Unleashing the Power of the Team OODA loop: Lessons from High-Performance Teams in Risk Management and Debriefing with Gareth Lock | Ep 57

Picture this: a world where every team in your organization is functioning at peak performance, communication is seamless, and misunderstandings are a thing of the past. Sounds like a fantasy, right? Not after you gear up for this conversation with our guest, Gareth Lock. We're unearthing the hidden power of teamwork and the dire consequences of overlooking its importance.

We're shattering the myths and misconceptions around teams and their development, bringing to light the real components of effective teamwork: shared experiences, trust, and the capacity to take responsibility. Expect to have your views on teamwork radically transformed as we discuss insights from high-performance teams. We dissect the intertwining roles of technical abilities, collaboration, risk management, and—of course—debriefing and sense-making.

Our chat doesn't end with theory; we're giving you practical solutions to improve communication and foster a learning-friendly environment within your teams. Join us as we share effective communication techniques, hands-on learning activities, and the nitty-gritty of cultivating teamwork skills through workshops. We cap off with the importance of reflection and identifying key lessons. So, are you ready to redefine teamwork and turbocharge your team's performance?

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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
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Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:57

All right, gareth. Teams and name only. I want to know what's at stake in today's volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world if organizations continue to go down the path that they have been on for years, and that is ignoring what good teamwork is. I want to start there and I want to move on over to some teamwork myths. Then I want to dive into the where. Where do we learn about good teams and how do we actually build them or develop them within organizations? Those are the three areas I want to look at with you today. I want to flip it over to you and I'll see you in about an hour and a half.

Gareth Lock: 1:39

All right, okay, that's it. No, no, no. This is great. What's at stake? What's going?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:42

on. There's a subtle effect.

Gareth Lock: 1:43

There we go yeah yeah, yeah, there you go. What's at stake today?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:51

If organizations and individuals actually don't pick up on how to become good team members.

Gareth Lock: 1:59

The simple response could be they fall behind In a world of change that actually you don't keep up with what else is going on around you, and it doesn't have to mean that your competitors or actually different departments within your organization have to move very far or very fast. If you're not moving as fast as they are, by default you're going to be behind. That's the simplest bit. At its most critical, it could be a massive loss of life. In fact, today is the anniversary of Piper Alpha and a huge loss of life there. There were a lot of process safety issues that came out of that, but fundamentally it's people not working together and understanding this concept of work as imagined and work as done. That requires a team to be able to share what they really do versus what they're supposed to do in the paperwork space. It could be a minor inconvenience for a small team it were an entrepreneurial two or three-person software team or whatever, although up to a multinational, that has a phenomenal loss of life and reputation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:23

Let me repeat what I think I heard from you. Number one is if you want to be successful in this world, you just need to suck less than everybody else.

Gareth Lock: 3:33

That's one. Yeah, that's one.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:37

You really don't have to try to develop teams or improve your teamwork skills. The second point I believe you made was safety. It's a safety critical issue if you do not work together as teams. I want to anchor on that a little bit. A lot of people do not work in safety critical environments. If they do something wrong today, they're going to go home at the end of the day. It's software development, it's service industry, things like that.

Gareth Lock: 4:06

Can I just hold you on that? Yeah, please. People often think that they're not involved in any safety critical stuff software teams but actually the interconnectedness of what we do can have huge consequences. What does safety actually mean? An organization at the beginning of some work recently had a cyber attack which took down their systems. It wasn't just about their ability to operate as an organization, but their whole customer linkage billing connections had a huge thing. Safety, critical safety is this bit that's seen as fingers, pink bodies, we get hurt, but actually safety is way bigger than that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 4:59

The way many organizations are looking at teams now is they say they're critical, and even people say they're critical inside of organizations. I don't have all the data in front of me, but you can look at this study from this organization, from LinkedIn, from the World Economic Forum, from Salesforcecom, from Microsoft itself. They'll all look at what organizations are thinking about teams and they all say the same thing we need to develop teams and teamwork skills. This leads us to the second area, and that's the myths of teams and teamwork.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 5:35

You and I have a background in military aviation. You and I experienced something that not a lot of people got to experience, and that is learning how to work together as teams. Yet a lot of our work today is we're trying to exact some of those lessons from what was known as true resource management, which is also known as the foundation of team science. Today, we try to bring those things over and build them in their context. There are a lot of myths out there. I want to hear some of the myths that you're hearing about teamwork to see if this resonates with some of our listeners.

