As organizations increasingly realize the need to learn and act more quickly and effectively, they discover their ability to form diverse, multi-faceted teams with shared purpose, trust, competence, and confidence is paramount to success. Technology and the subsequent broad acceptance of knowledge management approaches have revolutionized the way we think of and practice our business, but alone fall short of enabling teams to reach the high levels of performance required. While the U.S. Government shifts to a philosophy of collaboration and transparency, its operations and crisis or humanitarian disaster responses are requiring the integration of the whole government. A new approach to forming and developing distributed, cross-boundary, multi-functional, and interagency teams is required.

This paper explores the question of how teams of leaders from sovereign and diverse organizations with different operating mechanics and approaches, and sometimes incompatible interests and philosophies, find the shared situational understanding, purpose, trust, and confidence to achieve success together. Based on results of multiple applications of this approach with different types of teams, and recently piloted in the U.S. Army's European Command (EUCOM), the approach has shown that when we combine the multipliers of high-performing team qualities with modern collaborative technology tools and sound information/knowledge management processes, enabled by a simple leader-team development exercise, we create a synergistic effect that improves the qualities of shared purpose, trust, and team competence; increases confidence; generates "actionable understanding;" and accelerates sustainable, high-performance.