Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

Many teams require specialists if they are to succeed, although they don’t require these specialists on a daily basis. You might need someone from your company’s legal or compliance team available to review work, but you probably don’t need them daily. The same might be true for any range of specialists. For this, we’re seeing teams use what we call the orbital model of staffing. In this model, your core team is a planet, and you have a variety of specialists orbiting the planet like moons. This model works because, like a moon, each specialist is on a known orbit. Specialists check in with the team once or twice a week—an agreed-upon cadence. It’s the rhythm of this relationship that makes it work. Unlike other part-time staffing assignments, in the orbital model, the key to making the assignment work is the known and consistent rhythm of the interaction.