Cooperation

Shared games

We all know the feeling of playing a shared game — of temporarily being members of a group bonded by shared intent. It’s a feeling of pursuing a worthy goal together.

Sometimes that goal is vague. Or demanding. Family teams aim to help children be happy and healthy. Work teams might aim to build something, or to meet a particular need. Often simply enjoying ourselves together is plenty.

Once there’s a sense of shared game, effective teamwork comes from synergistic roles, a shared strategy, and healthy team dynamics.

Synergistic roles

In a team, everyone can specialise in what they’re best at, or in what they’re keen to learn. That’s what makes teams more efficient than individuals on their own.

But somehow the roles have to mesh. Everything that needs done has to get done.

To develop synergistic roles, people have to be clear about what they are good at, clear about what they like doing, and clear about what needs done. Sorting out who does what can then become common sense.

A shared strategy

Complex challenges can rarely be tackled successfully without a coherent strategy.

Everyone will have different perspectives. Sharing any perspective sheds a new bit of light on some part of the big picture landscape. So pooling insights helps.

It also helps to have a clear sense of the path the team will take, with common understanding of the opportunities they’ll take and the hazards they’ll avoid. And it helps to have a clear sense of what’s at stake.

The strategy is complete when it becomes a plan that’s easy to follow. Everything should be out in the open. Who will do what? When? Do they have everything they need?

Team dynamics

All complex systems, from snowflakes to flocks of starlings in flight, display emergent behaviour, meaning behaviour that can’t be inferred from a knowledge of the system’s constituents alone. New patterns appear at the level of the whole.

Group dynamics is just such an emergent behaviour. When groups form, the random patterns that happen in their first days together often get fixed. Who will talk most? Who will listen? How will ideas spread through the group? What behaviour is unacceptable? And who will people look to when there’s a tough decision to be made?

In most groups, the random patterns wear away, replaced by something better, but sometimes a rigid control from above prevents healthy patterns being established. Sometimes there’s a bully in the group. Or anxiety about the future.

Problems with team dynamics can usually be overcome. New stories can be planted. Solutions can be found.

Being a team player

Mastering cooperation doesn’t mean making the teams we’re in perfect. That would be impossible. A team is what it is at the time. What mastering cooperation means is making the best contribution we can to the overall success.

• Role. We can put our personal agendas aside and focus on how, with our particular skills, we can best contribute to the overall performance of the team.
• Strategy. We can think about the best way to tackle the team’s challenges, identifying the obstacles to success and looking for ways to overcome them. Any clarity we reach can then be shared with the rest of the team.
• Team dynamics. We can avoid the selfishness and toxic behaviours that sustain unhealthy group dynamics, and instead do our best to embody good humour, open communication, optimism, and a passion for the shared endeavour that the team exists to pursue.