Gareth Lock: 6:12

I'm going to say the biggest one, the biggest ones I can think of. We'll put a group of people together under a title and there we go, there's a team. We'll give that group of people a name Team X. There we go. Okay, the fact that they're all sitting together and working towards a common goal, that's a start towards the team making sure they get the shared values. Teams don't just happen. Well, I'll counter that and caveat it and say if people have been used to operating as a team, you can take team players and put them together and a team will evolve. That's quite a noticeable thing.

Gareth Lock: 7:06

Both you and I have used a software tool to bring this to life. I remember demonstrating it to a consultancy and I'd got two ex-Air Force people they didn't know each other and then two diving colleagues we're operating, or I was running the simulation and the two service Air Force guys veterans just clicked, they got into it and the consultant that I was speaking to the management consultancy said I have never seen a team come together so quickly with implicit trust, because they've never worked with veterans before. It's this shared knowledge of what makes a team, and it's really difficult to articulate it in a couple of sentences Other than you can say there's a shared experience, there's trust, there's that bit of say punch. Can you do that? Yes, I know that you're going to do it. If you can't, you'll turn around and go.

Gareth Lock: 8:05

Gareth, I don't know how. Right, I caveat that you can bring veterans in or serving members and drop them into an environment and they will nominate a leader, or a leader will quickly float to the top and they will recognize as the leader. They will collate the ideas, understand the problem, come up with a joint solution and crack on and get it done. I think anybody who's in a especially in aviation veteran space, that's just like a no-brainer Right. It's really difficult for most people to get.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 8:42

I think what you're highlighting here is the crew concept, where we just have these skills, these teaming skills, where we can fit in with another group of people that have the same or similar teaming skills. We'll dive into that here in a second as well, what we mean by them, what we mean by teaming skills. But that crew concept is one way I use. It is it's a great way to hack the Tuckman model. If you believe in the Tuckman model, yeah, jump ahead. Yeah, if you have these skills already, you don't have to worry about the forming, storming, norming and performing. You can almost perform it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 9:13

We see this quite a bit in any context where you have crews and people working with those crews and they've been trained on some of the things we'll talk about here in a few minutes, I'm sure, but that's not the reality we're in. Most people that are working in organizations, they have a tendency to look at teamwork as well. If I have to go learn how to do this, that's a distraction from actually getting real work done. I don't have time to send my people off to go do a day of training with Gareth Locke on how to work together as teams with a goofy little game called Planks or Gemsim or something like that. That's totally unproductive so that's not worth my time. But I do have time to send the five days of Scale Agile Framework training, because that's what they need.

Gareth Lock: 9:59

Yeah, totally so. Today I just come back from delivering some training and I had one of the best pieces of feedback based around some of the exercise, which was I tried to avoid this course for the last two weeks and I'm really glad I came today. You've given me such an insight into operating as a team within that, and that's the hard pit People come in prejudice and often they've been, I'm going to say, tainted by training which is click read the slide, click read the slide. Right, teamwork doesn't come through paperwork. It comes through experience. It comes through setting people up. It comes through the brief, the execute, the debrief, the reflect, the plan, brief execute process.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:53

Yeah. So this kind of leads into another myth there, and that is hey, I don't want to go to your class, I don't need to learn this, because I was on a team 20 years ago. I've always been on a team, and a team in name only, because I've been told that. I've been on a project management team. I've been told these things, I've been a team member. I do not need to learn how to work as a team, or I don't need to learn how to work or to develop teams.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 11:33

So that's another myth there that a lot of people bring along is baggage. And of course, there's the framework myth that hey, if I just put a funny framework on top of you, you're going to be a team. So I guess what you and I are getting at is there are a lot of headwinds out there that face organizations and individuals from actually learning how to work as teams, how to develop that team of teams mindset or whatever it may be. So you've seen it, I've seen it. These myths are out there, and I'm sure there are others. I can't think of any on the top of my head. But let's get down to some of the good stuff on here, and that is what do we learn about teamwork and how do you develop it?

Gareth Lock: 12:18

Oh, so there was a bit of a break there. So there's a bit of a good trust piece. Teamwork is the fact that I'm not going to try and gaff my way through this, because I didn't understand what you said. So, pontch, can you repeat that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 12:34

Yeah, absolutely. Just when we look at where. Where do you look around the environment to find out who's doing teamwork well or teaming well? Where do we look? That's number one. And then two how do we develop teams and organizations and, more importantly, how are you doing that so I can steal some better ideas from my own training.

