Bringing your Analogue past into our Digital future

The social aspects of teamwork and how to improve the ways in which we work together.

First I’d like to start this with a question, Is humanity really all that social?
Most people would quickly answer yes to this, however if our modern social interactions are looked at closer a different picture emerges. I mean think about it, yes we work together but in the end it all boils down to personal gain. In our current society we have an ‘every man for himself ‘attitude. People work not to achieve the goals of the job but to make money in order to improve their own lives. Having more money than your neighbors and having a better lifestyle have become an integral part of society, our adverts tell us we need more, our parents insist we need security and money, our friends tell us how much they have and we dedicate our lives to getting more. Looking throughout history it is always individuals who have been singled out as the inventors, explorers and artists. In reality there were many people behind these famous faces but it points out to me the weight each of us gives to individuality. It is easier somehow for us to think of things being completed as individuals.

The best of our work can be done in teams, a team provides more people to tackle a problem allowing the problem to be broken down and managed. The success of a team depends on how the people within the team work together. Put 10 random people together and give them a task and they will all work to complete it. However they are not really working together, they are working as individuals doing there own tasks all with the concept in their heads that it is them as individuals who will complete the task. A traditional team will have someone to lead who overviews the entire task and then the rest of the team usually assigned to individual tasks. This is an inefficient team as it splits the team into a group of individuals each of which concentrates on their own task. The leader is the only member of the team aware of the overall situation and even they are not aware of the details of each task. If the leader was to have full awareness then the rest of the team would be redundant. Each team member is most aware of their own task, this is damaging to the overall task as the individual is not fully aware of the way his part fits into the overall task. Splitting a complex task into manageable parts is the traditional method of solving the task, however I believe this dilutes the best solution to the task.In my opinion a team can be set up to be much more efficient and be capable of finding answers to very complex problems.

To truly get a group of people together we need to remove their individuality and get them to work truly together. We do not however want to turn off a persons individuality, as a group of drones would be useless, but we want to add their individuality to the collective of the group. Imagine a group of computers set to complete a task, they do not work best as individual machines but as a collective group of machines all working together. A concept that could achieve this would be to create what I have called an Autonomous team. By this I mean a group of people that are no longer a group of individuals working for individual goals but a collective group working for the team. The team becomes a new individual in itself made up of the collective of all the members of the group. A team like this will work like an individual, the members of the team will almost automatically do what they are best at in order to complete the task. Each member of the team would be fully aware of the strengths and knowledge of all the other members. An individual knows exactly who to call on for each aspect of a problem as do all the individuals. A team like this would require a minimum of communication, quite contrary to what is expected of a good team. This minimum of communication does not mean a void of communication but a more efficient communication. An Autonomous team would not need to discuss each members strengths as this would already be known. Communication in an Autonomous team would consist of each member being fully aware of what each other member is doing. This awareness to an extent would require little communication as each member will already know what the other members will be doing.

An example of efficient communication within an autonomous team, the fire service gets a call out, the team on a pump will not need to discuss the process of getting to the call they will already be aware of who will drive, who will connect the pump, who will put on breathing apparatus. This knowledge allows the team to work very efficiently without lots of communication. An autonomous team can take this further in that it can tackle problems and tasks that it hasn’t encountered before.

To give an example of how an Autonomous team might work when applied to the simple task of building a brick tower.
In a normal team the behavior expected would be for a number of people to pick up bricks and begin stacking them, these people are seeking individual gratification, they want to believe they are stacking the most bricks and that therefore it is them that are driving the team to build the largest tower. Other people in this typical team will be talking about how to build the tower trying to get their own plan to be the one used to build the tower. Another set of people in the team wouldn’t care about the task but would look for other ways to gain.
An autonomous team set this same task would get on with it without the need for discussion and with all the members adding an equal value to the task, the group collective would understand each other enough for them to be able to build the tower more efficiently and with less time discussing how than a typical team. The solution to the tower problem would be a collective solution, where each member is aware of the overall task and contributes their skill and knowledge to the collective ‘pool’ of the overall team. For this to happen it is already obvious that the team would have to be set up and used to working together, a random team would not have an understanding of its members, which is a requirement for an autonomous team.
For a simple task like this a solution within the team would already be present allowing the team to move on with the task.
For a more complex task without a prior solution an Autonomous team would spend time discussing the task in order to bring a collective pool of knowledge forward and to bring into the open a collective solution before the task is carried out.

Another example of this could be taken from sport, in a football game made up of players who haven’t played together the game would be hesitant players would need to keep communicating to get passes and all the players would individually be trying to win the game themselves. In a team that has played for a long time together there would be no hesitation players would be able to pass the ball without even looking because they would know that there would be a player on the receiving end. All the players would play for the good of the team. I am sure if an experiment such as this was carried out the autonomous team would have an easy win.

An example can also be given from an MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). In World of Warcraft people join large teams known as raids these can consist of 20 – 40 people. If you play WoW and ask anyone about pick up groups (PUG), that is groups of players making a raid who have never played together before, you will only hear negative comments. This is because getting a group of people together however strong the individuals will usually fail. This is because each player doesn’t know the play style of each of the other members, also due to the nature of a group like this each individual will be trying to solo the challenge. This leads to a group that will no doubt fail.
However if a group gets together that has experience of playing for a while as a group, even if they are weak in terms of equipment, they will have a much easier time completing challenges as they raid.
A group that has become an Autonomous team shows a huge difference in ability compared to a PUG team. To play as part of a group like this is a very interesting experience, everyone just seems to get on with it each player knowing what the other will do, each player working together in such a way that the whole group is like a new individual made up of each member of the team.

In todays world of work though I feel that teams are being thrown together on the fly, growing a good team and allowing it to become autonomous and almost self contained does not seem to be on the agendas of any organisations. I would like to see teams like this form in business, business which at present is still fixated by individual gains. Business today has a culture of teams which never remain together, workers who don’t know who their colleagues are and individuals who care nothing about the bigger picture. Business has tried by sending people to training camps and on activity weekends but in my opinion they have failed to understand the concept failed to understand that to get a team to work the team needs to work for a greater goal than individual gain.
I feel that if we could really understand where a team makes the transition from individuals in a group to a single autonomous unit we could become much more efficient and gain the ability to tackle the huge complex problems that we face. Questions about team practice must be asked, I feel that we still have a lot to learn about working together. As problems become more and more complex we must adapt how we solve them if we are going to continue our progress. For me the Autonomous team is just the beginning of how we can begin to tackle problems that are presently beyond our abilities.

Very complex tasks cant be solved by individuals but could be solved by autonomous teams.