Team Growing Cycles
Copyright 2011 D. V. Williams All Rights Reserved
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Published by Vic Williams at Smashwords
Version 1.01 November 2, 2011
Contents
Chapter 2 The Inferential Cycle
Team people need to be able to do things together for mutual benefit. A good team relationship washes over all kinds of small problems that can grow big if the relationship isn't there. The process bonding in a good team lets one person take up something where another left off without a lot of fussing about. It encourages them to do things together, just step in and lend a hand. They learn from each other and the circumstances. The team grows ways that are mutually understood, learning-by-doing them, with a whole range of tacit learnings that reinforce the process. They are interdependent and self-organizing with diversity.
Underlying the team's performance are good patterns. The SCRUM pattern is a basic relationship pattern, first borrowed from Rugby by Nonaka et all, then aimed at software development, and now used in other fields. It is deliberately based on the team flow in rugby. An agile or entrepreneurial development team adds technical and other layers on top of scrum, adapting to suit, on an 'inspect and adapt' basis.
A key pattern in rugby and agile is passing as you go along. Players pass sideways in rugby. They complement while playing together. Agile software developers often sit side-by-side doing the same bit of software together, producing more higher quality software in the process. Others are doing very different things, at the same time. So they are focusing, two sets of eyeballs on one thing, and overlapping, two different sub-projects, both at the same time.The larger team sits so they gain tacit hand-offs from others. Agile creates tests before the software is made, then runs the new software against the tests. Thus pulling testing up front into the development process, and creating a much more interactive environment. Their plays are short. They iterate improvements. Test-first design allows them to create the tests, do, then match the doing against the tests. This generates quality assurance to replace quality control.
Linear forward passing: this guy > then this guy > then another person > and so on in a relay chain. Is replaced by:
We do together and check as we go. Losing somebody is bad, hey he tripped, but doesn't break the web. The chain becomes a web or a map with a rich set of choices that are 'inspected and adapted' into deemed fit. The team routes around many problems, and aims for better things and synergies. It can put many eyeballs on matters for better design and implementation. The team project puzzle fits together into a living map as it goes. (Google on 'new new product development game Nonaka')
With the right team it becomes an almost accidental Design Thinking pattern. It's also the traditional pre-factory/pre-spreadsheet thinking Strategy pattern.
Okay, now blindly mix together innovators and perfectionists and one-at-a-time rules people (monochronic) and some-at-a-time relationships people (polychronic) in a cultural mix. Blindly done, you most likely get poor results and problems. If you grow mutual awareness of such cultures and propensities, you can grow teams. With a coach you can form a team and go faster and better.
The team learns to choose, to make decisions, and to do, as a learning team. It should also learn to 'inspect and adapt'. The Toyota equivalent is 'go look and see'. It might use OODA or PDCA or some other learning cycle. Most teams fossilize, kill the learning cycle, and die into a group of individuals.
Team Life Cycles - Team Building into Growing Teams
Most natural teams only have two or three members. One sees a need and starts work on something. A second person-ant-goose-monkey sees what's going on and joins into handle the matter. They do it and separate – dissolving the impromptu team. They follow natural needs, fitting into the environment, their cultural knowledge, and expectation of mutual gains. True community shows whole webs of such informal interdependent interactions. People and critters, and cities, grow together, learning needs and likes and dislikes, and handling them as a kind of whole.
Modern factory teams can do much the same, but most lack the good web of pre-existing interconnections that empowers natural teams to just step in and 'do the right things' at the right time. Modern teams often start out fragmented, likely with fairly authoritarian leadership, then may develop understandings and relationships into a kind of community. Quite a few modern teams become rule bound and or fossilize around some rigidity-cleavages. We now tend to watch others, instead of joining and growing the process.
Better teams develop pattern awareness like the following diagram and gain substantial performance and interdependence benefits. Many such teams share/rotate leadership and other roles to suit the situation.
Lame duck teams remain fragmented, or develop cliques or other rigidities. A fair number of people burnout (tired, sick, go postal) in the resulting situations.
