Agile 2 Training Report—2022-01-26

Not everyone is the same—and not everyone communicates best in the same way

We have moved from our study of leadership to focus on cognitive flow and how groups of people collaborate well and make good decisions.

Effective collaboration is not an event: it is a process over time, and effective collaboration about complex issues requires talking, listening, writing, reading, and thinking. And not necessarily in that order or as one-time events.

We delved into the System 1 and System 2 model used by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, what it means for collaboration and decision processes.

We are just getting started on this topic, but our foundation on leadership already came up several times. For example, we realized that both Path Goal theory and Adaptive leadership could help to explain why a leader needs to form relationships with individuals and not just a team as a whole, because people are cognitively diverse.

The discussion of neurodiversity seemed to resonate with the attendees: some shared that they are ADHD—it never goes away, but as one matures one learns to manage it—yet it presents challenges for some people in various collaborative settings. We also discussed how some people share their thoughts well verbally, but others do better through writing. At the same time, some people can absorb verbal conversation well, but others do better through reading.

These differences have implications for how to get the most out of a group, and what is needed to make sure that ideas are shared effectively so that the best decisions can be made.

We also discussed the phenomenon in which a group might discuss a topic and reach a decision, but then if one asks each person individually afterwards what they think, one will often hear opinions that were not expressed in the group discussion, including many reservations. We discussed techniques for avoiding that.

More to come!