Gnostam to release Team Building excercise results

SEATTLE - April 20, 2013 - PRLog -- Gnostam Consulting [http://www.gnostamconsulting.com] is seeking collaborators to run a series of experiments on how to render particularly dysfunctional teams more effective.

Human beings are social beings, but our evolution has meant that the instinct to collaborate is weaker than the instinct to compete.  Anthropologists have discovered that the oldest “towns” or co-operative human settlements are only about 6,000 years old.  Prior to this, most human social organization was around “hunting” which did involve specialization of tasks and co-operation, [for hunting] but not to the extent that was required in “urban” dwelling and farming.  Language had to become more precise, written language was necessary for the co-ordination necessary to build cities, administer them and develop the social and technological infrastructure of the societies of the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians.

Today we have not lost the urge to compete.  In many of our work environments we have groups that perform work, but which are extremely dysfunctional.  The urge for some in the group is to compete with others, as in many cases the incentives to co-operate are missing.

In particular we see many complex tasks in technology type companies being held up by dysfunctional group companies.  Too many product launches in software are held hostage to the blame game, with “product” teams blaming infrastructure teams, blaming those who run networks for the non performance of the task and problems they are to solve.

How can we find ways to improve team productivity.  Gnostam Consulting, a strategic consulting firm in Seattle, [http://www.gnostamconsulting.com] with emphasis on medical and technology product consulting, is seeking volunteers to run a series of experimental teams to see if a “co-operation” template can in fact be taught.

Philip Corsano, CEO of Gnostam, [http://www.gnostamconsulting.com] is seeking to find non faddish solutions to the problem of team dynamics.

As a graduate of the London Business School MBA program, [http://www.london.edu], he has worked with various researchers and companies to find ways in which create positive relationships and resolve the instinct for human competition in group team settings.  The greatest gains in productivity a team can make are in their interactions with one another.  It is axiomatic that if this is so, the greatest gains one can make in multiple team situations are interactions between teams.  

Many companies will have the following types of goals:

·      How to DECREASE the time it takes teams to make decisions, [by 50% or more]?

·      How to increase team facilitation of information, especially when in disparate locations?

·      How to increase team morale and collaboration in general?

Gnostam seeks to demonstrate how a company can transform a team building activity into a sustainable competitive edge by looking outside conventional solutions.  Integrating the disparate knowledge of the group into a cohesive innovative and integrated solution requires deep thinking.  

However the vast majority of established companies feel there is a big gap between their efforts and their achievements.  R&D investments have been made, stage/gate processes have been built, creativity training courses have been run, and yet the outputs –exciting new products and services—don’t seem to be falling into place.

It is Gnostam’s intention to test the following work methods to establish if they do in fact contribute to better functioning group teams.

1.     Allow teams slack time:  Most companies struggle to justify that level of slack, and aren’t confident it would be well used anyway.   For example allow the teams to meet offsite and give team members an opportunity to commit to do something new, something a bit risky, but which may have a big impact on productivity.

2.     Allow team member to have loosely defined roles:  One of the biggest obstacles to innovation is the notion of a job description – it is a sure-fire way of narrowing an employee’s focus around someone else’s view of what is important, and of not making full use of his latent skill-set.  Truly innovative companies avoid giving people job descriptions, or they find creative ways of encouraging them to join multiple projects.

3.     Tolerance of Failure.  Successful innovation requires tolerance of failure. Some pharmaceutical scientists will spend an entire career working on drug development without a single one of their products reaching the market. Strange, then, that so many of our management processes, the ones that support innovation, are designed to avoid failure and to ignore it when it does happen. We can try to breed tolerance for failure through our skills as leaders of others, but we also need to find ways of institutionalising this approach.  Here are a few examples. Tata Group’s annual innovation awards include a category, Dare to Try, for the best failed attempt at innovation. Advertising agency Grey has a Heroic Failure award in similar vein. HCL Technologies has a prestigious leadership development programme which executives have to apply for by putting together, among other things, a failure CV listing their biggest mistakes and what they learnt from them.

The common theme is that these team building exercises do not involve idea-generation schemes. Rather, it is about translating ideas into action. This is where real progress is made.