Gareth Lock: 12:54

So, hey, that's another bit, that's organizational learning, and so the first question where do you find it? What I would say is probably one of the best and easily accessible activities is high performance sports. So you know, look at, say, the all blacks rugby team and the book legacy and the, the way that that team operate, and that the book comes with those little infographic that talks about the key themes within the book and bits that stick to me. You know no dickheads. You know one of the mantras that they've got and that's based around the fact that it doesn't matter how good you are as an individual player, if you're not a team player, you're not going to be in the all blacks. There's humility, that's there, and this piece that sweep the sheds, go out there and be part of the team and take part in the mucky work. That's there. So, and one of the I think the difficult parts of looking at elite sports when it comes to teamwork is all of the hidden practice that goes on. Yeah, so when actually the team are in execution, you can watch the flow. There you go. That is awesome, but what you don't see is the ages of practice about how to interact, how to focus on the little things.

Gareth Lock: 14:21

Something that came out in today's training was looking at Formula One teams. So they don't, you know the pit teams. They don't go and jump on the car as a team of 14 people and try and do it all at once. They'll break down the activity into chunks. So the front right wheel team will sit on a front right wheel simulator on off, on off, on off, on off, and then they will build up those core competencies, the minor skills that are there. Then they'll build it up into a stationary car on off, on off. Then they've got the cars coming in. So it's this recognition that when you're putting the team together, when we see high performance teams in action, we see the output and unless you understand what went into it, it's really hard to take it apart and there's complexity in action for you straight away.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 15:13

Yeah, I want to come. I want to come back to legacy, because it's very important to our podcast and our podcast is really I wouldn't say it's really about John Boyd's Oodleoo, but if you go back to the book legacy, they actually bring up Oodleoo in there, which is pretty awesome. So there's a conversation about destruction and creation and John Boyd and how important it is in building teams and understanding decision making and action activities, as you as you relate it to with the car. So just a nice little plug, great book, go get it. And then, gareth, I have a problem with your analogies, the one that you brought about. A car Not everybody has a highly repetitive motion that they go through every day, right, yeah, so it's great that, yeah, those crew, crew or pit crews can actually do that.

Gareth Lock: 15:59

Pit crews yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:00

And I know they have contingency plans. They work through all that in case something breaks or somebody's injured or something like that. But that's not reality, that's not most organizations. So, again, I can't learn anything from a pit crew, can I? What can I bring over from them?

Gareth Lock: 16:12

Right. So what I would pit from them is the fact that practice, perfect practice, leads to perfect so that, and that requires feedback. So to me, the critical piece that organizations can learn and some organizations, when I've shown the sort of pit team changes and they sit, they go. Oh, it's all about doing it fast. No, it's not. It's about doing it in a coordinated manner and a collaborative manner. And even you know, you've brought up the fact that we've got contingency, so if the back right wheel team screw up and they drop a wheel, the rest of the team don't turn around and go. What you know, it's this bit that says OK, how do we help you all? That's what the other piece about, the collaboration, so so I get that total piece it's about the, the working together and the synchronicity. That actually, yes, is a repetitive task, but if you don't get that sync quite and right, then actually it's going to go horribly wrong. I'd also say there's a huge amount of trust in the pit team, because the guy who's got the front nose jack is standing there in a whole line of fire of energy and he's trusting the driver to come to the right stop, stop at exactly the right point where he can jack the car up.

Gareth Lock: 17:28

So again there's this briefing and planning that we've got very tight margins and many organizations operate at that margin space. So I don't know if you talk about Jens Rasmussen's dynamic risk model in any of your stuff where we talk about the tensions that exist within a system. So we've got an economic boundary, we've got a resource boundary and then we've got a boundary of unacceptable performance, safety accidents. So within this sort of closed system you've got an operating point that moves around based on efficiencies and cost savings. Each one of those takes you to the closer to the failure boundary. But the thing is we don't know where that failure boundary is. So we back off and we call a safety margin.

Gareth Lock: 18:16

The biggest bang for buck for any organization is where your toes are right on the safety line. But the problem is you don't know where that safety line is until you step over it and go, ah man, that's the accident. So high reliability organizations who have got high performance teams, they recognize they failed. They're going to do lots of contingency planning, lots of practice. Their variability within their team is quite tight, which means that they can sit fairly close to that failure line because they know how people are operating. You say low reliability operations have got a big dispersion of performance, a lot of variability. So you say here's the rules and people go oh really, that's where we're playing. So we step over and have the accident lines and aircraft carriers from your background high reliability operations. But you know you're going to fail. That's why there's lots of contingencies happen.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 19:19

Hey, Gareth, a couple of things here on the HR side of the house, the sense making side of the house, with Carl Weich's work. Here's something we had Alistair Coburn on the podcast and Alistair is the person that put together the Agile Manifesto. He's one of the signatories of it. Here's what he said Agile had gone down the wrong path. They went down the pseudo science path and the path they should have gone down was a sense making, high reliability path where they would have uncovered and this is my view and I think it may be yours they would have uncovered what's actually behind developing teamwork skills. Right, Because my life on an aircraft carrier and yours in a C-130 and of course we may talk about diving you have to bring in and I'm not going to say human factors, training, but some of those lessons we borrowed from crew resource management to really build teams.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:12

Now, what I heard from you, between the pit crew and the all blacks, is they have a process they go through right, and I hate to break it to you, but most teams that do scrum go through the same process. They do planning, sprint planning, they do a daily stand up, which could be a brief replanting session, they have a review with the customer and they have a retrospective. So they plan, they brief, they execute, they debrief. So okay, they're already doing that. So they're a high performing team, right? Or is there more behind all that?

