The patterns of team system evolution provide a method for looking at teams from various perspectives and points in their evolution, in order to understand what is happening to them as they move through time, how they can evolve, and how they can be crafted to behave in the future.

Imagine a large gathering of people in a banquet room where there are several large round tables with chairs. Over time some people sit down at the tables while other stand or walk around. Sometimes a chair at a table will have a person in it, sometimes it will not. Sometimes all the chairs at a table are full, sometimes empty. The whole-time people continue to move around, talk to each other, and sit at tables.

Over time you can notice pathways that people walk making it easier to move about the room. You notice some tables with the same people for long periods; others that no one ever sits at. It is a forever changing and evolving landscape.

With this concept, if it were teams of people organized to produce output, there would be reasons for why people are sitting at one table or another, and reasons for why someone may switch tables. Over time these reasons would become identifiable patterns. While a table has people at it that team system has systemity, it exists at a point in time as a system.

• SYSTEMITY – The qualities of a system to exist at a point in time in the real-world; a system that can produce output has systemity while a system that cannot produce output does not have systemity.

These patterns have an evolutionary cycle to themselves that allow a person to predict logical next steps. These patterns fall into four categories: Alpha, Epsilon, Tau, and Omega.