Capstone Project Wiki

Like all teams, your Capstone team will need to learn how to work together effectively. Fortunately, getting teams to work well effectively is a problem with known solutions. In 1965, Psychologist Bruce Tuckman identified four stages through which teams progress as they learn to become effective: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing (see Tuckman's stages of group development on Wikipedia). These stages are described below.

• Forming During the forming stage, team members become familiar with one another and with the tasks at hand for the team. Much of the work that is done is individual, because team members don't know each other well enough to trust one another. During this stage, teams discuss expected behavior of team members and lay ground rules for how the team should perform.

• Storming During this stage, the team members start to gain one another's trust. Conflict arises because different team members have different opinions. This is healthy team behavior. Team members need to have patience with and tolerance for one another. Teams should welcome the presence of these conflicts because it means team members can be open. However, teams must work to prevent the conflicts from becoming personal attacks or descending into continual fighting. As teams develop methods for constructively dealing with conflict, they may revise their team ground rules.

• Norming During this stage, team members appreciate and value the differences of others on the team. They understand how they can work together, and now have developed standard working methods that help move the project forward. The level of trust in team members continues to grow. There is a danger that the team will value the lack of conflict so much that they avoid expressing disagreement during the Norming stage.

• Performing During this stage, team members understand their roles and those of other members and trust each other so well that they can focus on achieving the team's goals. They are autonomous, competent, and trusting. They are comfortable with the team's methods of productively handling dissent. Instead of focusing on team processes, they focus on the significant challenges of the team's assignments. They have achieved synergy, where the whole of the team is more than the sum of the parts. Teams in the Performing stage may fall back to Storming on specific issues, but they hopefully have developed skills that allow them to quickly move back through Norming to Performing.

Note that teams must progress through each lower stage to reach a higher stage. If teams don't form, storm, and norm, they never get to the Performing stage. This can cause problems at BYU because we understand that contention is wrong, so we try to be `nice' and avoid sharing our true feelings so as not to raise the level of conflict in the team. Teams that are afraid of conflict may back away as soon as they start to reach Storming, thus remaining permanently in the Forming phase and failing to reach their potential.

It may be helpful to understand that not all conflict is contention. People will have differences of opinion. This is to be celebrated; it means that the team is stronger than any individual on the team. As long as team members are respectful of others with whom they disagree, conflict will not become contention. With respect for other team members, conflicts can be resolved and accommodated as the team moves into the Forming stage. If instead, the team backs away at the first sign of conflict, they never become a high-performing team.

During the transition from Forming to Storming, there is a real possibility for the team to fail by having team members go along with a proposal even if they don't agree with it. Sometimes, even the member who made the proposal is not in favor of it, but the team still moves forward because they value lack of conflict more than they value getting the right solution. It's important that every member feel free to voice their opinions, even if the rest of the team disagrees.