Publish at October 24 2022 Updated October 24 2022
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Besides, it has always worked that way."
Margaret Mead, American anthropologist.
Human organizations rely on the cohesion of their teams to achieve collective performance. For this they take advantage of the good weather to organize team development days. This is often the way to reveal hidden talents but also to take up collective challenges. These challenges engage the intelligence, the bodies and the emotions in a way that is rarely possible in the day-to-day life of a company. The ingredients for success are a quality location, a favorable season, a residential time and many informal times spent together. The team seminars allow to complete the box of memories and positive emotions very useful at the time of bonding in the face of challenges.
Outdoor activities are often proposed to connect with others in nature. Currently with pervasive talk of the climate, nature-based activities are on the rise. Teaming up by cooking, building bridges or towers. Learning trust by dropping into your teammate's arms would even become commonplace.
After bungee jumping or kayaking, paintball and rhythmic drumming are having their moment of glory. Why are we seeing what seems to be an acceleration of an educational phenomenon: the need to form groups? Perhaps because today's organizational forms, which require more transversality, are not satisfied with solitary work. Companies that are reputed to be organized in the form of pyramids have begun to change.
This is how the organization of horizontal work processes that are supposed to make interactions more fluid and get us out of silos requires a more sustained involvement of a multiplicity of actors disjointed by organizational charts and formally assigned functions. At the same time, the more individualism separates individuals, the more the demand for cohesion and teamwork is felt. The two trends meet and echo each other: the search for corporate efficiency on the one hand, new ways for individuals to be social on the other.
Teamwork is thus trending. With the exploits of high-level sports collectives, the potential of the team excites the imagination of managers who see in its power of attraction the means of creating the conditions for belonging to the corporate spirit and culture. The team is adorned with positive virtues as to the achievement of performance.
Thanks to a mysterious collective force 1+1=3, the expected synergy creates new wealth. That's why team foundation, team building and maturation of the high-performance team are also in vogue. All teams are potentially concerned. This is the case for management teams, managerial teams, sales teams, project teams and all collectives formally or informally constituted that participate in the achievement of a goal.
Under the name of "team cohesion", it is possible to identify a number of practices, most often playful, that are supposed to facilitate the passage from a set of isolated individuals to a more or less linked group, to a welded team and then a high-performing team. The offer in this field seems to be a new Eldorado for communication and recognition agencies, business schools and training firms in search of innovation. The exercises and games that can be proposed target several dimensions:
All of these dimensions have been regularly examined throughout human history, by philosophers, writers, and thinkers of all kinds. The current known as "human relations"documented by authors such as Lewin, Mayo, Herzberg, had already explored these dimensions within small groups. Inspired by their work, training-group practices had developed. The forms that team-buildings take today are based on different entertaining activities. It is thus possible to list:
It is important to note, however, that all of these activities contribute to team building in different ways. There are two words for this currently sought after form of work in French; the first is collaboration, the second is cooperation.
At first glance, these two terms might seem equivalent, they are not. If the first word evokes a free intention to engage in the collective and to elaborate together, the second refers to a structured organization and tasks to be distributed. We live a collaboration while we organize a cooperation through a work process. These are two ways of working together that rely on freely shared ties with another when collaborating, or that are directed toward the success of a common enterprise if cooperating.
In a collaborative aim, there are no a priori allocated roles, each co-constructs meaning, enriches the goal and commits. In a cooperative aim, each person takes on part of the task, a division of labor is negotiated and rationalized. Making this distinction makes it possible to better perceive the purpose of games, practices and exercises aiming without more precision at "learning to work as a team".
The vision of the company will be affected differently depending on the orientation chosen. Incidentally, some more fusional exercises promote learning to collaborate, while others that strive to perceive differences or styles of behavior focus on developing cooperation.
There are still two risks to be pointed out. First, a risk specific to edutainment(a catchall word between education and entertainment). Today's individuals are so used to fun that educational content, in which there is no break, no experience, no entertainment, is less and less acceptable. Individuals would be looking for distraction. In what can be perceived as a drift, education through play would be limited to play. It is therefore important that the organizers of games and group activities claiming an educational intention finely master the springs of group dynamics because it is not enough to sing together or to succeed in a sports challenge for a team to learn to collaborate or cooperate.
Then the risk of the individual feeling embroiled in activities that are very far from his professional activity and pushing him into a personal questioning of which he is not always in demand. In this case, the organizers must not only master the group dynamics, they must also be attentive to the potential fragilities of each participant.
To conclude, whether the practices of team cohesion are collaborative or cooperative in purpose, they currently allow for a renewal of the act of learning because they put the concern for collectives back at the center. Team building practices deserve to be professionalized. The market that has been set up will certainly succeed in sorting out dubious practices from educational practices that respect people.
It is a safe bet that these practices will facilitate the emergence of the learning company and that they will constitute, thanks to the emotions experienced together, the favorable soil for social learning (Cristol, 2014) that will extend the collective experience on spaces, this time digital.
Sources
Cooperation and collaboration at work, what's the difference? | Suzanne Girard, HR Consulting and Coaching
https://conseilsrhcoaching.com/cooperer-et-collaborer-article/
Pesqueux, Y. (2015). The "human relations school"(or the "behaviorist movement").
https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01225917/document
Cristol, D. (2014). Forming, training and learning in the digital age: social learning. ESF Humanities.
https://www.decitre.fr/ebooks/former-se-former-et-apprendre-a-l-ere-numerique-9782710139195_9782710139195_1.html
Thot - Pathway and event two models for thinking about learning
https://cursus.edu/fr/10622/cheminement-et-evenement-deux-modeles-pour-penser-lapprentissage
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