A core challenge for any organization is to create highly functioning teams that creatively and effectively find solutions to complex challenges. The authors propose the foundation of creating such teams is for the team to develop a shared understanding of the requisite knowledge of everyone on the team and then recombine that knowledge to find solutions to complex challenges. The theoretical foundation of this proposal is optimization theory, which applies to cognitive, emotional, physical, and/or social aspects and provides a generalizable way to understand problem-solving (Page 2008). From this theoretical foundation, the dimensions of diversity and the domains of learning then provide a framework for understanding how individuals on a team can coalesce into an effective team or turn into a hostile organization of competing teams.