When Three Teams Became One (And Actually Meant It)

Most team mergers try to eliminate differences and create alignment. We discovered the opposite approach worked better - embracing those differences and letting them become strategic advantages. Here's how that played out with a Unilever R&D team.

As I was setting up the first exercise, the new department head Mark (not his real name) caught my eye and nodded toward the clusters of people around the coffee table.

“You can see what I mean already. They’re making nice with each other, but they’re just not gelling - politeness but not engagement.” On paper, they were now a single team. In reality? Still three tribes, circling each other warily.

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Traditional team-building approaches would have focused on shared values, common goals and a nicely crafted mission statement. Complex organisational challenges require us to understand how different people make sense of the same situation - and then work with those differences rather than trying to eliminate them. We need to see the world through other people’s eyes to understand what’s possible, we need to break the old traditional corporate thinking boxes and build new ones from the remains and we then move into experimenting and learning.

Mark had tried bringing people together initially to create a common vision for the future, to iron out differences and do some teambuilding work. Today, however, we were going to flip it around - explore the past, embrace differences and recognise what people wanted to avoid as well as what they wanted to achieve. Expose some beliefs and ideas to the daylight (ironically, in an underground room below an ice bar in Central London) and see what was possible next. 

Mark trusted that whatever emerged out of the day would be an improvement on what had come before. I knew that there would be surprises for everyone, but after some laughter, some argument and a fair amount of reshaping, the teams would be set for a really energised, productive year ahead.

By lunchtime, something had shifted. The same people who'd arrived in defensive clusters were now looking at each other with compassion and understanding, seeing the real differences between their thinking rather than just the assumed conflicts. We hadn’t got too much in common, but we could now see the landscape that each team thought they were navigating. What happened in those few hours wasn't magic - it was the result of creating space for people to share what they actually cared about, rather than what they thought they were supposed to care about.

And by the end of the day … Well, we’ll get to that. It was a complete shift in how they thought about their work.

The Hidden Challenge Behind the Obvious One

This was Unilever's R&D department in Bedfordshire, responsible for developing and refining packaging solutions across a range of Unilever’s huge beverage product portfolio. . The official challenge was straightforward: merge three separate teams into one cohesive department, bringing together designers, engineers, managers, and administrators who'd previously worked in silos.

But the real challenge became clear in the pre-workshop conversations. It wasn't just about combining teams - it was about people who'd built their professional identity around being "the design team" or "the engineering team" suddenly being asked to become something new, without losing what made them valuable in the first place. And, of course, there were those moments on past projects where differences had spilled over into inter-departmental tension - which now looked like intra-departmental tension.

Mark was under pressure to show merger value quickly, but also knew that forced integration often backfires in modern working environments. And he wanted to use the merger as an opportunity to energise and revitalise everyone, but he was navigating a delicate balance. Push too hard toward "we're all one team now" and people would feel their expertise was being diluted and they were being cajoled into something they didn’t want. Move too slowly and the merger would become exactly what he was determined to avoid: "business as usual" with a new org chart, missing all the opportunities that he thought the merger might open up for the business.

The Moment Everything Changed

The breakthrough came during an exercise I've used dozens of times, but it still surprises me how powerful it can be. We split them into three groups where they could felt comfortable and confident in, then coached each team to create a visual representation of their past experience, their hopes for the future and what they most dreaded that the department might become - not the official version, but the real story of what had energised them, frustrated them, and made them proud.

Opening Up The Sense-Making

From a complexity perspective, we used some key exercises to help people reveal their sense-making of the past, the present and the future of the department and the work they were doing. We had a direction–get people better aligned–but needed to start by understanding where the landscape they were in first. And it was more different than expected, but encouraging divergence at the start is key to moving forward sustainably.

As everyone explored and asked questions about each others’ models, the conversations opened up. One group’s success had been perceived as a land-grab by another. Almost everyone had assumed that a decision by an earlier director had been a deliberate choice, where an administrator (so often the un-noticed institutional memory of any department) was there and could recall it had been an unintended consequence of another decision altogether. Suddenly people saw past events through different lenses - and noticed how that played out in what they hoped or feared about what came next.

"We learned more in two hours in that Post-It covered room than we had in months of internal meetings," one of them said. "And what we found wasn't what any of us had expected. The problems weren’t in what had happened, it was in how each of us had made sense of it differently - and that changed what was possible together."

By the time all three teams had shared their stories, the invisible tensions were easing, replaced by understanding and new-found respect, particularly for the administrative staff who were now recognised as the glue keeping all these egos and roles functioning together. Not because someone had announced they should, but because people had recognised something in each other's experiences. The designers realised the engineers had been dealing with the same "nobody asked the people who actually do the work" problem they'd faced. The engineers saw that the logistics team's last-minute innovation looked a lot like their own problem-solving approach.