Gareth Lock: 20:44

So I'm going to ask does that debrief focus on the task or the team?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:51

I know the answer. It's always the task.

Gareth Lock: 20:55

So that's why I asked the question.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:58

Yeah, the way we coach it is 60% teamwork and 40% task work, but generally what you see is 100% task work and try to blame somebody for something right?

Gareth Lock: 21:10

Yes, yeah, absolutely so. Why is that? Why is that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 21:14

Yeah, why do you? And I see the same thing.

Gareth Lock: 21:17

Well, the simple answer is because they haven't been taught teamwork, you know, and that's such a glib statement from my perspective. You know, but and that's why we're here and that's not just to say then, then we know better than you. It's because actually we've lived it. And and the fact that Organizations think that if you put a bunch of people together, you give them some technical skills and Off they go. And that's no different than the surgical environment, where I've written a couple of, you know, articles looking at non technical skills, teamwork in the surgical space and In, you know, just off that space, because it's it's applicable in. You can transport that across into the software world and the diving world. The training is about technical skill acquisition. So you were talking about the software teams learning coding. They're learning the framework of agile and and I'm gonna be naive here, I don't know enough about it to comment, but I can say that that it's not about the interactions, the relationships, and that's no different than the surgeons. So a surgical outcome is often put down to the technical skills of the surgeon and the surgical team. But actually what we're saying is there's also context. So what's the environment like, what's the task design like, what's the, the culture like. Then there's a bit of randomness and luck, especially in, you know, sort of safety critical space, where there's a lot of variability in a cut, in a complex space. And then there's the non technical skills, this crew resource management that we're talking about, and those Four layers, those four dimensions have got an interdependence, they've got a relationship. And I've got no idea what that waiting factor is and I've got no idea what the past mark might be. But if you're only focusing on the technical skills and that you don't consider the context and you don't consider the non technical skills, your multiplication basis could end up going horribly wrong. And so it's about being as good as you can in all of the dimensions.

Gareth Lock: 23:20

But if your teamwork scores, you know, if I say one, one, one, one, the outputs one. If I say point eight, point eight, one and point eight, the outputs point four, eight. If the output for the team is point two, it's that point four, sixty four. So you end up with point one, six, yeah, so it's a pretty small number. So, yeah, 64 times yeah. So there we go. That doesn't have to it, you know. But but what I'm saying is that actually the, because of the way that those factors Relate to each other. It's not just a linear or an additive process. There is some in multiplication waiting process. If you have a low score in teamwork, you'll get a disproportionate effect coming it out the other side. No matter how good your Technical skills are, if your teamwork sucks, your output will suck too.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 24:18

Okay, so I forgot to tell you how much I would pay you for talking about the importance of Understanding teamwork skills before you learn how to debrief or or what you look back at debriefing. So I want to thank you for that, and my client wants to thank you for that, because I've been telling them that. So let's, I want to. I want to dive into something else because this connects to something very important. I have something on my hand that may look familiar. Love it. So I have these mini planks, mini means, if you want to call that. Uh, let's talk about how. How do you develop teams, teamwork, what do you want to call them? Teaming skills, teamwork skills with what works best for you right now.

Gareth Lock: 24:54

Teamwork, actually I don't care, okay, from it, from a label, I and you know. So you could say that teaming is that bit where. So Amy Edmondson's definition of bringing Disparate individuals together towards a common goal and moving forward and then dissolve teams. So cockpit crews would be teaming. Yeah, surgical teams are teaming. Emergency response teams Are often teaming in that sense. And and you've got to quickly come together with a shared goal, shared mental model of what's important. How do we get there? What's the contingencies? And play the what if game. Okay, so what I do is I have scenarios where there's no jeopardy.

