Do Agile Teams 'Storm' In Different Ways?

Agile transformation coaches promise their clients the positive outcome of “high-performance teams.”

According to the well-cited Psychologist B. W. Tuchman, teams go through four stages on their way to high-performance. The end result seems to be a self-organizing team which effectively delivers to clients or customers with increasing satisfaction and continuous development and growth.

However, agile teams are different than regular teams. Aren’t they?

What I mean is, right from the outset individuals in an agile culture expect to confront change with positive stride. They are expected to be able to adapt to quickly even in uncertain environments. Therefore, their experience of team development is different, right from the outset.

Consider what Debbie Madden has to say in her article The Increasing Fluidity of Agile Practices Across Teams. She writes that, “most companies either claim they are Agile, are trying to become Agile, or have tried Agile. In truth, what I see today is a lot of customized Agile. In fact, the term “Traditional Agile” has come to mean the pure, original implementation of Agile. And, most companies are not following “Traditional Agile”. Instead, teams are customizing Agile to fit their needs, making the fluidity of Agile more prominent now than ever before.”

What this says to me is that since “Traditional Agile” has been around long enough now, teams have internalized the principles and values enough to understand change is to be expected and they have strategies in place to adapt well.

It says to me that teams are now taking Agile to a whole new level. They are making it their own. Adapting. Shaping. Moulding. Sculpting. The fluid nature of Agile gives teams permission to do this.

If we take Tuchman’s four-stage model and insert some agile thinking what we might come out with is an awareness that agile teams do what Debbie said they do. They make things up as they go along and they get the job done.

In this way, what might have been called “storming” by the old standards and definitions of team development can really also be called “high-performance” when the team is agile.

Perhaps some agile teams can create their own team development model and one of the stages is “high-performing storming” and maybe that is not even the final outcome but maybe it is the starting point on Day One!

Wouldn’t that be something?

This article was originally written by Travis Birch.

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