Facilitating Healthy Storming

Takeshi Yoshida
8 min readNov 8

Some teams form and norm skipping storm, and consequently perform mediocrely. Other teams storm badly and norm chillingly with low team trust.

The key is in facilitative leadership and in this Mental Model Dōjō community session we discussed the professional topic of how to help Agile teams, or any team, go through a healthy Tuckman process of forming, storming, norming, performing.

Here’s a replay of the session.

View session participant Michael Ong’s notes

Michael Ong’s session notes

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Transcript

Facilitating Healthy Storming

The late organizational psychologist Bruce Tuckman coined the group and team forming stage concept of forming, storming, norming, performing, and correctly adjourning, back in 1965. While there are criticisms to this model as overly simplistic and linear in its description, I find this concept useful and congruent to my own experience of supporting team development.

Particularly, I find critical importance in the storming stage. Some teams form and norm skipping storm, and consequently perform mediocrely. Other teams storm badly and norm chillingly with low team trust.

The key is in facilitative leadership, and in this session I’d like to share a few tips on how to get that going with newly formed teams, and how to reboot that process with teams that have gone stale.

Set-up is super important

First, set-up is super important in forming a team. Ideally speaking, like a startup if there could be one or two founders with a desire to do something great and they drive a process of recruiting a team with a powerful why, what…

Takeshi Yoshida

Chief Coach, Agile Organization Development (agile-od.com) — we are a tribe of change, transformation, innovation experts