Gareth Lock: 25:36

So one of the biggest things that stops teams forming is fear of failure. It's that bit of not wanting to look stupid in front of colleagues because they don't know the answer. So the planks game that you've just talked about and Jemisin and interlab personal skills is the new tool that I'm using. They are all about the same thing you give people a simple task to do, but it requires cooperation, collaboration, communication, and the way that I Develop those teams is through guided discovery and and for people in the sort of the educational space you've got this sort of Normal way of delivering in a didactic manner. I tell you, you listen, you replicate and off you go and you're doing reproduction that doesn't stick very well and it doesn't. It doesn't hold and it's very difficult to get experiential ideas across in that way. What I'm moving is across the other side, which is guided discovery or self-discovery, where people get given a problem, they get given a sort of a space in which to operate and a there's where you're trying to get to and they, they've got to go and discover it. They find it through trial and error and they learn to make mistakes and they learn to reflect and interact with each other.

Gareth Lock: 27:03

And then we'll have a small debrief and we'll talk about simple. You know we start with a simple debrief of what did you do Well, why, what do you need to improve on and how, and that's. You know that's four simple questions. But the difficult questions out of those are why did it go well and how are you going to improve? Because they require the thinking. Observations are easy oh, we didn't communicate very well, okay, good, why? Yeah, or actually, yeah, teamwork was good, why? What was good about the teamwork? Give me a specific, and that's the other piece about debriefs is be specific, not general. And I know from experience, and you've probably had the same thing when Non-adiators here and military aviation debrief will sit there and go oh my god, there's gonna be a fight here in a minute, it's really brutal and actually sit there and go.

Gareth Lock: 27:53

No, this is about separating the person from the role. So you are a team member, you are not punch, and as long as you can separate that, then actually that accelerates the learning. So we go through some iterative processes. They've got to do some problem-solving, but a competition helps, but it has to be healthy competition and again, you know, sort of finished today. I think it's a really good idea to have a team that's really working in a team that's working in a team that's working in a team that's working in a team that's working in an organization where the departments they brought cross department members into the session and it was really apparent that there was unhealthy competition happening within the organization. And would you say, look, hang on a minute. As an organization, you all need to be heading in the same direction. So we often talk about low level teams and then if leaders are rewarding individual team members, individual departments, for winning against their Co team members, that's not a collaborative space at all.

Gareth Lock: 28:56

So all of this stuff about using planks, about understanding the difficulty of solving a problem Is is Relatable to the operational environment, be that a healthcare team, be that a software team, be that a utility that's in space. So once they've solved the problem which is actually two parts, so it's a construction problem and it's a sequencing problem, so often organizations and they do quite well and they put this puzzle together and go, hey, right now you've got to constraint that, you've got to take it apart and put it together In a certain order and there are certain other rules and people sit there going, oh, does that mean that we've got to remember whose plank is in which order and put it together in the right sequence. It's like, yeah, yeah, and so they've now got another problem to solve and that can only be done in a Through again, effective teamwork. So we run through that and then what we do is, if we've got multiple teams will work out who's the fastest team and we'll get them to demonstrate to the slower teams what they did. So now we're sharing the learning across the board. So we're going to do a. We'll get them to demonstrate to the slower teams what they did. So now we're sharing the learning across.

Gareth Lock: 29:55

You say, right, what do you? What questions have you got to learn from those? What did you pick up? And so they'll go away and practice and we'll run through some more sequences, will do some sharing the learning across. And you say, right, what do you? What questions have you got to learn from those? What did you pick up? And so they'll go away in practice and we'll run through some more sequences, we'll do some more timed runs and then we'll say, right now, you two team members, you're over there. You two team members come over here. Now you've got to absorb those new team members. They're going to have skills and knowledge that you don't know about.

Gareth Lock: 30:29

How do you extract that? And it might be that, as we had last week, we had a team that really nailed the time, so they were getting down to sub 30 seconds and if you play planks for the first, you know that's the first 30 minutes they were doing it. It's just like they're pretty good. The other team had only built it once in the 30 minutes and they're like getting so despondent. So what we did is we actually we just took two team members out that and we got them to coach and develop the other team and from being a despondent, frustrated team, they said they go oh, there's no point in doing this, this is rubbish. You know, it's the learned helplessness that was happening. They got to a 27 second thing and went. I told you could do this, because now you've listened and you've taken knowledge from another department, and they just sat there and went wow, yeah, yeah, we count this as organizational learning in action.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:18

So I want to talk more about this, because I think this is really important to our listeners, and that is, when you set up these activities, you're not asking people to come sit down and log on to their computer and look at each other, right? Although that does happen.

Gareth Lock: 31:31

Well, so yeah, we're with Jemisin and Intel App. We can.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:34

Yeah, but just talking planks. So they don't come in. They're not on their devices, they're not checking email, they're not doing anything like that. That's generally the expectation when they go into any type of training is I can be on my computer looking at my email and doing all that, right, Not in our classroom. You come in our workshops, you're gonna be putting your computer down and you're gonna be hands-on experiential learning activities and a few other things. I wanna share something with you that I've been able to do and I think you've done it.