Building “Now What” Out Of Insightful Differences

It wasn’t all plain sailing - some of the differences between groups were significant. The autonomy that one team aspired to was exactly the problem that another was desperate to avoid. Some were solvable, but not all - but they were now visible and recognised, part of the new department’s thinking and conversations to come. What was possible, however, was moving forward together. The rest of the workshop focused on a simple question that is always hard: "What do we do next as a result of what we’ve found??"

Working now as mixed teams, they pulled actions, projects and ideas together, benefiting from the different viewpoints rather than fighting them. Before long, we’d got a wall-full of straightforward actions, some bigger projects with clear ownership - and then the trickiest bit: the amorphous list of complex things that always emerges from team events that feel unsolvable (because they are - progress is possible, but a once-and-for-all solution? Never.)

The energy in the room dipped visibly as we grouped these things into the usual categories of how we see life in an organisation: Training, Budget, IT, Resources, Strategy. (Sound familiar? We’ve all got slight variations on these. Sound exciting? No, me neither.) It was hard for anyone to get behind these with any enthusiasm, but we weren’t done yet.

Within an hour of frenzied conversation, debate, post-it shuffling and movement, everyone had come together and settled on a new set of things to focus on that they had visible energy for: Career Progression, Recognition (separate from Reward), Common Ways of Working, Departmental Identity and Reputation, Capacity to Innovate, Business Relationships, Changing Roles, and Work/Life Balance.  

Changing Behaviour By Changing Categories

One of the principles of complexity includes shifting how people perceive the world. Familiar categories create familiar patterns of thinking and behaviour. Helping the team come up with a new way of how to see their world–that is completely their own–is a powerful way of empowering and accelerating change.

And half an hour later, alongside the action and project plans from earlier, there were dozens of small experiments people had signed up to run themselves to make progress on the new themes..

By the time the team retired upstairs to the bar at the end of the day, people weren't just talking about their new shared priorities - they were already planning specific projects that would let them experiment with working together. The energy in the room was palpable, but more importantly, it was focused. Instead of generic enthusiasm about "collaboration," people had concrete ideas about what they wanted to try first.

The Real Measure Of Success

Three months later, Mark called with an update. "It's actually working," he said, with what sounded like genuine surprise. "But not in the way I expected. And it’s making life easier than I’d anticipated."

The projects people had planned during the workshop were moving forward, but that wasn't the most interesting part. The real change was in how people were approaching problems they hadn't discussed in the workshop, as well as those they had.  Rather than starting with “are we making progress” and “was it a success,” they were looking at their energising categories and noticing “what are we learning about … Capacity to Innovate? What does that mean? And what do we try next?”

"They're not just working together," Mark explained. "They're thinking together differently."

“And,” he added excitedly. “The team’s growing - but the onboarding is so much easier. We’ve taken those three representations of where we’ve been, where we’re going and what we’re avoiding - and we’ve framed them. Now whenever someone new joins us, the first thing that happens is someone on the team walks them through those models - and they ‘get it’ instantly.”

The validation came a few weeks later when one of Mark’s peer department heads asked if we could run a similar session for her team. Word had spread not because someone had announced the merger's success, but because people in other departments had started noticing different behaviour from the R&D team.

The question they were asking wasn't "What did you do in that workshop?" It was "How did you get people to actually work like that?"

Differences Made the Difference

Looking back, the success wasn't about the specific exercises we used or the off-site location (though both helped). It was about creating space for people to share what they actually cared about in their work, rather than what they thought they were supposed to care about.

Most merger approaches try to eliminate differences. We discovered the opposite - success came from helping each team reveal what it did brilliantly, then letting those approaches cross-pollinate naturally.

The merger could have been a box-ticking exercise - new org chart, new reporting lines, new team meetings. Instead, it became an opportunity for people to discover what was possible when they combined their different approaches to solving problems.

The most telling moment came during our follow-up session six months later. Someone mentioned that they'd almost forgotten which original team their colleagues had come from. Not because the differences didn't matter anymore, but because those differences had become assets they could draw on rather than boundaries they had to navigate around.

That's when you know a merger has actually worked - when people stop thinking about what they've lost and start getting excited about what they can create together.

When teams stop trying to erase their differences and start learning from them, unexpected strengths emerge. If your organisation is facing a merger, restructuring, or simply the challenge of getting diverse groups to think together differently, let’s have that conversation. The patterns we've seen work consistently might be exactly what you need to unlock your team's potential.