A team building exercise most teams can’t do
When students begin the semester at Melbourne business school, some of them participate in an exercise with Prof. Peter Gahan, designed to break the ice, and, more curiously, to help uncover what kind of teams perform best at a given task. Prof. Gahan teaches subjects relating to organisational design and human resources and last year he and I caught up to chat about org design and what makes high performing teams tick.
The exercise put forward is very simple — can you make a square from a ball of string?
Each team member is blindfolded and people are broken up into groups. A ball of string is placed somewhere in the room and the students are asked to find it, unwrap it, and then form a perfect square using the string. The exercise is timed. It sounds easy — and everyone fails.
Prof. Gahan and I talked about this exercise over lunch at the dining room for faculty at the top of the Melbourne Law building in Carlton. He has run this exercise over many years and observed which teams perform the best.
“The MBA students we have really struggle to get the job done. They talk a lot about how to do it, in the moment, but when you look at the finished squares they are far from perfect — the MBA’s perform the worst. Too many chiefs.”
When I talk about high performing teams, one thing I highlight frequently at is Daniel Pinks book Drive, where he outlines that to motivate teams and get great results, teams need as much autonomy as they can get. The crux of it is that top-down management structures underperform those who work in teams that are more self-organising and autonomous.
But what’s fascinating is the teams who perform well at the string square exercise are the most top down and hierarchal in structure. Melbourne business school has teams come in from the police force and the military, and teams from the private sector, and these highly structured hierarchal teams simply outperform the other students by a mile.
I asked Prof. Gahan why he thinks this is.
“All teams start out the same way. They fumble around trying to find the string, but then the more autocratic teams suddenly stop, and someone will shout, Alright, everyone just stop. Who is the most senior person here?”
“Some of these teams then quickly identify numbers, so they give people identifiers, so that commands can be easily distributed. Number 1, move forward one inch. Number 2, move back one foot.”
For whatever reason, when Prof. Gahan looks at the squares created, those teams from the police and the military deliver the best results.
There are many ways of looking at the success of these teams and wondering what the contributing factor is.
- Is it because the teams follow orders, based on rank? Which makes the process faster and they can try more overall experiments in the same time window?
- Is it because the teams work well together already? Maybe they move as a cohesive unit?
- Are autocratic teams simply better suited to the task?
I certainly don’t have the answers on this one. But it does make you reflect on having a system to solve problems, and how that system of rules can lead to higher performance.
One thing Prof. Gahan raised when we met was a big misconception about Holacracy, which is an operating framework I love the sound of in practice, but sadly have not had much real world experience with.
A business that runs as a Holacracy like Zappos, is at first thought to be run by self-directed actions. The idea that staff can simply do whatever they want, and the whole company is in productive chaos.
But Holacracy has very engrained rules, in ways, much like the military. There are defined operational systems that ensure everyone knows how things should work. Meetings are run in a very particular way. It is very clear who can decide what. Who has authority to hire someone, for instance? That’s very clear, and when it’s not, a meeting is created not to discuss who you should hire, but simply to work out who is going to be responsible for that domain of authority moving forward.
The idea in Holacracy is simply to dish out responsibilities, then leave the details of that decision up to that person. If they want to talk about it, or they want to hear from other about their thoughts — nothing stops them. But whats key is that people can simply make decisions when they need, as long as they follow a consultative approach. You want teams to seek information from those who might provide good council, but you don’t want people having to convince others in order to make the most basic of decisions. If every time you need to decide something you have to summon the powers of persuasion, it creates too much anxiety, and slows teams down to a grinding halt.
Frameworks not orders
If we take a common organisation today, there will be staff who are tasked with delivering millions of dollars in sales, but can’t be trusted to book the ‘cheapest’ airfare without strict oversight. Why do we entrust some tasks, but not others to be done without interference?
If I were to guess at why the autocratic teams create the best squares, it’s that the military and police simply have better operational systems (ways of working) established, and the success is less about the person giving out orders being the most senior, but more that everyone knows how to operate together.
Specific talent performance problems aside — I think the big misconception about autonomy, especially from those who fear it leads to disaster, is a false assumption that autonomy is letting teams do anything, but this isn’t how it works when done right. There has to be some rules to the game which ensure that the activities teams perform all work. Citizens of a country are mostly left to their own devices, but there are laws that govern conduct. These laws give everyone a unified social contract so that we can move quickly, while protecting the rest of the population from disaster should someone decide to play outside of the rules.
Companies try and fix this by writing employment policies, but you would be hard pressed to find someone who can remember what is in those kind of documents so I doubt their real world efficacy.
I suspect this is why even the phrase, ways of working is becoming more popular in agile teams. I would guess, by having a set of guidelines, whatever they are, enables teams to operate without hinderance, while giving managers the peace of mind, that whatever the activity, if it works within the ways of working guidelines, high performance and high engagement stand the best chance of success.