Gareth Lock: 32:04

And just on that, we had somebody today who was I've gotta leave class at two o'clock because three of my team members are down, they're on their own. They're really worrying and they stayed for another hour playing planks because they're like I wanna do this, I wanna do it, I'm learning, yeah, yeah. So it's like so you're willing to I've gotta leave because they're over there, but now you're willing to sacrifice good learning or sacrifice work for good learning, and that, to me, is gold dust.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:32

Yeah, let's build on this and we'll stay on planks, because we use that a little bit, and I wanna talk about some of the science not gonna say science, but some of the ideas that we inject into it. One of them would be we wanna create some context switching, some opportunities for team members to take their focus off the desired outcome, which is to build it in under whatever minute or two minutes, whatever you may set up Well as quick as you can.

Gareth Lock: 32:56

it's competition. Yeah, exactly.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:58

Yeah, and then that's number one, so we can inject that in there. We can also hide one of their not necessarily hide it, but maybe move a plank, especially if the plank is the same color as a desktop. You just kinda move it away, so now they lose situational awareness of how many Planks are in front of you. It's kind of funny if somebody's dominating a team, you can Find those people and group them together, which is always fun, see. So that's a lot. You know we do that. And then, of course, we inject some noise and sound and, you know, crank up some horrible music From from the, from the UK, really.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 33:36

It's just yeah, well, there we go.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 33:38

Yeah, you know, you find whatever the latest and greatest annoying song out of the UK is and we play it really, really loud. And then what we're trying to look for there is are they trying to shift their environment? Are they trying to control their environment, right? So there's so much you can do with this. If you want to call it a low fidelity game, it's a high-touch, low-tech game, but we can inject. It kind of follows along the lines of anthro simulation, right, human machine, manipulation of the environment, and we can also do things like this because all teams go through the same life cycle, which is planned, execute, assess.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 34:11

You can actually demonstrate to folks After they do maybe one or two iterations of it that they just learned scrum. Right, you just learned scrum. And they're like what I'm like? You just went through scrum and you didn't have to go through two days and 14 hours of sitting around Playing with tennis balls and look at stuff. You get it done in 20, 30 minutes and then you can inject red teaming techniques like a fishbowl and you can go okay, let's take a good debrief, let's, let's demonstrate that and let's have this team talk about or have their debrief while everybody else listens in.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 34:42

Right so you can actually create all. You can mix and match all these different things based off the context that you have. And that's what's fun about this is there's no one set way to do it right, and and I will I'll throw this. I want to ask you this to Gareth go when you go in and you run a workshop, you have some desired outcomes are looking for. However, I believe you and I are the same. When you go in there, you sometimes don't know what you'll be doing in 30 minutes, right?

Gareth Lock: 35:12

Agreed, agreed, you may extend something and ditch some theory. What I was gonna do is Challenge you. This works because we know what teams are and we have one or two levels more knowledge Than our graduates do, and that, to me, is a critical thing. My, you know, I have a team of 10 or 11 instructors. Now their instructor development process to be able to teach my just a two-day class is five months and about 150 hours of theory, and that's because I'm giving them the knowledge and I want them to know the background.

Gareth Lock: 35:51

So that is exactly that point there, when something goes left of field for you as the, the facilitator and I would say I'm an educator, a facilitator, I'm not a trainer, because I'm getting them to do the learning and the development when something goes, you go ah, yeah, right, how do I take a learning out of that? Rather than go, whoa, stop, right, let's reset back to this. Yeah, we're gonna follow it. Because it doesn't work there. The learning is there, we go. How often does that happen in real life? So even things like you take about shaping the environment, tipping that, the play bits, that the Jenga or the planks bricks in the middle of the table, the, the context, people then lean right into the table and they really struggle to build this and you, like you know you get to the debrief, you go. Why don't you move the tables around so you only have one table to operate, so you're not all coming? We had somebody yesterday. I can't reach this or move the table then, but you know and you say they go, what?

Gareth Lock: 36:51

so that you know? Taking that to the work environment, I can't do my job because of x, y and z. Can you change the environment in which you're working? Yeah, to make it easier to work properly.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 37:02

I think I shared pictures with you once where we ran a workshop and we put planks on the ground and they're in a bag and they crawled around on their hands and knees rather than put it on the table. I'm like this is exactly what you do inside your office you do not fix, you do not change anything. So let's let's build on this more so. Experiential learning activities it's in the name actually. We want them to experience something and then they I believe they have to take the lessons and apply it to what they, what they see.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 37:33

Right, oh yeah we let them make that connection and we don't tell them how to use it. If if I'm hearing you correctly and if I'm doing this correctly, it's they start making connections and they go this is what we need to do tomorrow, and then what up right and and absolutely it's that that's the critical thing is making that bridge, and that is also the really difficult thing.

