The Complexity of Group Dynamics

In what sometimes feels like a strange experiment, I have several times this year been part of a team delivering the same workshops to different (but almost identical groups) on successive days. Thirty-six of the most exciting, promising researchers at the University of Glasgow were split into two cohorts as part of the university's Talent Lab programme I'm working on with 64 Million Artists. The groups were essentially controlled for many of the variables to create two representative groups across gender, disciplines and more.

And above all, as the programme moves into its final part this year, what strikes me is the incredibly complex thing that happens as part of a group of humans coming together to work on something.

Delivering the same content - or watching it being delivered - what feels almost identically (although of course it never is) and yet finding it land completely differently.

Seeing - or thinking I see - one small (or big) reaction from one participant changing the group dynamic.

A joke being present or missing seeming to effect how a whole section of content landed with a group of 18 people.

My comfort - or lack of comfort - in dealing with a person or a situation rippling on through the day.

On some level, I think I knew it. I think I knew how complex group dynamics are, but having worked on this programme with these cohorts across the year it is impossible to ignore.

One of my favourite leadership books of the last few years is Jennifer Garvey Berger's Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps. It concerns the way that - according to the author - our mind falls into traps in the face of complexity that it didn't evolve for. (Because we evolved in simpler times than we live in.)

Of course, humans did evolve to exit in groups. But that still doesn't mean they aren't almost complex by definition - groups of humans are devoid of clear cause and effect and the sheer number of variables (how much sleep everyone had, who had a difficult conversation with their partner that morning, who forgot breakfast or drank too much coffee just before the meeting, and so much more) make things different every time.

This means, of course, we run the risk of falling into Garvey Berger's mindtraps. The trap, for example, of thinking we can control the group. Instead of being trapped by control we can never have in the face of real complexity, Garvey Berger says we must look for what we can do to enable good things to happen.

Focusing on enabling instead of controlling is a powerful tool and - above all - allows us, if we can manage it, to relax. To accept that we can't control everything, no matter how much we would like to.

The truth is, I didn't know until seeing the same session with or without - say - a particular joke, that the joke made a real difference.

But once I have seen it, I know. I can start to learn that. To allow it into my subconscious - Daniel Kahnemann's System One - so that I can more nimbly respond in future. So that I can, in the example, be more likely to make jokes that enable good things to happen next time.

And so one of the conditions for enabling a positive group dynamic is to notice.

Notice what happens.

Notice the impact of things we do or do not do.

Remember that in a complex system, something we input may - in fact, will - have unintended consequences.

Notice what we and others do that changes, disrupts, or enhances the energy or flow of a group of people.

Seeing the complexity of a group of humans working together in this way makes me think about how incredible it is that we manage to work together at all.

And I also understand why so many of us have spent so much time working in teams and organisations that feel frustrating to be part of, feel so far from the idea of a high-performing team.

As technology enables so much for us, one of the great limiters of human potential is becoming how we work together.

So it's time to start paying attention, to notice what enables groups to thrive and what doesn't.

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

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