Improvement Insights Blog
Form Storm Norm Perform Takes Too Long!
Traditional Form-Storm-Norm-Perform models of team development take too long. Here’s how to collapse the time and skip right to perform.
“I was looking at myASQ, and somebody was asking about the four steps of Team development: Form, Storm, Norm, Perform. You know, if you do it traditional (how it usually was taught), it takes a long time for a team to form (come together), storm (fight each other a little bit), normalize their behavior (so they get productive).
“Well, I found that that takes too long. I can’t get to results that way. What I discovered was if I could do the analysis and figure out how to pinpoint where the problem would be, then I can figure out who ought to be on that team to solve that problem. Once I do that, guess what? I can bring those people in, I can tell them the story using the data and get them to the point where they can see where the problem is. Then we can do root cause analysis and they do a little storming (that’s okay). Then we can come up with some countermeasures and we can implement it. I skip people all the way over to perform by doing the data analysis up front.
“Now this sounds a little foreign, but I don’t think teams should be together for weeks at a time or months or… you know, some of these things take too dang long, right? Because they’re only meeting one day a week or for an hour or two, something stupid, right? No! Let’s get together in one day and solve the problem, right?
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Skip over all those introductory steps. Take some data, slam them right in to perform root cause analysis and countermeasures. Get on with it.
“Let’s go out and improve something today.”
