**5.4. Adaptability**

Being able to adapt to external forces is one requirement when operating in open systems. For a system to self-organize, then alter its course and reorganize, it must be adaptable. Adaptive systems "have a high degree of awareness to its local context as well as a high capability to change internally" [23]. This adaptability characteristics includes a team and its members to adapt to both internal and external forces. One example of internal forces could be intragroup conflict, with intergroup conflict being an example of external forces.

#### **5.5. Interactions**

Interactions are identified as being representative of "causal processes at the lower levels" [24], and can represent structural or behavioral processes. In viewing behavioral processes in a team setting, facilitation constructive conflict as opposed to destructive conflict will aid in a team's interactions, thus becoming more effective and adaptive. In complexity terms, facilitating interactions aids emergence.

#### **5.6. Emergence**

Complex adaptive systems operate from the bottom-up in a dynamic manner that facilitates interactions among the system's agents (e.g., individual team members) with the potential of producing emergent, new, structures [22]. Beck and Plowman [19] identified emergence as "new structures and new forms of behavior in open systems far from equilibrium", whereas Campbell-Hunt [25] identified it as "new structures around which organizational activity is reassembled".

Operating in complex and open systems, teams must be free to self-organize as they adapt to external and internal forces, allowing team members to interact accordingly until the team emerges as a new entity to address the current environment. This process identifying teams as complex adaptive systems is described best by Beck and Plowman [19]:

*When provoked by either an unforeseen opportunity or threat, a CAS moves away from equilibrium or stability, toward instability or disequilibrium…. In doing so, a system experiences adaptive tensions that give rise to emergent self-organization, the ability to spontaneously arrange its components in a purposeful way without the direction of a higher level coordinator.*
