Team Development Framework I
Phase II Transition
Phase II Transition
Denis Silvers
Founder & Developer
I have experience teaching teens maths. Today teens prepare for and pass the SAT Exam. I brought up the exam to talk about one mental model that divides all my former students into successful or unsuccessful.
Many universities consider a score of 70% in maths to be a good result. Of course, there are universities that want to attract the best students, for them 70% is not enough, but for most students 70% is a good score.
The main secret of the maths exam is this: one can get 70% if one does everything accurately and according to the techniques. For 70% there is no need for creative thinking, but discipline, diligence and accuracy.
My personal experiments have shown that the average student with these qualities spends 90 minutes on solving the first 13 problems out of 19, checks their solution for no more than 60 minutes – and leaves. Without stress. Without panic. Without resolving already correctly solved problems: people are suspicious of the fact that the correct solution came easily.
A 70% in math is a Simple System. If a person needs more, they get to the Complicated System, where there are no simple rules and best practices. Creative thinking is required there.
What was described in Phase ???? are just such simple tools, the careful and disciplined application of which will lead to quite high efficiency. But people are eager to get their hands on some sophisticated tool.
Once at my training I was talking about the Eisenhower Matrix, a fairly good tool that helps one get just the right 70 out of 100. One participant objected: he was expecting something more sophisticated than a simple Eisenhower Matrix. When asked if he used it to solve the personal effectiveness problems he had voiced in the beginning he replied, ‘No’. Although the matrix would have solved 70% of it.
During the break, he found a time management book in the bookcase and showed me what real personal effectiveness tools should look like: a full-spread table to be filled out every 15 minutes, with a task and an assessment of one's effectiveness in completing it. A very ‘blue’ solution.
Is it safe to say that this person is free to choose his or her own tools? For himself, yes, but as a team leader or business manager, the person is responsible to the stakeholders, to the customers, to the team, and here the person is deprived of such freedom.
Many universities consider a score of 70% in maths to be a good result. Of course, there are universities that want to attract the best students, for them 70% is not enough, but for most students 70% is a good score.
The main secret of the maths exam is this: one can get 70% if one does everything accurately and according to the techniques. For 70% there is no need for creative thinking, but discipline, diligence and accuracy.
My personal experiments have shown that the average student with these qualities spends 90 minutes on solving the first 13 problems out of 19, checks their solution for no more than 60 minutes – and leaves. Without stress. Without panic. Without resolving already correctly solved problems: people are suspicious of the fact that the correct solution came easily.
A 70% in math is a Simple System. If a person needs more, they get to the Complicated System, where there are no simple rules and best practices. Creative thinking is required there.
What was described in Phase ???? are just such simple tools, the careful and disciplined application of which will lead to quite high efficiency. But people are eager to get their hands on some sophisticated tool.
Once at my training I was talking about the Eisenhower Matrix, a fairly good tool that helps one get just the right 70 out of 100. One participant objected: he was expecting something more sophisticated than a simple Eisenhower Matrix. When asked if he used it to solve the personal effectiveness problems he had voiced in the beginning he replied, ‘No’. Although the matrix would have solved 70% of it.
During the break, he found a time management book in the bookcase and showed me what real personal effectiveness tools should look like: a full-spread table to be filled out every 15 minutes, with a task and an assessment of one's effectiveness in completing it. A very ‘blue’ solution.
Is it safe to say that this person is free to choose his or her own tools? For himself, yes, but as a team leader or business manager, the person is responsible to the stakeholders, to the customers, to the team, and here the person is deprived of such freedom.
Phase II relies on the fact that you already know your objectives – and they are linked to the company's objectives, you already have a WBS in the format of epics and stories or any other adequate format, and a team that is ready to implement improvements at least in words.
While Phase I can be completed in two months, Phase IIalready requires a year. In Phase II, the team continues their meetings, but:
- Resistance begins, ‘why fix something that is not broken’; ‘it's not a problem, everyone has it’; ‘It is a special case’.
- Some of the people you relied on in the beginning will leave. Perhaps it will be for the best.
- People may start missing meetings – they turn out to have important and urgent things to do. When these meetings are run by an external consultant, people behave in a responsible and disciplined manner. When they are led by a team leader, there may be a desire to get things back to the way they were.
For a team to slowly but surely improve its performance in Phase II, a more subtle work leading from 70 to 90 is needed.
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