Is your team agile or fragile? -Forbes France

People have practiced meditation for thousands of years in China and India because they knew its benefits. Now that neuroscientists have succeeded in explaining its benefits from a scientific point of view, it has gained enormous popularity in the West. Suddenly, this exotic and mysterious art turned into a scientific and proven approach. The activity itself has not changed, only the awareness about it and its conditioning have changed.

Understanding your own emotions and those of others has always been important, although the topic wasn’t as popular until Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer coined the term “emotional intelligence” in 1990 and Dr. Daniel Goleman later claims that she can count more than IQ.

The agile frame is very similar. There is nothing revolutionary in recognizing that the world is changing and therefore people and companies must be able to adapt and find new solutions to new challenges. There is nothing revolutionary in realizing that the quality of the collaboration and the values ​​of the people determine the quality of the results or that the processes themselves are not enough.

The reason these approaches have received a lot of attention and interest is that they have been successful in measuring, visualizing and optimizing the steps leading to a desired outcome. It’s hard to believe in something you can’t see or understand. It is difficult to value something if we have no words to say it or if our definition is more negative than valuing.

The term “agile” is sometimes used too often or incorrectly in coaching, which can lead to confusion.

Agility is the ability to move your body quickly and easily and also the ability to think quickly and clearly, so it makes sense that project managers chose this term. The opposite of agile is fragile, rigid, clumsy, slow, etc. Not only are these not flattering adjectives, but they are also dangerous traits when describing a team within an organization.

A range of perspectives

The brain likes us to stay in our comfort zone and associate with people who agree with us; however, it’s rarely an option in real life, and it’s also the enemy of innovation and agility. The ability to see the same situation from different angles allows teams to make better decisions. Most scientists agreed that Earth was the center of the universe until Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise – but opposing views are rarely welcome initially, even if they are. lead to better solutions.

Maximizing cognitive diversity is the foundation of agile teams. However, a team can be individually highly intelligent and competent but also collectively blind due to low cognitive diversity. Optimizing cognitive diversity can be a success or a disaster, depending on two factors: psychological safety and motivational drivers.

Psychological safety

How many times have you come to a meeting and disagreed with what most of the attendees agree on, but said nothing and stuck to the rules? Why don’t you speak out?

In general, there can be two reasons for this. The most likely is the lack of psychological security, the feeling that your idea will be rejected or ignored. Maybe you fear ruining team harmony, or maybe you tend to doubt yourself. It is one of the guaranteed ways to prevent progress and limit growth. According to Google’s Aristotle Project, psychological safety is the number one trait of high-performing teams. It is the ability to express oneself without fear of negative consequences, coupled with the willingness to contribute, that brings us to the third factor.

Motivating factors

Being able to do something does not mean we are willing to do it; you also have to have the will to do things. For example, it’s always possible to stay at work an extra hour, but you’ll only do that if you really want to (or have to).

The highest level of growth occurs in a psychologically safe environment, where cognitively different people feel motivated and able to transform their differences into synergy in order to achieve a common goal.

According to my colleague Pedro Bernardo Juan Celis Caraballo, Associate Professor at Simón Bolívar University, agile teams require a set of characteristics generated by the whole, not the individual, and which are directly related to human interactions. At its core, there is trust and psychological safety to foster constructive conflicts that can generate value if resolved positively. This, in turn, generates commitment, accountability and ultimately results.

The challenge is that it doesn’t matter whether we think about something we’re not aware of or use something that almost works; they won’t give us the result we pay for and hope for. The ability to measure, visualize and optimize these invisible forces and master the blueprint of why people think and behave differently makes the difference between a smart, agile team and a fragile team.

Article translated from Forbes US – Author: Csaba Toth (Founder ofICQ Globalthe world’s leading experts in measuring and optimizing psychological safety, motivational drive, and cognitive diversity.)

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