The transformational journey of a newly formed team
Using design tools to promote team performance
Introduction
In this essay I will try to demonstrate how specific design tools and external pressure (negative feedback) can be used to impact team member’s individual growth, and in consequence, improve the overall dynamic of newly formed team. For this I am going to focus on three main tools and methods (Table 1) which were introduced to the Service Design MA students during our Ways of Working (WoW) [1] module and that marked key moments for my team development:
The ideas presented on Table 1 are largely consistent with Tuckman’s “stages of group development” analysis: the improvement of my team’s performance was directly connected with our ability to change our interpersonal relationship patterns. But while Tuckman draws a parallel between Group Structure (“the way members act and relate to one another”) and Task Activity (“the content of interaction as related to the task at hand”) I am interested in exploring how individual changes impact the team and its ability to move through Tuckman’s four development stages: forming, storming, norming and performing (Tuckman, 1965). The tools and methods described on Table 1 have, therefore, supported not only myself and each of my team members to become more open to change, but it also helped the team as a whole to evolve from being a newly formed group of people working together, to a performing team.
This personal and collective transformational journey was rewarding yet challenging. Part of this challenge can be explained by our human nature of creating identity through repetition of ideas and beliefs, meaning that from an individual level all humans might be resistant to change as “reconsidering something we believe in deeply can threaten our identities” (Grant, 2021, p.4). From a more collective perspective, part of our struggle to lean into change might come from our educational system, and future career paths, where taking risks, sharing weaknesses and failures are not encouraged. On the contrary, from early years our curiosity is suppressed (Berger, 2017) giving way to a culturally accepted mindset where “most of us take pride in our knowledge and expertise, and in staying true to our beliefs and opinions” (Grant, 2021, p.16) instead of prioritizing the ability to be curious, to rethink and transform. But when living in a fast-changing world, as we currently are, it is essential that we develop the ability to “learn to unlearn”, rethink and change our ideas and believes (Grant, 2021) so we can innovate and be in sync with the changes around us. This is the mindset that the WoW module ignited during the last eight weeks.
The Manual of Me (MoM)
The MoM impacted how team members individually reflect about themselves by providing structure for us to organise our thoughts around our personalities, preferred ways of working, skills, and shortfalls. Having to share these personal reflexions with the team members on week 1 of the course transformed our mindset as we tried to let go of the believe that “being honest with one another is scary” (Fessler, 2017) to seeing the ability to expose our vulnerabilities as a mechanism to create trust within the team (Brown, 2012). Also, having to do the MoM on the first week of working together helped us to save time in understanding each other better. If usually we learn from trial and error during a long period of time of working together, directly communicating our values and preferred ways of working at an early stage can help to shorten “the learning curve for new employees, and helps everyone avoid misunderstandings” (Fessler, 2017).
Although I appreciate the potential of the MoM and the positive impact that it had on my team, going through the manuals was a lot to take in. In this sense I agree with Heffernan’s idea that “Openness [of data/information] alone can’t drive change” (2012). Even after using the MoM, my team was still struggling to communicate with one another and to find an effective way to work together. Perhaps it would have been helpful if we had kept on referring back to and updated our MoM as the work and our team dynamic evolved as a way to make the information more relevant to the situations we were going through, and also to create the habit of self-reflexion and real-time understanding of how each team member was evolving within the team dynamics.
External pressure (negative feedback)
At the end of week 4 my team was put under pressure after receiving negative feedback from our tutor. We were already struggling to communicate with each other and advance with the project, so although the negative feedback did not come to us as a surprise, the extra layer of pressure to a team that was already insecure installed a dynamic of crises. As Tuckman describes in his article, the storming stage is “characterised by conflict and polarization around interpersonal issues” and “emotional response to task demands” (1965). This is exactly what happened to my team as we got frustrated with the task and with one another.
Each person in my team had a different reaction to this moment of crises, but one reaction was the same for us all: hidden characteristics of our personalities (especially displeasing traits that we avoided mentioning on the MoM) were brought to light, raising the level of the conflict as people were not able to accommodate each other’s singularities. Also, as “under acute stress, people typically revert back to their automatic, well-learned responses” (Grant, 2021, p.5), the learnings from the MoM (the caring attitude) gave way to a more individualist and defensive dynamic.
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Although this scenario created a momentary block on the team’s ability to progress with the work, understanding how each one of us dealt with pressure increased our own self-awareness and the awareness of our team members’ singularities. For instance, it became clear to me that some of my colleagues would become paralysed by the high pressure and criticism to their ideas, while others seemed to work well under pressure and were able to explore new ideas when criticised. As consequence the team became out of sync while each one of us wanted to impose their ideas and ways of working, instead of learning from each other.
