This TED Talk features leadership expert Amy Edmondson recorded live at TED NYC 2017.

So it's August 5th, 2010. A massive collapse at the San Jose Copper Mine in northern Chile has left 33 men trapped.

Half a mile, that's two Empire State buildings, below some of the hardest rock in the world. They will find their way to a small refuge designed for this purpose,

where they will find intense heat, filth, and about enough food for two men for 10 days.

Above ground, it doesn't take long for the experts to figure out that there is no solution.

No drilling technology in the industry is capable of getting through rock that hard and that deep fast enough to save

their lives.

It's not exactly clear where the refuge is.

It's not even clear if the miners are alive.

It's not even clear who's in charge.

Yet, within 70 days, all 33 of these men will be brought to the surface alive.

This remarkable story is a case study in the power of teaming.

So what's teaming?

Teaming is teamwork on the fly.

It's coordinating and collaborating with people across boundaries of all kinds, expertise, distance, time zone, you name it, to get work done.

Think of your favorite sports team, okay? Because this is different. Sports teams work together, that magic, right? Those game-saving plays.

Now, they win.

Sports teams win because they practice.

But you can only practice if you have the same members over time.

And so you can think of teaming.

So sports teams embody the definition of a team, the formal definition.

It's a stable, bounded, reasonably small group of people

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