What was the most effective team you’ve ever been on, and what made it excellent?

• AI News Team
• February 25, 2026

​Published on February 24, 2026 8:18 PM GMTEvery great man that I have known has had a certain time and place in their life that they use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were supposed to and great things were accomplished. For Richard, that time was at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Whenever things got “cockeyed,” Richard would look back and try to understand how now was different than then. Using this approach, Richard decided we should pick an expert in each area of importance in the machine, such as software or packaging or electronics, to become the “group leader” in this area, analogous to the group leaders at Los Alamos.Richard Feynman and The Connection MachineWhen I see people add a lot of value to organizations, very often it’s in the form of importing a way of doing things that worked well from some other organization that they have been involved with. This process knowledge can take all kinds of forms, from “this is how to efficiently run a meeting, with an agenda, so everyone knows what the meeting is about and we don’t waste time on extraneous maybe-tangents” to “we absolutely need to be constantly getting rapid feedback from our users” to “we need a CRM” to “exactly one person should be in charge of this project, and they must be full time”, to “this is how to clarify your organizational goals and set KPIs”. Often there will be some tacit knowledge component that is hard to convey without having seen the system in action.When you’ve seen a class of problem handled really well at one org, it stands out very starkly when a different organization is struggling with that class of problem. It’s very natural to adapt what you’ve seen work in the past to this new context. And beyond isolated process improvements, some teams are just much more effective at whatever they’re trying to do than most organizations. The way they do things overall coheres into a highly effective machine. They know how to work together to do amazing work.In retrospect, I wish I had prioritized seeking out and trying to join highly effective teams, to collect reference experiences of groups of people working together effectively and achieving exceptional performance. I think those reference experiences would help me, today, in trying to make the organizations I work with succeed at their ambitious goals, even when those goals differ substantially from those of the orgs I’m modeling.As a second best to that kind of direct, personal, experience, I would love to hear anecdotes about impressively effective teams that you all have first hand experience with and what it was that made them special. What was the most effective team you’ve ever been a part of? In what way was it unusually effective? (How could you tell? What was their output? How was it exceptional?)What contributed most to the excellence of that team? The personnel / hiring standards? Elements of the culture? Specific practices, procedures, or expectations?I don’t care what the team was doing together. An research group, a sales team, a film crew, a political campaign, a broadway production, or a startup, are all interesting, if they were exceptional at what they were doing.Discuss ​Read More