or miscommunication. Work down the pyramid, starting with trust, to make sure you are addressing the most foundational of the issues.

1. Absence of Trust. Dysfunctional teams hide weaknesses and hesitate to ask for help or offer feedback, leading to missed opportunities. To build trust, team members need to openly admit mistakes and appreciate each other’s skills. Activities like personal histories and 360-degree feedback foster this vulnerability.

2. Fear of Conflict. Without trust, teams avoid conflict, resulting in boring meetings and unresolved issues. Encouraging healthy debate, using tools like “mining for conflict,” helps teams engage in open discussions, solve problems faster, and reduce office politics.

3. Lack of Commitment. Ambiguity and over-analysis lead to a lack of commitment in dysfunctional teams. By setting clear goals, deadlines, and aligning the team on priorities, you create clarity and confidence, allowing teams to commit fully and act without hesitation.

4. Avoidance of Accountability. In dysfunctional teams, accountability is weak, leading to mediocre performance. Teams should regularly review progress and hold one another accountable, with team-based rewards and a shared responsibility for high standards to ensure better performance.

5. Inattention to Results. When accountability is absent, personal goals overshadow team success. Teams should prioritise collective goals, set clear results-based rewards, and avoid distractions to retain top talent and stay focused on shared objectives.

Get started.

• Host a candid team assessment. Use a simple team survey or meeting to gauge where you sit on the pyramid.

• Lead with vulnerability. As a leader, model vulnerability by admitting mistakes or struggles. This invites others to do the same.

• Mine for conflict. In the next strategy meeting, actively invite contrasting views to foster healthy conflict.

• Clarify team roles and decisions. Ensure that everyone is clear on who is responsible for what, especially in shared leadership models. [See Theory of Change #003!]

• Track collective impact. Regularly check in on your shared goals and mission. Make sure individual work ladders up to broader team success.

🔮 FUTUREPROOFING 🔮

In fast-changing, decentralised environments—especially common in nonprofits and newsrooms with fluid roles—Lencioni's reliance on formal accountability can feel rigid. Additionally, it assumes trust can be built primarily through vulnerability, but in diverse and historically marginalised communities, trust must be earned differently, often requiring deeper relational work that transcends the business-oriented context of the model. So, other organisational models are worth investigating:

• Sociocracy. A decentralised model where decisions are made by small, semi-autonomous circles or teams. Each circle has the autonomy to make decisions within its area but is also connected to the broader organisation’s purpose.

• Decolonized leadership. This approach seeks to dismantle traditional power dynamics by centering marginalised voices, flattening hierarchies, and fostering collective decision-making. It challenges the “leader-follower” mindset and emphasises shared ownership of success and failure.

• Teal organisations. Teal organisations operate with self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. They reject rigid hierarchies, opting instead for fluid roles and peer-based accountability, aligning team members around shared values and autonomy rather than command-and-control leadership.

These models provide alternatives to the top-down structures that Lencioni’s pyramid assumes. They require deeper commitments to inclusivity, equity, and distributed power, which may resonate more with nonprofit teams focused on justice and systemic change. Check out the Reinventing Organisations wiki for more.

🪁 PARALLEL PLAY 🪁

Three worthy distractions for you from the worlds of culture, technology, and art.

• Zebra Unite: a founder-led, cooperatively owned movement creating the culture, capital & community for the next economy. 

• Hugging Face. An AI community where the machine learning community collaborates on open source models, datasets, and applications.

• The Campaign Trail. A blend of fanfic and strategic calculations, this browser-based game is a haven for politically-minded modders.

🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊

Thanks for taking time out of your busy inbox to read this. Was it helpful? Reply to this mail and let me know what you'd like to see next.

I coach nonprofit and journalism leaders, and have a bunch of free and paid resources (including a GPT that helps you find funders!) over at Evenly Distributed.

If you were forwarded this mail and like what you see, you can sign up to the newsletter here.

Take care,

Adam