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SessId040

The First Key to Team Success: Deciding Who to Include and Exclude

Designers

SteveSmith and Kevin Fjelsted

Requirements

max number of participants: 40

min number of participants: 15

optimum number: 25

configuration of room: flexible, chairs only

Description

The word team comes from the Indo-European base meaning "to lead". Spinmasters around the world corrupt the base meaning of this word every day. They quickly form a group of people to work on a project and bestow upon them the title "team". Almost all the energy spent in the formation process revolves around the decision about who will lead the team. Although management is surprised when the supposed team produces less than what is expected, they really shouldn't be. A closer look would reveal that the group spent most of its time squabbling and little of its time leading. Sadly, management doesn't look closely so the cycle of rapid team formation repeats itself again and again.

Everyone can save themselves a lot of pain and anguish by investing time to form a team of leaders that will work together to achieve the desired result. Inevitably, this investment will require including some people and excluding others. Decisions about team membership are necessary before the start of a project and whenever membership changes. Regardless of the reason, excluding other people from membership violates a deep rule for some people. This session will explore how to reduce the hurt, transform the rule, and break the cycle.

[I don't accept that blindness should prevent someone from paritcipating in a wiki. Just last night I heard an hour of counterexamples from a long time participant in the Archimedes Project at Stanford. 12 July 2000 DickKarpinski]

Split people into groups.

Discuss their reaction to being excluded. Discuss what the best method is for including new people into a group.

Simulate a work process using card sorting and a competition between groups.

Each person picks a ball from an urn, if it is red they move to another group. Given the earlier discussion about inclusion, note how the group processes the tradeoff between winning the competition and including the new people.

Debrief the simulation. Perhaps using ropes. DiscussionOfRopes

I don't understand a few items in the following notes but here is everything I wrote:

• reducing hurt
  
  
• including new people faster
  
  
• new project manager arrives and isn't included
  
  
• What propogates the behavior and how do you break the cycle?
  
  
• Have Kevin arrive unannounced and see if he is included.
  
  
• Create a special group (that all the other groups know about) and have its members join the other group.
  
  
• Jerry described Dani's work in the Swiss village where she wasn't fully included until she went away and came back.
  
  
• Inclusion effects whether people stay in the organization.
  
  
• Inclusion affects organizational safety.
  
  
• People can begin to feel so inclusive they become exclusive.
  
  
• Do simulation blindfolded. Tests the assumption that sighted person could do better than nonsighted. H.G. Wells story of the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind.
  
  
• How can the learnings be applied to projects and teams.
  
  
• What are you (the participant) doing to exclude people that you didn't realize?
  
  
• I don't think we covered the importance of when its appropriate to exclude people that triggered this session.

We do want to return to the original question of when it's appropriate to exclude somebody, and how to do it.

Of course we have much too many ideas, which is good, but now we have to shape them into a real session.

How shall we do that?

What's your instinct for how long the session should be? Two, three, or four hours?

What's the upper limit before we start excluding people?

We could make it two hours long, and offer it twice if there's a big demand.

Steve: I also like the flexibility of two sessions.
Jerry: So do I.

Jerry: I like 15, but with certain designs, we'll need more people. For instance, if we want more different groups so we can try different things with them, we'll need more than 15.
Steve:I would like three groups. The group size could start out the same and then change as people move to other groups. We could create a group that is "too small" or "too large". I've observed that as the group grow beyond an acceptable level of similarity factions (inclusion) and outcasts (exclusion) begin occuring.

I believe this is a second major learning and it is ignored only at the cost of having to keep finding people who have drifted away and bringing them back. It is far cheaper to catch the problem closer to the source!

We didn't do this very well on Sun. I attribute this to a "rush to process" that I felt a few in the group took as their primary goal for the day as an effort to avoid any extension of the long, painful discussion path we had started down on Sat. My comment is that we've spent far more time, energy, and effort as a result of trying to avoid the near-term pain of chaos than we might have spent by solving the problem in a more human way. However, this way lead to learnings that made it all worthwhile for me.

I'd like to have sessions in which we practice the above-mentioned critical skills of observing where people are, connecting with outliers, and checking back at the end of interactions. We could also practice keep-alive polling of connections in larger groups. I suspect that pretty much any practice forum we have will work for these items. -karl

  1 I had no intention of commenting on anyone's feelings. DickKarpinski
  

This leads to a secondary effect of blindness which we sighted rarely see (or "get", in the common vernacular). Blindness is not a unifying experience, and blind people, just as sighted people, often find themselves responding to their individual situations very, very differently.

If Kevin feels excluded, he is excluded. See Karl Ginter's excellent post to ferret out this effect. We need not debate why, but we need to reach out if we wish to incorporate him, as I believe Jerry and Steve are illustrating very plainly.

And that brings us back to the topic at hand. -- Sharon Marsh Roberts (of AYE as well as "Sharon and Ken")