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Intelligent
Teams?: The Dynamics of Collaboration
Written by: Brett Richards, M.A.
President, Connective Intelligence Inc.
Published in AQP Journal, (Association of Quality and Participation),
Fall, 2003
In the Summer 2003 issue of The Journal for Quality and Participation,
I explored the discipline of innovation and concluded that
those organizations that enable individuals and teams to develop
the appropriate skills to manage both the cognitive and emotional
dimensions of innovation will experience reduced cycle times and
sustained high performance. Not only do teams enact the innovation
process, they drive the overall momentum of the business, and thereby
provide an interesting barometer to the current and future performance
of business units, if not whole organizations. In this issue, I
will explore the link between effective teams and organizational
performance, as well as the dynamics that underpin effective team
collaboration.
Are You Smart or Effective?
I recently worked with a high level team who were all very “smart”
people, by smart I mean highly educated professionals and scientists;
however, they could not get their heads together to collaborate
effectively. It reminded me of a query by Dr. Robert Sternberg,
in his book, Successful Intelligence (to paraphrase): how
is it that a group of really smart people can end up with really
dumb results? Over and over again, I have experienced that team
performance is far less a function of “knowledge” and “expertise”
and far more a function of their ability to collaborate. To reiterate,
the team in question was comprised of very smart people who were
highly motivated and committed to their work and to their organization.
However, despite their best intentions, the team had reached a performance
ceiling, which demanded that they rethink how they work together,
while developing a different set of skills. Without the discipline
and commitment to continuously refine their collaborative skills,
all teams will eventually reach that same performance ceiling where
the quality of their interaction is insufficient to meet new and
emergent levels of organizational change, speed, and complexity.
Figure
1: Collaboration and Performance
Figure 1 represents
a model that I believe articulates the interdependent relationship
between, learning, performance and systemic change. I have adapted
it from a ‘systems law’ that was formulated by Ross Ashby who was
one of the founding fathers of a branch of science known as cybernetics.
Ashby’s law of requisite variety states that for a system to maintain
its integrity and survive, its rate of learning must at least match
the rate of change in its environment. I should mention that although
the focus of this article is geared at team learning and team
collaboration, I believe the model equally applies to organizational
learning and the entire suite of collaborative systems utilized
to drive performance within whole organizations. In my view, teams
should be viewed as sub-systems of a much wider organizational network,
which is, in turn, affected by even broader systemic levels beyond
the borders of the organization. In my experience, team dynamics
often represent a microcosm of similar dynamics at play within the
larger organization.
Line A – indicates that the rate of change and
complexity is accelerating at a faster rate than the team’s ability
(or willingness) to learn and collaborate. Under such conditions,
the team will be unable to sustain the necessary levels of performance
to achieve desired results. In organizations, the pressure is usually
increased due to externally imposed time compression, where the
team is forced to respond with equal or higher levels of quality
and results in less the time. The cognitive and emotional pressure
on individual team members becomes too great and the team’s collaborative
dynamic breaks down as self-preservation and infighting increases.
Typically, the team becomes divided, breaking up into various sub-groups,
which further dilutes its much-needed collective brainpower and
energy.
Line B – indicates a circumstance where the team’s
rate of learning is keeping pace with the current rate of change
in the environment. The watch out at this level of learning and
collaboration is that if a crisis emerges or there is an unanticipated
onslaught of change, it could throw the team into chaos, moving
it back towards Line A. In effect, there is no buffer zone
between current levels of systemic complexity and sudden influxes
of change. Given the nature of the current business environment,
it is not unrealistic to expect sudden, if not drastic, organizational,
competitive or even global changes to emerge, frequently.
Line C – indicates an optimal rate of team learning
and collaborative ability. I would argue that the goal is always
to strive to stay to the right of Line B, keeping ahead of the required
level of performance. Organizational leaders and team leaders are
responsible for this difficult task, as they must set the tone,
raise the performance bar and create the necessary conditions for
continuous learning and development. Effective leaders anticipate
potentially threatening circumstances and make great efforts to
provide appropriate information, knowledge, tools and skills to
ensure sustained high performance. Perhaps most importantly, effective
leaders continuously strive to help their teams maintain a posture
of emotional readiness to the demands of both, continuous
learning, and accelerated change. The task of continuous learning
requires tremendous amounts of emotional energy; it also requires
a good amount of emotional resilience to personally cope with, and
lead others through, accelerated change.
Process Matters
All the data in the world is meaningless if the team does not have
an effective process to harness, capture and assimilate relevant
information, knowledge and experience. Process refers to the how
teams collaborate while working through tasks. Data refers to
-the what- all of the information involved with understanding
and completing the team task. Due to ever present time pressures,
many teams jump right to action and get caught up in the data, while
losing sight of establishing and developing effective process skills.
