CRCA: The Team Communication Cycle
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.
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. 
A popular complaint about teams is that they take too long to make decisions. This is called Process Loss. It is an accurate critique. The amount of time a team needs to make a decision 
In an earlier post, I talked about team dysfunction (What is Teamwork?) and the fact that most dysfunction occurs in the process as the team moves between first and second base, the ME to We phase. (See last weeks post: The Team Building Process.) The most commonly reported team problems are: misapplication, no training, no support, work systems not changed to fit team work, frustration over purpose, endless meetings and unclear expectations. 
In leading/facilitating effective teams, the expectations, beliefs and paradigms of the leader set the parameters (or limits) on the team’s effectiveness. In other words, if the leader has little faith in the team and its ability, and expects little or nothing from the team, that is exactly what the outcome will be. Conversely, if the leader has confidence in the team’s abilities with no limitations, the team will produce outstanding results. Bottom line is, the leader’s expectations and beliefs about the team are a self-fulfilling prophecy on the team’s outcome.