Thank you for your very interesting article and for prompting the valuable responses from Marvin and Marcial.

I thought you might be interested that my Finnish colleagues Matti and Tapio created a company, Dialogue Life, to assess teams using Marcial’s principles after listening to his speech at the famous Team Academy for entrepreneuring in Jyvaskyla.

I have the privilege of helping them to promote Dialogue Life in the UK, having seen the use of the tool very powerfully with the Humap team in Finland (www.humap.com).

Marvin asks a question to which we think we have developed a really good answer; a very practical tool that helps teams to develop awareness of how they really work together, without distracting them from their work purpose, which many self-assessment or role preference teams seem to do. I do not mean to criticise those tools, which have helped thousands of teams in the last century. I think that part of the value of Marcial Losada’s principles are that they approach team performance from a radically different direction that is complementary to traditional approaches, and freshly innovative.

The Dialogue Life process is to leave) a digital video recorder with a 360 lens in the middle of the meeting table. We find that the camera is unobtrusive and does not distract the team in the way that our personal presence might.
At the end of the meeting we study the recording. There we can see the whole team in a single field of vision. Using specially adapted mobile phones, we ’score’ the video for P/N, I/A and S/O comments.
The Dialogue Life software then produces a minute-by-minute timeline graph of the three relevant behaviours. We can then present this back to the team to show them what they actually did and to bring out relationships and connectivity between the actions (e.g. it is interesting how questions in a positive environment lead to more positive comments a few moments later and that negative comments seem to have a faster effect – raising some interesting evolutionary neuro-biology musings).
It is early days yet, but we have had some very successful results in Dialogue Life’s first year and next year will bring some new very valuable new partnerships, I think. The tool is extraordinarliy powerful at raising teams’ self-awareness, a core platform for future development,

I agree with Marcial that it can be an exciting challenge to develop engaging, customised development for each team, but a beauty of the tool and his principles is that it inspires so many different possibilities. There are so many ways to be positive (or negative), to ask questions, to advocate views that stimulate more questions. When, before we begin, people ask what the programme will be after the assessment, I explain that until we have done it, we don’t know, just as I would not expect the doctor to prescribe the cure until the diagnosis is complete.

I also think it is very helpful to explain that this is not just about positivity. It is the ratios and the systemic interactions between the three behaviours that generate the complex emergence and connectivity that integrates the team to each other, other teams and the wider reality and the team’s core purpose.

If you would like, please visit our new blog at http://www.dialoguelife.wordpress.com or visit our website http://www.dialoguelife.com

Thank you again

Jonathan Wilson
Dialogue Life UK

From the start, I realized that the success we had in finding what where the critical variables and parameters to decode complex human interaction processes was due mostly to the fact that we were able to develop a nonlinear model to account for the hundred of thousands of data points we generated at the labs observing hundreds of teams. Human interaction cannot be properly understood with linear models because whenever you have interaction among the components of a system linearity is useless. The reason for this is that linarity assumes independence of the system’s components. Nothing could be further from the truth when we deal with humans interacting, there is no independence whatsoever, we affect each other for better or for worse, not only by waht we say, but by waht we don’t say. This realization was the key to develop our training programs. We concluded they had to be nonlinear also. All the training we had seen in many corporations was linear, and hence the changes introduced were rarely if ever sustainable. As you all know, organizations spend enormous amounts of money in training and development and they deserve a good return in their investment –which basically translates into sustainable change.

At the start, we realized that each program had to be custom made for each team, because they had to be developed following the interaction patterns we find in the team when we observe them for the first time. How do we go about this? After about an hour of observation of a typical team meeting we can tell what is the P/N ratio, the level of disconnection in the team, how able they are to expand (or contract) their emotional fields and, most importantly what are the gains or the losses in the interaction process. In other words, whether, as a team, they subtract, add or multiply each other. Few teams are able to multiply each other, to create synergy, which is our objective in the training process.

To accomplish all this, I work with a world expert (Geralda Paulista) on reading nonverbal behavior and modifying this behavior according to the ML model. While Geralda observes the nonverbal behavior, I observe the verbal behavior. Then we compare notes and produce the diagnosis of the team. We translate all the information into compelling graphics, so that the team can observe, for example, their interaction patterns in real time. This type of feedback has an anormous impact on the team and we have seen they start changing just as a result of the diagnostic process. We recently observed this in Brazil with the big electricity companies in Rio and Fortaleza and did observe it previously in the BHP Billiton mining operations in Chile. Both of these are tough customers who work in tough environments, so they provide good evidence of how even the diagnostic process can be compelling.

One approach that occurs to me is to video a team meeting and play it back later, highlighting occurrences of each variable (inquiry/advocacy, P/N, internal/external). This would have the advantage of making participants’ behaviour very explicit to them and thus preventing denial, but the disadvantage of the need to manage the video system.

Another approach could be simply to call time-out every 5-10 minutes to debrief the meeting process. Each person could have a score-sheet to note the variables as they occur. This would have the advantage of encouraging participants to focus on the process of their meeting as much as on the content and could be an effective approach to learning. It would also be easier for teams to sustain on their own once the consultant has left.

Has anybody tried these methods, or similar? What seems to work best?