Effective process skills, is what distinguishes high performing
teams from low performing teams, over the long run. Collaboration,
in my view, is the essential process skill that teams need to learn
and continuously refine if they are to stay ahead of the performance
curve. Let’s look a little closer at the dynamics of team performance,
and, more specifically, the two essential drivers of real collaboration.
1. Valuing Diversity
Effective teams have sufficient diversity to generate constructive
and creative tension. Groups that think alike and share the same
world-view typically have a lot of fun together, but they often
miss the necessary friction brought about by fundamentally divergent
views and approaches to getting work done. Diversity in and of itself,
however, is not enough. Typically, one of the first stages of insight
and awareness for teams is that individual team members do actually
think differently. It sounds almost trite, however it is in fact
a profound recognition for many people. Unfortunately, mere “recognition”
of the differences is not enough to drive high performance collaboration.
Real collaboration requires that individual team members truly value
the different modes of thinking that each member brings to the table.
Team members must be compelled to challenge their own mental models,
as well as others’. In reality, teams will resist this type of effort
or simply will not engage in exploring the value of different mental
models without an effective framework to do so.
Thinking Style Diversity
One of the most robust and practical systems in the world for understanding
the power of effective thinking was developed through four years
(1977-1981) of applied business-based research at Philips, the Dutch
multi-national electronics firm. Jerry Rhodes and two in-house scientists
at Philips headed up the Deva project, which is a shortened phrase
for skillful thinking. The project goal was to improve corporate
performance worldwide by developing a practical, easy-to-learn thinking
skills system for universal application across their R&D group.
Rhodes and his associates identified three primary driving forces,
six dimensions and 25 core conceptual activities of mind. Once teams
learn what developed into the Rhodes’ system of Effective Intelligence™,
known as Effective Intelligence™ in North America, they can use the concepts
and tools to harness their brainpower, collaborate better and get
work done more effectively.
2. A Common Language
Embracing a common language to harness a broad range of team diversity
is another essential ingredient of effective team collaboration.
The Effective Intelligence™ model of mind provides a common language for thinking
through tasks and creates a practical framework for team members
to understand each other better, as well as develop their own ability
to flex their thinking energies to best match the requirements of
each task they face. A shared language for teams to work through
tasks such as innovation, strategy and project management, to name
a few, are needed to provide the necessary process skills and structure
that most teams desperately need. Real collaboration requires that
teams develop the discipline to focus their thinking energies and
learn to do the right thinking at the right time. Without an effective
process framework, team meetings get derailed, team members get
frustrated because they feel they have not been heard and precious
time is wasted. Figure 2 depicts the Effective Intelligence® framework of mind
that developed its roots from Rhodes’ system of Effective Intelligence™.
Figure
2: The Effective Intelligence System of Effective Intelligence™
What
The Six Mind Frames or “Frames of Mind” Mean:
The Logical Mind Frame: Hard Blue
 The type of
thinking that is driven by relevance, proof, comparisons, disciplined
and logical reasoning.
The Personal/Evaluative Mind Frame: Soft Blue
The type of
thinking that is driven by action, personal values, commitments,
enthusiasm and personal views.
The Analytical Mind Frame: Hard Red
The type of
thinking that is driven by realism, quantitative information, data,
precision, organization and a sense of context.
The Impressionistic Mind Frame: Soft Red
The type of
thinking that is driven by impressions, sensitivity, qualitative
information, concern for communication and a holistic perspective.
The Ingenious Mind Frame: Hard Green
The type of
thinking that is driven by ideas, options, many alternatives and
outside-the-box approaches.
The Imaginative Mind Frame: Soft Green
The type of
thinking that is driven by hunches, metaphors, “what if” scenarios,
vision and imagination.
Intelligent Teams
The degree to which the group truly capitalizes on the rich diversity
of each of it members will directly affect the quality of their
results. Intelligent teams make a concerted effort to continuously
improve their collaborative skills. Collaboration requires deliberate,
focused attention and conscious effort to sustain it. Real collaboration
is not easy because it requires individuals to scrutinize the way
they think and interact, and it requires a tremendous amount of
emotional self-management. It’s when the stakes are high and the
pressure is on the team to perform better when emotions run high.
Intelligent teams learn how to harness both their emotional power
and conceptual energy to navigate the pressures of continuous change.
Any team, work group or task force that gets together for the purpose
of working toward a common goal becomes a micro-learning community
embedded within the larger system of the organization. Organizations
need to pay close attention to the way individual teams think and
interact. It is the quality of those daily team interactions
that will ultimately determine how well the larger organization
responds to the pressures of an increasingly competitive and complex
world.
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About
Brett Richards:
Brett Richards is an innovator, performance coach and energizing
facilitator. In addition to being a master trainer in the Effective Intelligence™
System of Effective Intelligence™, he also holds certifications in
EQi (emotional intelligence) and executive coaching. He can be contacted
at 866-848-6548 or via e-mail at brett@connectiveintelligence.com.
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