OD Experiments at Stanford University Medical Center: Accelerating Team Development — III
[Continued from ‘Fractal-Based OD Experiment at Stanford University Medical Center’…]
Soon after the first course Stanford’s Center of Education & Professional Development asked me to create another course that leveraged the fractal notion emphasized in the previous stress-management course. I thought about this and decided to broaden the basis of applying fractal analyses by creating a course that focused on accelerating team development.
I wanted to use a team maturity model that was widely accepted and decided on the Forming-Norming-Storming-Performing framework. The insight I had was that some kind of aggregate of states of being experienced by people on a team would give direct insight into the stage of development of the team.
One of the people I bounced the idea off felt that the focus should not be on the states of being, but rather on a summary narrative that captured where people thought the team was at on a number of different fronts. My view, however, was that states of being, whether of anger, irritation, fear, joy, courage, perseverance, amongst many others was much more indicative of where a team was actually at.
I viewed emotion or a state of being as a fractal structure comprised of a vital, a physical, and a mental component. Hence the “feeling” (the vital component) makes one aware of a deeper structure likely operating behind the surface that is influencing the way a person ‘processes’ circumstances. Without that feeling a person will perhaps never become aware that such circumstance-processing structures exist. But then if one becomes aware of such structures then one can probe deeper and will find a driver (mental component) actually responsible for the structure. On further examination the part of the body (physical component) that the structure exists in will also become more apparent.
Such examination is the basis of dissolving these automatic processing-structures that quite frankly, is a self-imposed layer that tends to remove us from what is really happening around us. Becoming aware of such structures, and learning to observe them will tend to dissolve them, hence freeing up useless processing capacity and allowing people and consequently a team to operate far more productively.
The net-net of the course was hence to help a team accelerate its journey through the Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing levels. This would drive a team to a higher level of optimal performance in a shorter time frame, thereby increasing ROI and productivity, while lowering organizational costs.
In this course I had participants break into teams that were given different real-life like scenarios. Each of the teams was at a different level of maturity and had to play the part of being either in the Forming, Storming, Norming, or Performing stages. Through entering observations and comments in real-time to describe how simulated team interactions went, overall team patterns were computed in real-time, and gave each of the teams and participants insight of what it meant to be at that level.
This course along with the previous one, were both focused on introducing the concept of fractals and their power in the workplace. The possibility had been introduced and the ‘field’ was being prepared for something more dynamic.
(To Be Continued…)
