Teams under pressure often fall back on dysfunctional coping mechanisms that are deeply rooted in human evolutionary psychology. The group works like a pack, instinctively looking for ways to alleviate its members' collective anxiety. It might unconsciously ascribe an unwanted role, such as scapegoat or savior, to one or more members and lapse into skewed interactions-for example, directing its energy toward fighting a common enemy, whether real or perceived, rather than advancing its actual mission. The authors discuss how to spot these harmful patterns and break their hold. They describe a powerful tool deployed in their work with top teams: sociograms, or pictorial representations of team members, their connections, and their interactions. By understanding the unconscious forces that influence them in times of stress, teams can become less captive to such forces and more engaged with improving performance.

This case provides an opportunity to perform value stream mapping for an assembly line and use the same to identify inefficiencies and areas of improvement in the operations processes using VSM. It features a manufacturer of machine tools who has recently doubled the throughput rate one of the assembly lines, through half-day indexing. Amid cut throat competition, the firm needs to reduce costs throughout the plant and therefore the case prods students to come up with further process improvements the firm could implement, before adopting the half-day indexing to other assembly lines in the plant.