IS YOUR TEAM ADAPTIVE OR REACTIVE?

You Don't Have Small Cases

Reactive teams play whack-a-mole. Adaptive teams gather intelligence and act accordingly. And the organizations that are most certain that they have no big problems are usually the ones that have stopped looking and are blind-sided by that problem.

Ask the security, HR, or investigations people at a large organization how their caseload runs, and you will hear a version of the same answer: nothing major, mostly minor stuff — Billy was mean to Sally. They will tell you they rarely do an important interview, and they believe it. In companies running hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts across dozens of countries and thousands of employees, they will tell you, with a straight face, that they don't have big problems.

That belief is the problem. It is not evidence that the problems are small. It is evidence that no one is looking at them together.

Ostriches do not actually bury their heads in the sand in the face of danger. Corporations, it turns out, do. The size of any individual case is never the metric; what those cases add up should be the metric. Yet, we are met daily with the quiet conviction that the cases don't add up to anything.

Every case is a data point

Here is the reframe you should be thinking about…every day: a case is not a chore to be closed. It is collection. Every incident, every interview — even the small, tedious, Billy-and-Sally ones — is a data point about how your organization actually works, where its pressure points are, and who is operating in the gaps. Handled one at a time and forgotten, those data points are noise. Read together, they are intelligence. They are the treasure map to the actual problems you are not seeing.

Whether your organization can read them is not a matter of talent or budget. It is a matter of what kind of team you are. Are you reactive or adaptive?

The model, briefly

I’ve spent the past years since retiring from the Bureau working with all kinds of teams and my goal is always to help them move from being reactive to adaptive. So let’s look at our adaptive team model.

Everyone who arrives at a situation brings a perspective — their experience, their assumptions, and the piece of the problem that matters to them. Four people means four private views of the situation. That is individual situational awareness, and no one in the room has the whole of it.

The first job of a team is to build shared awareness: a common understanding of the facts — who, what, where, when. The operating picture, and everyone looking at the same one. It’s hard to imagine that is not obvious, but look at the picture attached to this text. Tell me the story of what is happening here. Everyone who gives me a story will give me a different story – I promise because I have done this exercise hundreds of times and have never gotten an identical story. So first you have to come to a joint understanding of facts.

But facts are not meaning, so the next move is shared understanding: agreement on what those facts mean to us. Why does this matter, what is its significance, what does it demand we do? This is where a team decides which problem it is actually solving — and only from here can it build a plan worth executing.

And to hold that plan together through execution, a team must cycle on three engines: communication, cooperation and coordination.

Communication is interpersonal: in every exchange there is a sender and a receiver, and the work runs both ways — the sender confirms the message landed as intended, the receiver checks their own understanding instead of assuming it. Cooperation is the alignment of interests; operations, HR, and asset protection each arrive with legitimate goals pulling in slightly different directions, and cooperation is the work of pointing them at one outcome. Coordination is staying on course once the plan is moving: two aircraft leave Washington D.C. for San Francisco, one a single degree off, and it does not land a little late — it lands in San Jose. Small deviations, uncorrected, produce large consequences.

Then comes execution and monitoring, the absolutely critical glue to adaptive teams. Every team member must have the same ability to speak up the instant something looks wrong. This is not a “see something, say something” poster at the airport. This is genuinely the hinge that your mission rests on. If you see something that doesn’t feel right, you have to be able to say it.

And you have to be able to do so with psychological safety – the absolute knowledge that if you say something there will be no  repercussion and, should your observation prove incorrect, there will be no ridicule.

And finally comes team learning. Learning comes from an honest evaluation of what worked and why, what didn't work and why, focused on how the team performed and not only on what it closed. Mostly this is after but there is a constant loop that should be followed…if something goes wrong during, someone calls it out, and it is addressed, there to team learning happens and should happen proactively.

That is the model for effective, high-performing teams, that move beyond reacting to seemingly random problem and that begin to address root cause. Unfortunately, most teams stop at the first step…if they even get there.

Reactive teams stop halfway

A reactive team gets to shared awareness (sometimes) and quits. It establishes the facts of a case, resolves it, and moves to the next one. It is, in intelligence terms, permanently stuck on the bottom rung — the descriptive level, what happened — and never climbs to the explanatory and evaluative levels where the questions that matter live: why is this happening, and what does it mean for us? It certainly never reaches the estimative level, what is coming, because you cannot forecast a pattern you have refused to assemble.

