By Julian Chapman*
Master Trainer of Effective Intelligence
Forrest and Company, Toronto
Building a Team
Team building isn't about going offsite for social events and games. While these can work for a period, they don't hold up well once back in the crucible of work.
At Forrest, we help teams understand one another using Effective Intelligence (EI), by looking into how we all think at work. EI helps people understand their thinking preferences and the preferences of others so that they can work better collaboratively.
Thinking is at the core of behaviour. While many tools help teams look into personality, the Effective Intelligence tool called Rhodes TIP** helps people understand their preferences in thinking. Then, it gives them the tools to make decisions, sell ideas, or solve problems. As I like to say, we teach people how to think, not what to think.
In my 28 years of using the tool, I have not found two people with the same thinking profile in the same organization. There are similarities, sure, but each of us is different. Thinking is the core diversity for everyone, and, because we all think differently, we see situations differently. When conflicts in thought inevitably arise, it can lead to burying it, crossing fingers, or seeing it flare up.
In its simplest format, Effective Intelligence shows you the three core Thinking-Intentions that drive how you think, symbolised with three Colours:
Green - Future-looking to realise what might be new
Red - Orienting to the present to describe what is true
Blue - Focussing on the past to judge what is right
Here at Forrest we have found that, when team members can recognise one another's thinking preferences, it helps them understand one another better. The added bonus of EI, which personality profiles aren't able to do, is that it provides a process for the teams to establish norms to work together, with Maps for thinking. It works because, uniquely, it uses the same language to define a person's thinking to also define the process of thinking through a task at hand.
The Mapping norms are essential to team building because they remove the tensions of personal thinking by establishing a cognitive process for a team to work together. In this way, the focus of team building is not just shared experience but a path for teams to use to work more effectively together and value the diversity of thinking within the team.
In addition:
“Emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition.”***
Thinking is an undiscovered country, and if you can harness the thinking capability of your team, you will truly build it.
The three ways of thinking may help you understand your teams' diversity. So, I suggest you reflect upon them to help you understand your own thinking and the thinking of those around you. If you do, you are on your way to the first steps of team building, made possible by the work already invested in building your team.
* Original Article by Julian Chapman jchapman@forrestandco.com Edited by Sue Thame Trustee for inclusion as a blog on the Effective Intelligence website
** Rhodes Thinking-Intentions Profile: https://effectiveintelligence.com/yourthinking/
*** https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-brain-maps-out-ideas-and-memories-like-spaces-20190114/