“Social progress, as we know, consists mainly in a successive differentiation of functions, or, in simpler language, a division of labour. The work which in primitive society is done by all alike and by all equally ill, or nearly so, is gradually distributed among different classes of workers and executed more and more perfectly; and so far as the products, material or immaterial, of this specialised labour are shared by all, the whole community benefits by the increasing specialisation. Now magicians or medicine-men appear to constitute the oldest artificial or professional class in the evolution of society.” -- J.G. Frazer in The Golden Bough (Shamans => 'magicians'/medicine. Such were pre-design thinking doers.)
Notice that his assumed norm is to separate by class, labour, function, in search of progress. Ponder an implicit machine-parts, or great clock, model in his thinking. Perhaps like Newton's great clock of the world. Minus Newton's attributes as the last great magician.
We take our experience, social rules/ways, and generate expectations, then act on them. Often mostly subconsciously. The inferential cycle materials, shown later, show how people and groups spiral into blackholes, or spiral out into improvements. We fulfill our expectations.
Instead, we need to see and use the differences and use them together. As the simple look at team roles diagram shows, we need to develop and use awareness of diversity in our ways and interests. Some of us are innovators, others are perfectionists. A lot, the middle most of us, mixes innovation and perfection, and mainly just gets things done. Relationship oriented people like to engage with people or things or ideas. Power or controlling people like to lead or manage those relationships. “Getting things done” is a kind of “things” relationship.
Later, you can play with the simple intuitive team roles test. It's good to get a handle on your team roles propensities. For now it's more useful to be aware that we need widened awareness – sensitivity and adaptability. And that awareness needs to live in mind and body.
Imagine two people starting to do something together. They likely have different approaches. One may see a problem and the other is enjoying an opportunity. It's new to one and 'old hat' to the other. Sometimes people can rub differing views and ways against each other and end up with a richer understanding and a better overall solution. But much of the time we withdraw, reducing contact with the other person.
Follow the individual's journey via the 'Sensitivity to Environment' Diagram.
I First both people are oblivious of the differences.
II Then they get a first glimmering of their differences.
III They bump, becoming aware.
IV Consciously and subconsciously in different ways/levels, they recognize some differences, and accept, ponder, or deny the differences.
V They adapt. Either spiraling into conflict/problems, or spiraling out to explore the matter.
If they continue in contact they may go around the cycle again, trading information and viewpoints and emotions. Whole teams follow this process. When they first form, when they meet new problems, or get new members, or have to adjust to new things. Better teams glimmer into larger awareness, accept, adjust/adapt, and keep growing.
It's interesting that we show the same basic pattern in developing awareness of our own body, our group or team, other cultures, and even how we adapt when moving to a different climate. We see the same patterning in culture shock. The patterning links to 'waves' in our primary and secondary processes.
Our primary process is where our attention is, including our deliberate messages to others. Our visual, listening, feeling, sniffing, tasting five-senses attention. If you're deliberately gesturing to someone, showing them how skin a cat, then your attention includes your gestures. But most of us add other subconscious messages and miss/ignore/deny other subconscious messages coming from others.
Our secondary process(es) occurs out of our awareness. It's often gestures, how other people react to things, other ways of thinking, involuntary body movements, sounds, smells, and so on. Differing secondary processes are one reason why witnesses to traffic accidents often diverge so widely in their descriptions. Secondary happenings or signals occur “under the radar” of our attention. They are signals or messages from parts of our mindbody personality to the whole. Or signals from parts of the team or community to the whole. It takes time and effort to really become aware of such processes. Culture shock also has secondary patterns causing primary problems.
In groups, skilled observers can find many examples of secondary processes to be interpreted. The problem is that telling someone, or a group, or nation, about their secondary processes isn't very helpful. People need to become aware, more sensitive, then let the discovery show its meaning to them, then act or not-act on the message. Group-think is a common form of secondary process that groups often have a hard time detecting. Very often the signal needs to be enlarged, practised, amplified to be felt by the person or team. Other times denying it can raise a rebellion that teaches awareness.
The Ape – Hunter - Family Diagram is another way to look at our propensities, based on our past. Some of us use our brains one way and others tend to do things other ways, both are subject to secondary tendencies. Both ways of thinking are often somewhat subconscious. When we mix people with the differing ways, or all the same way, of thinking, it takes time and effort to work out tolerable interactions. Also, I might have a 'hunter' way of thinking, and automatically switch to 'ape' to protect family or family needs.