Six Thinking Hats
configurationsTo overcome our crises my group decided we had to talk about how we were feeling, what we had discovered and what we had to improve as a team. At this point the trust achieved through the sharing of our MoMs became very important as we felt safe to talk honestly with each other. Through this conversation we agreed that we had to learn how to use conflict as a tool to think and evolve ideas, but this was not an easy task. As Heffernan says, the ability to transform conflict into thinking requires “patience and energy. You really have to care for it, and [you] need to be prepared to change [your] mind” (2012). This means we needed to rething the ideas we were trying to develop, as well as rethink the roles we needed to play within the team so we could progress with the work.
The “Six Thinking Hats” came to support us to do exactly that: to communicate our ideas, or our criticisms towards an idea, from a determined point of view. This brough structure and a sense of relativism to our debates as no idea was entirely satisfactory if analysed under all six hats, forcing us to see the qualities and the problems of each idea that people were bringing to the table. It also helped us to move from a “relationship conflict”, where people inflict or take on criticism personally, to a “task conflict”. For Grant this shift in interaction allows the team to debate and advance ideas by “preventing us from getting trapped in overconfidence cycles. It helps us to stay humble, surface doubts, and make us curious about what we might be missing. That can lead us to think again, moving us closer to the truth without damaging our relationships” (Grant, 2021, p.80).
Ultimately the “Six Thinking Hats” helped our team to change the way we would express our frustrations and concerns by providing a method that we could use to explore our ideas from a task-focused perspective. This new way of working took us through the forming stage to the performing and final stage of Tuckman’s group development where we were able to not only accept singularities of each team member but also to use them to make our team stronger and unique.
Conclusion
Transformation demands courage: courage to expose your “good” and your “bad” self and to accept other people’s individualities; courage to face the uncertainty alongside colleagues you just met, having to trust them; courage to fail repeatedly and still keep an open mind to take risks and fail again. The design tools I explored in this essay certainly contributed towards this courage making the transformation less lonely (as the tools were used in shared moments with the team) and more structured (as each tool clearly signals to a new possible way of working/being).
It is clear to me that using these tools, and receiving external pressure, not only enabled our personal, and our team’s transformation, but also accelerated the process. In only eight weeks my team went from being unproductive and somewhat disharmonized to a closed-knit team who managed to deliver a project we were all proud of.
From this experience I have learned that ideas and actions can be changed without you having to change your identity. In fact, becoming increasingly aware of your singularities can be of great value to the team. This seems to be of great importance as “no team is the same, and we cannot work with everyone in the same way” (Fessler, 2017) but we can still be ourselves and use our singularities to better support the team and the work being done.
[1] Ways of Working (WoW) is an eight week module where newly ingressed MA Service Design students are put in groups of 4–5 people to work on a design brief. This year the brief was to develop a service design idea to stop waste.
[2] The Manual of Me is a guide to help people communicate their working preferences, their disposition and needs. On the first week of WoW each student created a manual to respond to the following prompts: “The team I can work best from includes…”, “The environments in which I thrive have…”, “You’ll convince me to get on board by…”, “The best way to give me feedback is…”, “The basics you should know about me are…”, “Beyond work, I’m really passionate about…”, “My best working patterns look like…”, “The things I struggle with are…”, “Cool, fun, crazy, odd, strange and embarrassing thing to know about me…”.
[3] De Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” is a tool that support teams to unscramble their thinking process by allowing ideas to be analysed under six different perspectives: WHITE HAT: neutral and objective, concerned with facts and figures, RED HAT: the emotional view, BLACK HAT: careful and cautious, the “devil’s advocate” hat, YELLOW HAT: sunny and positive, GREEN HAT: associated with fertile growth, creativity, and new ideas, BLUE HAT: cool, the colour of the sky, above everything else-the organizing hat.
References
Berger, W. (2017) Improving The Questions You Ask [online]. Available on https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-knowledge-project-with-shane-parrish/id990149481?i=1000397275946 (Accessed: 18 November 2022).
Brown, R. (2012) Daring greatly. London: Penguin Random House.
Fessler, L. (2017) Completing this 30-minute exercise makes teams less anxious and more productive [online]. Available on https://qz.com/1046131/writing-a-user-manual-at-work-makes-teams-less-anxious-and-more-productive (Accessed: 24 November 2022).
Grant, A. (2021) Think again. London: Penguin Random House.
Heffernan, M. (2012) Dare to disagree [online]. Available on https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_dare_to_disagree (Accessed: 24 November 2022).
Tuckman, B. (1965). “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups” Psychological Bulletin, Volume 63(6), p 384–99.
