A team is two or more people working together to accomplish a common purpose. If two or more people are seeking to work together, successful communication is critical. The CRCA Team Communication Cycle is an effective way to facilitate communication within the team.

Teams are a resource of tremendous potential and tapping the genius, insight and potential in any team is the challenge of team communication. Individuals who make up the team can bring a vast knowledge, understanding, ability, expertise, insight, intuition, access and energy to the team, yet these assets are not immediately obvious or easily accessible. We have an unmined deposit.

While the team contains the untapped resources of great knowledge and energy, it also harbors misperceptions, partial understanding, blind spots, invalid assumptions, irrational responses, prejudice and bias. The key to successful teamwork is to separate the two (untapped resources) (misperceptions) utilizing the former and discarding the latter. Just as the prospector panned for gold and carefully sorted the gold from the mud, a team must select the genius of insight from the mud of misinformation.

The CRCA Team Communication Cycle, a specifically designed communication method, facilitates the team’s gathering of information and the sorting of the valuable from the worthless. It is a very specific method used to facilitate teamwork by managing communication. It utilizes the same probing questions that drive the team process to stimulate each team member to draw on the pool of resources he/she brings to the task in order to utilize the collective resources for the team.

The challenge of an effective team facilitator, like a prospector of old, is to separate what is valuable from what is not. While teams generate a great deal of information, not everything is useful. To collect and sort information, effective teams follow the five sequential steps of the CRCA Team Communication Cycle:

1. Ask a probing question.

2. Provide time to find potential answers.

3. Report all potential answers.

4. Discuss and analyze all potential answers.

5. Agree as a team on the answer.

The Creative Root Cause Analysis (CRCA) Participant’s Guide was designed to lead a team in an orderly process to identify, analyze and solve complex problems. However, the material and process have been used for more than problem solving training, i.e., as a business tool in many companies and organizations. Some applications of CRCA:

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Well-facilitated teams are efficient and effective, bringing synergistic potential to problem solving. There is an enormous pool of knowledge, understanding, ability, expertise, insight, intuition, resources, and energy in most teams. When that pool is tapped and utilized, the positive results are beyond imagination. Teams, working together cooperatively, can be more successful than the best and brightest person on that team working alone.

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In the Driving Team Performance process, each of the “8″ Steps has been divided into three actions/tactics. These individual actions must be successfully completed for the step to be complete. Borrowing from process control terminology, these action steps are identified as “Go/No Go” Signals. The quality and, ultimately, the performance of the team are controlled by these “Go/No Go” Signals. “Go:” If the action has been successfully completed, the team may proceed to the next action or step. “No Go:” If the action has not been successfully completed, the team is not to proceed until such time as it has been completed.

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Driving Team Performance is designed to make successful team performance a normal and regular occurrence. It is an understandable, visual, learnable, repeatable, teachable method that teams can employ time and time again and produce winning results.

All teams must have a purpose for their existence. “Teamwork starts with a need.” The need might be a problem or conflict, a dysfunction or trouble, information gathered or dispensed, a project/task or issue/concern. A need is so primary or central to the formation and function of a team that it could be said, “If there is no need, no team is needed.”

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The imagery and metaphor of the Driving Team Performance logo presents a wholly new approach to team process patterns. The figure “8″ track visually reinforces the 8-step process. This process imagery, with its figure “8″ track and stop light illustrations, actually creates a road map for team procedure. Driving Team Performance was designed to create, facilitate and utilize a team dynamic. This tool is easy to understand and remember and does not intimidate people, but rather affirms them as valuable resources to the team.

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Driving Team Performance is an 8-step, user-friendly process designed to facilitate team synergy and to accelerate teams through the development process in a systematic and orderly way. This process method is for those who promote teamwork and strive for innovative, inventive, creative and effective results from their teams. This can be used in a variety of team applications and is a learnable, teachable, repeatable process that will produce results whenever and wherever it is utilized.

This 8-step process is the foundation for the Center for Creative Teamwork (CCT) Advanced Team System. Each of the additional processes, that comprise the system, is built upon this process. For optimum results, it is important that teams be trained in this process method.

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The imagery/metaphor used to guide team decision making is a colorful, five-point star called the “Synergy Star.” It presents a wholly new approach to decision-making. Each of the five points represents one of the five areas that must be taken into account in making a viable decision:

1. Practical: What are the practical considerations of this option?
2. Environmental: How will this option impact its environment?
3. Negative Potential: What is this option’s realistic, worst case scenario?
4. Positive Potential: What is this option’s realistic, best case scenario?
5. Ideal: How does this option satisfy the decision objectives?

When decisions fail, or support for decisions break down within the team, most often the root cause is that one or more of these areas was missed, ignored or otherwise not given ample consideration. The “Synergy Star” provides a structure and process to guide the team through an open and candid consideration of all five factors.

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It is popular, even a bit “PC,” to talk about reaching consensus. Consensus is: “harmony in a general agreement” or, in popular vernacular, “agree to agree.” But the question must be asked: “How?” Consensus is actually a broad umbrella concept of general agreement that arches over varied strategies for reaching agreements. I define consensus as: “reaching a harmony in a general agreement by some form of strategy acceptance.” So, behind the harmony of a general agreement is an agreement on the “how,” the method or strategy that will be used to reach that agreement.

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There are five process actions in the Team Communication Cycle.

1. Ask Probing Questions
2. Provide time to Scrutinize
3. Affirm the Team
4. Analyze the Team Input
5. Agree on a Team Decision

1. Ask Probing Questions. Arouse the team to action using inquiry to stimulate involvement by asking Probing Questions. A Probing Question is one that cannot be answered with a simple Yes or No, but requires the individual to draw on his/her own knowledge, experience, insight, expertise and intuition in order to formulate a response. The asking of probing questions is an affirmation of each team member. It says, “Tell me what you know, think, understand; share your insight with us.”

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