What is your experience of working in groups? Karl Melrose.

If you're like most people, it's a mixed bag. Some group tasks go very well - the group finds its flow, and gets the work done with little to no resistance. How often though, have you experienced a situation in which a group appears to have everything it needs, but can't get out of its own way for long enough to get the work done?

To me, the answer is 'far more often than we should.' Almost every single large-scale failure or seemingly intractable problem that I've seen in an organisation comes down to failures of people working in groups. This should be an avoidable failure - we have a vast literature on how groups develop from individuals into a work group that can achieve its task. Despite this, we routinely fail to invest the time in making it work.

In my experience, one of two things happens - we either fail to realise that a new group is forming at all, or we devote total focus to the quantitative elements of the work. In either scenario, we fail to do the work required to develop a group from a fragmented set of individuals, to an effective 'work group' that can achieve the task.

We are all very busy at work. That isn't new, and isn't going away. This means that there isn't time for a two day retreat to ensure every new group forms effectively. This makes having efficient models of group formation a critical part of every professional's kit bag. I've started to think about this as the problem of the 'minimum viable work group', and to question what the minimum effort and process necessary to achieve it is, and how we know when we have.

In this dd, we will will start to explore this question.

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Karl is an information management consultant whose focus is on how policy and strategy meets the organisation that has to do the work.

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