We can explain our propensities by looking at our ancestry. That apes have a hierarchy – akin to some traditional tendencies, and later human hunters needed to cooperate. Women naturally cooperate more than men. We also have a strong need to protect our family, and family group. We will naturally change our tendencies depending on circumstances. A family can be a good model for larger social groups because it often combines the various tendencies in one interdependent whole.
Good coaching, and larger awareness of the overall process, reduces things like one-dominant-thinking and group-think. It's fairly common for team members to coach or mentor others into their relative roles and relationships. The overall team pulls together by coaching itself, by being coached, by becoming interdependent.
Good coaching, and self-coaching, on changes is really a cyclic process, matching the Sensitivity Diagram. The process can be see as a self-evaluation process, where one learns by doing with coaching. Other people can evaluate, and the real key is to develop self-awareness of secondary processes.
Toyota does such with a double kata (google on Mike Rother and 'Toyota Kata'). They have a coaching kata, like the Solutions Focus coaching pattern, helping the person doing and improving the work. The person improving the work also has an improvement kata. The two people in the coaching kata work together as the one discovers and does the improvement kata, with lots of trials and 'go look and see'. Two improvement cycles spiraling better together.
Compare the general pattern shown by the Coaching – Mentoring and the Sensitivity to Environment cyclical Diagrams to Bruce Tuckman's popular team-specific Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing linear model of team development next.
The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of team development
(from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forming-storming-norming-performing )
Forming
In the first phase, the forming of the team takes place. The team meets and learns about the opportunity, agrees on goals and on the resources necessary to tackle the task. Team members tend to still behave quite independently. They may be motivated, but are relatively uninformed of the issues and objectives of the team. Supervisors of the team during this phase tend to be directive. 'Shock therapy' is used on various scrum teams to pre-form them into productive teams. Just like a Rugby sports team, the coach ensures, good performance, then encourages performance growth. Toyota does much the same with good training and its kata.
Storming
Most groups will then enter the storming stage in which different ideas compete for consideration. During this phase, the team addresses issues such as what problems they are supposed to solve, how they will function and what leadership model they will accept. Team members open out to each other and confront each other’s perspectives. They are still relatively unacquainted with the project. Flight crew and software developers and others with well-defined interaction patterns may skip storming at first, then need to re-enter as they grow teamwork.
In some cases, the storming stage can be resolved quickly. In others, the team never leaves this stage.
The storming stage is necessary to the growth of the team. It can seem contentious, unpleasant and even painful to members of the team who are very averse to conflict. If improperly managed, this phase can become destructive to the team and will lower motivation.
Supervisors of the team during this phase may be more accessible but tend to still be directive in their guidance of the decision-making process.
Norming
At some point, most teams will enter the norming stage. Here, team members adjust their behaviors to each other as they developing working habits that make the teamwork seem more natural and fluid. Team members often work through this stage by agreeing on rules, values, shared methods, working tools, and how to deal with outsiders. During this phase, team members begin to trust each other. Motivation increases as the team gets more acquainted with the project. Norming Teams may lose their creative edge if the norming behaviors become too strong and begin to stifle healthy dissent and the team begins to exhibit group-think. (too Yin)
Team leaders during this phase tend to be more participative than in the earlier stages. The team members themselves can be expected to take more responsibility for making decisions. The trend is toward each team member becoming a situational leader.
“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” -- Albert Einstein
Performing
Some teams will reach the performing stage. These high-performing teams are able to function as a unit as they find ways to get the job done smoothly and effectively without external supervision. Team members have become interdependent. By this time they are motivated and knowledgeable. The team members are now competent, autonomous and able to handle the decision-making process without supervision. Dissent is expected and is channelled through means acceptable to the team.
Supervisors of the team during this phase are almost always participative. The team itself will make most of the necessary decisions.
Even the most high-performing teams will revert to earlier stages in certain circumstances. Many long-standing teams will go through these cycles many times as they react to changing circumstances. For example, a change in leadership may cause the team to revert to storming as the new people challenge the existing norms and dynamics of the team.