Derrick Bransby

Dissertation Title: "Dreams to Machines: How Teams Navigate the Messy Middle of Innovation"

On their journey to innovate, teams confront daunting gaps between their vision for the future and the constraints of reality. This distance inspires creativity but complicates execution. Novel ideas often fail to materialize not for a lack of potential, but because teams struggle to execute and learn in tandem. This challenge is familiar across domains from product development and engineering to health care, where clinical teams coordinate around evolving diagnoses. They strive to keep shared understanding stable enough to coordinate, yet flexible enough to adapt. Prior research shows that constraints help create common ground for coordination. However, it usually treats constraints as features of a task, not as boundaries that teams shape over time. In this monograph dissertation, I develop a process theory of constraining: the practice of articulating, negotiating, and revising boundaries of emerging problems and solutions. Constraining explains how innovation teams harness creative potential and make progress without prematurely resolving the tension that drives creative work.

Using longitudinal qualitative data from field study of project teams at a live event production firm, I examine how teams translate clients’ ambitious aspirations (“dreams”) into custom technology (“machines”) under immovable deadlines. I show how teams create tentative problem representations that make clients’ aspirations legible by distilling their essence into evaluative criteria and tethering them to shared references to generate working assumptions. These criteria and assumptions define the contours of the emerging problem and establish a minimal basis for coordination. Over time, teams refine this basis through cycles of proposing, probing, and pivoting—a process my informants called the “design spiral”—actively clarifying and reshaping the problem space as solutions to emerge.

Within this larger process, I identify provisional commitments—open-ended, mutually affirmed decisions that enable action despite uncertainty—as the mechanism for progress. They establish a basis for coordination that is stable enough to support collective action but flexible enough to adapt, enabling action without hardening teams’ creative trajectory. In doing so, provisional commitments make ambiguous problems actionable, converting tentative representations into task structures (e.g., scaffolds) that allow teams to learn and execute in tandem.

This dissertation makes several theoretical contributions. First, it extends research on emergent coordination by showing how teams generate the stability needed to initiate coordination while remaining open to discovery and by specifying practices through which teams shape problem representations. Second, it shifts attention from ideas themselves to the peripheral work that carries them toward implementation, showing how teams shape the problem space where ideas develop and sustain common understanding as problems and solutions coevolve. Third, it contributes to research on organizing under uncertainty by elaborating how teams enact disciplined flexibility to make progress in the messy middle of innovation. These insights offer a process account of how teams sustain collective action without sacrificing ambition, with practical implications for leading and managing work in dynamic and uncertain situations.