So the reactive team plays whack-a-mole. A mole appears, it gets whacked, the team congratulates itself on a fast close, and another mole appears somewhere down the row. Because each is handled in isolation, the team never notices they are the same mole, or that there are a hundred of them, or that something under the surface is producing them faster than they can be hit. The team comes to believe the moles are all there is. Meanwhile, unread, the mole den expands and becomes more intricate.

Adaptive teams gather intelligence

An adaptive team runs the whole cycle. It creates shared awareness and turns that into shared understanding. And it does the one thing the reactive team never does: it aggregates and learns. It treats each case as collection, adds it to what it already knows about its own ecosystem, and starts to see the shape of things — the pattern beneath the incidents, the pressure creating them, the problem the individual cases are only symptoms of.

This is where execution and monitoring and psychological safety stop being soft ideas and become real. Everyone has to be able to call the problem out and bring the team to it. The analyst who says wait — this is the third one of these this quarter has to be able to say it, out loud, and be thanked for it. The team stops asking "did we close it?" and starts asking "what did this case just tell us about the organization?"

An adaptive team, in other words, is an intelligence-gathering team. A reactive team is a cleanup crew that mistakes a full dustpan for a clean house.

What it costs to stop halfway

In 2022 and early 2023, a 21-year-old airman in an Air National Guard intelligence wing began behaving strangely for someone with his clearance. He was seen taking notes on classified material in the SCIF and putting them in his pocket. He kept "deep diving" into intelligence unrelated to his job after being told to stop, and asked pointed, specific questions at briefings that were not his to ask. His supervisors noticed. They documented roughly four separate security incidents and insider-threat indicators, written up in memos for the record, addressed with admonishments and a cease-and-desist.

Every one of those was a data point. And every one was whacked in isolation and kept in-house at the squadron level, never reported to the security officials whose entire function was to see the pattern the memos formed. Some members didn't escalate because they worried the security office might overreact. No one assembled the picture. The airman, Jack Teixeira, went on to leak one of the most damaging troves of classified material in years, on Discord. The Air Force Inspector General later concluded that if anyone had connected and reported what was already known, the depth of the disclosures could have been reduced by months. Fifteen people were disciplined; the wing commander was relieved for cause. The intelligence had been in the building the whole time. There was simply no team calibrated to deal with it.

This is not a uniforms-and-clearances problem. Wells Fargo fired roughly 5,300 employees between 2011 and 2016 for opening unauthorized customer accounts — five years of whacking moles one at a time, each a tidy individual termination. The bank's own corporate security investigators had flagged employees "gaming the system" as early as a 2004 report. The pattern was visible for over a decade. But the cases were treated as one-offs rather than symptoms, and the mole den — a sales-incentive structure that made fraud rational for ordinary people — was left standing while the moles were removed. The scandal that eventually surfaced cost the CEO his job and the company its reputation. None of it required new information. It required someone to read the information already collected.

The point

The organizations most convinced they have no big problems are, with unnerving reliability, the ones not looking for them. Their teams are fast, busy, and reactive — closing small cases all day, certain the smallness of each is the smallness of the whole. They have a vague shared awareness and almost no shared understanding, a full caseload and no picture, and a den quietly filling and expanding beneath a row of whacked moles.

An adaptive team is the alternative, and it is not that complicated. Sure, it is a discipline: build the shared picture, agree on what it means, keep talking until understanding actually lands, align your interests, hold your course, make it safe for anyone to say the course is wrong — and then, when the case is closed, ask what it just told you. Do that consistently and your small cases stop being chores and start being the earliest, cheapest intelligence you will ever collect on your own biggest problems. It takes discipline…but it is not that complicated.

You don't have small cases. You have data points. The only question is whether anyone on your team is adding them up.

Sources: U.S. Department of the Air Force Inspector General review of the 102nd Intelligence Wing (2023); U.S. Department of Justice and court filings in United States v. Teixeira*; Wells Fargo* Sales Practices Investigation Report (2017) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's 2016 findings.