Gareth Lock: 37:55

This, this training, is not formulaic, it is not sit there and go right, and the learning objectives are going to be these that we can measure right. These are almost abstractable things. That said, we're gonna expose you to some Interactions, some relationships and behaviors, some some failure points, and we're gonna ask you to abstract to your Individual operational space. So we had 22 people in the class today and at the end of it we set some goals and say what are you gonna start doing, stop doing, continue doing, and we follow up some coaching goals, but each one of those people had a different set of outcomes from a class. Now, that makes it really difficult for HR to go.

Gareth Lock: 38:39

So what did they learn? What was the return of investment? What's the change that's gonna happen? I Don't know, because actually you know you, you deal in the complexity space way more than I do when it comes to the sort of delivering out to the organizations. Learning and change is complex. So actually you could deliver the same program to a different bunch of teams and they will have different ideas on how to use it, even if they're in the same business, but they're in one office, two office and three office. Yeah, what they do that learning, because each individual sense Making will be different and their collective team sense making will be different too.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:22

Yeah, yeah, I gotta tell you something we ran, I think, ten teams in parallel with planks, which included some of the smaller planks, and what we did with those teams that had the small planks was we had them do Scaling planks because everybody wants to scale teamwork, and you just kind of take one out and have them, you drop a new, you know how come that they, you want them achieve, and next thing you know they're scaling their planks. I'm like that's what scaling is about. It's about taking your, your teams, your smaller teams, and they start working with other teams and they start to integrate and they have those shared mental models of I don't know how you feel about this, but shared mental models of how to plan and maybe even communicate and maybe even debrief. Once they have those, they start to Work together. You can call them protocols, you can call mental models. They may be, but do you teach that in in the class as well, or do you demonstrate?

Gareth Lock: 40:11

scaling side.

Gareth Lock: 40:13

The mental, the mental models, more the mental well yes, all will give people frameworks for running an effective debrief, and one of them I got from, from your Seattle, and modified it to something else and the debrief framework is the same and it's giving people a Structure so that stuff gets covered without being forgotten, and it also helps the communicator, the leader, to make sure that everything is captured, including the contingencies and and the important bit that you know we end our debrief to. We end our brief, a pre-task brief, with, and the debrief will happen at such and such. So we set the expectation that a debrief will happen and then we get into the debrief, which is structured, which talks about what were the goals, create psychological safety, review the timelines and then the individual and team learning. And then the critical piece is Taking the lessons that we've identified, not so really learned, identify from the activity, capture it and say who's the actor who's gonna own this and fix it or file it or address it yeah, and then look at what the change is and you're laughing bit of lessons identified versus lessons learned.

Gareth Lock: 41:26

Organizations have got hundreds, thousands of lessons identified. Far fewer lessons learned. Yeah, because they don't take it. They go, yeah, take, move on and they've done their debrief, but actually they haven't learned.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 41:39

Yeah, we, we called it the lessons observed, and I think the new, the better term maybe lessons learning Rather than lessons learned, and I like you as lessons identified or just called lessons ignored as well. Right.

Gareth Lock: 41:53

Well, so, from what I understand that the UKMOD used to be lessons learned, lessons identified lessons Hmm, I didn't know that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 42:03

Things to follow away. All right, let's get into Communication real fast. Do you use the workshops? What do you call them workshops, by the way? What do you? What do you?

Gareth Lock: 42:11

call what when I run my classes yeah, classes, actually, I don't, okay, doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It might change people's uptake, I don't know. It's. It's a Continual challenge to get people into the programs because, for the same reasons, you say already know that we operate. Oh yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 42:30

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's an. It's not annoying, I get it, though. Right people, it's, it's not it. I wouldn't say it's not in an innate skill. I mean it is. We all have teamwork skills, we have some capabilities, but these are things that need to be trained in the same manner we would train Hate, to use training skills, technical skills right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 42:50

Yeah, they need to be seen as the same. You hire people for their technical skills and organizations right, and generally they don't have teamwork skills. So what do you do? You run around, you come up with all these principles, you hire these consultants that don't know anything about teamwork training, but they know teams and name only. They apply frameworks. And then you bring us in and we start talking about closed loop communication, communication techniques, and I want to hear what are you using in your workshop For communication techniques? Anything exciting?

