Teamwork

What is teamwork? Why is it that a team of people can achieve greater success than an individual working alone?
I'd like to try and answer those questions. I've looked back over my own experiences and thought about the best team I've ever worked with. I've contemplated what made that team great? Why did we we all work so well together? Why were we able to achieve greater than the sum of individual achievements? It's made me think about what stops teams from working well too. What prevents them from being a team?
I've discovered that there have been some great teams in history, teams that achieved more than any of their members could have imagined.
Families too, they can make a fabulous team, but can be fundamentally destructive when they don't.

So what makes a team and what is teamwork?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a team as "two or more persons working together" and teamwork as the "combined action of a team, especially when effective and efficient". For me the key words there are "working together" and "effective". There's nothing quite like being a member of a team all working together, individual abilities all harnessed into a single focused team, it is genuinely very effective. It makes you feel that together you could achieve anything. You probably could too!!

Why is it that a group can be more effective than just one member?
Physical laws would tend to suggest that the overall ability of a group can be no more than the sum of the individual team members abilities, and could be slightly less so due to inefficiencies with in the grouping. Sadly this is often true for many so called teams, because in truth they are just a group of people and not what I would define as a team. Their lack of drive and individual selfishness prevents them from achieving much.
True teams are powered by team-spirit, the willingness to act as a member of the group rather than as an individual. Individuals empowered by team-spirit achieve greater success than they would acting alone. It follows then that a whole group of people empowered by team-spirit will achieve greater things than all of its individuals would alone.

I'll never forget my first experience of working together with a really inspired team , it was awesome. You could actually feel the energy it generated! My great team were a team of engineers all working together to develop a four cylinder petrol injection system for a well known, sadly gone, automotive company.
Every member of that team was great, me included. The development engineers produced ideas and solutions to solve each of the challenges we encountered, the software engineers implemented those ideas and solutions into practical, working pieces of electronic engineering, the applications engineers took our systems and made them really work, fettle and tuned them into real world solutions. Every member of that team was enormously talented and each of us was driven on by a will to see the team succeed, which we did, not in the end so much as every single day.

It's not always been that way for me though, I've also experienced the frustration of working in a group that simply wasn't a team. I've discovered that even if a group has one or two inspired individuals it will still fail if the other members just lay back and bask in that warm light of inspiration. It led me to think hard about what stops a group member from becoming a team member. What stops an individual from developing team-spirit?

I think the most fundamental factor is the individuals themselves. While it is possible to make any group into a team under extreme circumstances, escaping from certain peril for instance, this effect is only temporary. Long lasting teams will only work if all of the members have the will and discipline to behave as a team, there is little room for selfishness and no room for laziness, these traits reduce respect for one another and without individual respect the teams days are numbered. Often group members fail to develop team-spirit because to do so requires some personal growth, a willingness to put aside their own needs and be supported by others. An individuals background or psychological makeup may prevent them from taking this important step, they may be able to with regular exposure to others team-spirit but some folks just never get there.

Work in progress...

Problem Solving

I was going to post this in Durch Technik but realised that I don't perceive problem solving as a purely technical thing, to me it's really more a state of mind.

(I'm paraphrasing Robert Pirsig again with a mix of my own perception)

How do we solve problems?

1) Identify the problem
- The light doesn't work)

2) Propose hypotheses to suggest a cause of the problem
- The light bulb has failed
- The wiring is faulty
- The switch is faulty
- The electricity has failed

3) Test each hypotheses to assess it's validity
- Try a new light bulb
- If it works we conclude that the light bulb had failed
- If it doesn't work we conclude that the problem lies elsewhere
(Be careful, there's a premise here that the new light bulb works!!)

4) Having found a valid hypothesis and reached a conclusion we achieve two things:
- We solve our problem (fix the light)
- We assimilate valuable data for the future (lights don't work when bulbs fail)

I'm going to extrapolate this into IT problem solving and see where we go....

On personal growth

On the subject of growth. If following the path of personal growth brings satisfaction, fulfilment and joy to our lives then it's clear that the currency of following personal growth is ultimately happiness.

It's interesting that so many people are just chasing happiness in their lives, that's their ultimate goal, but the more they try to "capture" it the more elusive it becomes.

As an analogy, we know that in business if you just chase the money (happiness) then success (satisfaction, fulfillment etc.) won't necessarily follow, but if you follow your passion (personal growth) then quite often the money (happiness) will follow on naturally.

Quality

More stuff borrowed from Zen and the Art..

When do we experience Quality and how do we percieve it? Quality is something we just know about, some things have it, some don't, some situations have it, some don't.

The feeling of a Quality job... You know when you've done something well and done it right, it's not so much that you enjoy doing it, it just feels good while you're doing it and the time slips by unnoticed, you're part of it.