The Bay APLN was kind enough to enable its members to beta test the Group Coherence workshop that will be presented at Agile 2009 by César Idrovo and Joanna Zweig. And it was really good. I would not go as far as life changing (as others have reported) but it certainly helped make sense of what lies beyond team dynamics.

I will avoid spoiling the experience of future attendees by describing the workshop. The process and the tools you will be building through the workshop will help you facilitate the apparition of group coherence. And it is far from being an exact science for now.

My personal highlights were:

people need to know their roles,

heroes and martyrs are an obstacle because they do not leave enough space for others to contribute,

the normal ‘good’ team dynamics must exist,

some sense of purpose and pressure must exist,

practice is needed to transforms practices into reflexes.

This eventually led me to form the metaphor that group coherence is a crystallisation process. The chemicals (people) are at some temperature (group dynamics) and under some level of pressure (deliverable, urgency, social pressure). When temperature and pressure align (and unfortunately that alignment depends on the chemicals) a crystal is formed. It could be a snow flake or a diamond.

Now some may prefer the cuisine metaphor but in the end, it is all chemistry anyway.

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