Team Avoidance

Avoidance is one of the most expensive things a team can do, and one of the hardest to name from the inside. The cost rarely shows up where the avoidance is happening. 

It shows up in the missed deadline that should have been a hard conversation, in the decision that quietly comes undone after the meeting, in the good person who slowly checks out.

Teams do not avoid because they are weak. They avoid because they do not have a safe, shared way to say the hard thing — so not saying it feels safer than saying it badly.

That is exactly what can be built. 

A shared way of seeing makes the hard conversation sayable. The work gives the team that. 

“The problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them — a team's shared blind spots are structural, not personal.”

Drawn from Peter Senge, 

The Fifth Discipline