A culture of ‘get on’ or ‘get lost’, the power gradient in the ‘expert practitioner team’ and ‘Practitioner Lemmings’ as a proxy for group think.
Tags: Possibilities and Potential; Fact over Fiction; Safety Vs Threat; Problem Solutions; Perspective; Leadership; Decision Making Process; Building Teams; Dynamic Team Performance; C-Model; The Power of Questions; Manage up – Manage down; Cognitive Conflict
Lemmings was a video game released in the 90’s which saw the player try to navigate a group of humanoid Lemmings through a variety treacherous puzzles to a designated exit. By assigning different tasks to Lemmings (Dig, Stop, Explode; Climb) a few would normally be sacrificed to help the group traverse the deadly traps and make a bid for freedom.
Have practitioner support teams in some cases become no more than ‘Lemmings’ marching to the metaphoric exit? Assigned a task by the boss, deliver the task as designated, continue marching in the direction demanded in the hope of not being singled out, creating disagreeing/disharmony or upsetting the status quo. Are practitioners so concerned with getting along with team mates and chain of command that they don’t view opinions, share ideas or point out alternative views? Worse, is there a power gradient within the team that flows directly from leadership steeply down that if challenged or questioned, might result in the practitioner becoming ‘the exploding Lemming’?
If expert teams are filled with novice practitioners with limited experience are they encouraged to have a voice, chair decision making meetings or even to make the big decisions? Are they encouraged to identify performance problems, build solutions and contribute to the direction of the team and the work they do? Or, as the case may be, are they expected to pick up the processes and ways of working of the previous Lemming and ask no questions? Is it any different for more established practitioners? Is group think driven by culture, relationships or the levels of diversity and experience within the team?
Is there a way that we can tap into the abilities, skills, perspectives and tools of a team of expert individual Lemmings to let them decide their own destinies and fates. Can we encourage critical thinking in environments where conformity, unanimity and the status quo thrive, where practitioners are often brilliant but under utilised, offer creativity and innovation that goes unnoticed, that strongly disagree but suffer in silence and frustration and that might have very different ideas about what is the right course of action to follow in complex demanding situations?
Perhaps…
