Form teams faster, succeed sooner

Working Together smoothly isn't automatic or instant. It takes explicit effort and conscious decisions.

Team Profiles

The more team members understand about each other's optimal working conditions, the better they can support each other's success and call on each other as needed.

Adaptation Education

Different team members have different adaptation intelligence. Training in how to recognize, respect, and support each other in moments of adaptation will help teams manage change more smoothly.

Mindset Palette

Each team member brings a different way of seeing the world to the mix. Knowing this about each other can facilitate better meetings, better sales, and better products.

Communication Practice

All of these techniques provide language to improve safe team communication, but guided practice makes perfect. Everyone comes to a team with their own story to weave into the work.

Better engineering through neuroscience

The little Agile team that could

One of the teams that experienced these practices was a small agile development team tasked with turning out complex products very quickly. The team had a lot of different brains: some strategic, some tactical, some visual thinkers, some verbal. They had different stress responses, ideal working conditions, and ways of communicating. These differences created so many barriers to optimization that every retrospective showed the same communication barriers:

  • misunderstandings
  • hurt feelings
  • communication deterioration and redundancy
  • too many meetings to cover the same information in different ways
  • lots of in efficiency that meant deadlines were missed.

For this team, we created:

  • team profiles
  • mindset palettes
  • communication practice routines

Once they understood that the miscommunications were not deliberate but neurological differences, fundamental variations in how they each were considering the problems they faced, they could address each other with more respect.

When the respectful foundations were laid, they could establish new communication patterns that let them raise issues earlier and less emotionally.

When problems were raised sooner, deadlines weren't missed, products were released on time, and the team moved into the performance stage.