Since the dawn of mankind, people banded together to increase their odds for survival. Lacking sharp teeth and fearsome claws, our predecessors found strength in working together. Collaboratively, people took on challenges far beyond the capabilities of an individual and became the masters of the planet. With time, the needs and goals of humans became loftier, more diverse and complex, to the point of exceeding groups ability to achieve them. This situation forced the collaboration group to take the next step and become a team.
The most important difference between collaboration groups and teams is the development of shared meaning by the teams. Shared meaning is what multiplies the efforts of members, rather than simply summing them up as it is with groups. This article is explaining what is shared meaning in order to help you better understand the mechanism that make teams productive.
Shared meaning is nothing but a shared mental model, therefore to explain shared meaning we first need to explain what is a mental model. A mental model is a simplified representation of objects and events in our minds. Every time we observe an object, we analyze it through decomposition. In other words we break down the object description to its characteristics or attributes. We extract its attributes like size, shape color, etc. and then we rank them in terms of relevance. The “not-so-important” attributes are ignored, while the rest collectively describe the object. This description is called mental model.
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