Gareth Lock: 43:20

So so yeah, closed loop is a classic piece. So it's that piece that the check of understanding afterwards, and and that could be as simple as just a verbal nod, and then you see somebody do it. Or if it's critical, it's it's making sure that the there is understanding and it's not parroting. So if I said you punch what my last three words and then you say what my last three words, all I'm doing is testing your short-term memory. What I'm gonna say is, in your own words describe to me what we're gonna do next. Oh man, I've gotta think about this. And so that's also about setting people up for success.

Gareth Lock: 43:59

When you come to do a brief and you're gonna check understanding is say to people look, I'm gonna give a brief, I'm gonna ask some questions at the end of it and I'm gonna do it in a manner where I'm gonna ask you to interpret and reflect back. So tell me, explain to me, describe to me what's gonna happen next, as opposed to just did you understand that? Yes, and people might go well, that's closed loop communications. Well, sort of yes, we have closed the communication loop, but the purpose of communication is to make sure a message has been transferred and has understood and the intent will be carried out, and the only way you can do that is to really check their understanding and their comprehension of what's going on.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:46

And there's nothing wrong with that. Like now, if you're in a meeting, you can ask everybody, okay, as a leader, you don't stand up there and say, as a leader.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:53

I wanna know what you said, but you can do a quick check. Okay, going around the room, you know, gareth. Just recap what it is we need to execute on over the next few days, right, and it's not to put them on the spot. Well, it may put them on the spot, but you're getting that feedback from them and, by the way, now everybody's paying attention, right?

Gareth Lock: 45:12

Oh, so that's another. So there's a couple of bits I was gonna pick up. One is you've used this technique really well and it's probably transparent to most people, but I recognize it because I know you're using it. What I heard you say was and that is a question, that's not, it's different to saying what you said Gareth was X, as opposed to what I heard you say was this, and so the latter is less, I'm gonna say, offensive. It doesn't create conflict. So the other thing I was gonna say is how you ask questions.

Gareth Lock: 45:48

So, moving from open to closed questions. So we already talked about the tell, explain, describe. If you want to check understanding and curiosity, use an open question. If you just want to check a value or a statement or a configuration, then use a closed question and you can transition between open to closed so you can use leading or loaded questions. Are you sure that's the right answer? Ponch, you know, and anybody who's used to sort of communication would go ah, all right. What's missing, by the way, that that's framed and that's just recognizing the patterns of speech that we have to prompt or nudge.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 46:32

This is great. So some of the things that we'll use, and it doesn't go over well because we're not in a surgical environment or in a hospital, but it's SBAR, it's Situation, background Assessment, recommendation, and this follows along the lines of what you just said, because it's leaving it open right. Here's the situation, here's the background, here's my assessment, here's my recommendation. What do you think? So you're putting it back to somebody, to you know? Here's, as a decision maker, I think we need to do this Perfect.

Gareth Lock: 47:01

And another one we had is so why don't you use that in software? I would have thought in crisis management in software that would be a critical thing to use. Sbar it should be.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 47:10

One of the first things you learn in day one with our workshops is to learn how to do these things right. You would think that's what they want. They do not want this, they want scrum, they want safe, they want a framework, because they know and I'm saying this from my experience they know how to work together as teams. It's already done. I'm like, okay, great. Then show us and I think that's the challenge we're facing right now by going back to the beginning of this conversation what's at stake. If you don't do this right, you can't just suck less than everybody else and you might be fine. Or if you want to dominate and really thrive in this environment, you can learn these things and they don't cost a lot of energy to do it right. So some other examples and this goes back into healthcare, is some keywords, and I think this goes back to psychological safety CUS concerned, I'm concerned, I'm uncomfortable. This is a safety issue, right, and I think you work in environments that they already use those approaches. And then we have another one called DESC, desk Describe the situation, express how it makes you feel, suggest alternative and then consequences in terms of impact on goals, right? So these are things we can inject into planks, by the way. You can actually do this then, and they can carry that over and go. We want to use this tomorrow in the way we work together as teams, and I learned a lot of some of this from you as well I think you gave me.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 48:33

The one I have here is Start by Getting their Attention. Hey, hugo, I'm worried that blah, blah, blah, we might something. Let's try this. Does that sound good?

Gareth Lock: 48:40

to you. What do you think? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's really, communications is such a difficult topic to get taught and yet when people well, it's actually a lot of these things people sort of want that their blinkers come off.

Gareth Lock: 48:59

So how you ask a question, I was always taught pose, pause, pounce. So if you want to get somebody's attention to ask a question and in group, you're going to get people to pay attention as a group when you're asking a question, so we'll pose the question outbound and we'll say right, I'm going to discuss the communication method, open questions, and I would like somebody to give me an answer, punch. And so if you pose that bit, people thinking about it and then, oh, it's me. Whereas if I said punch, what I'd like us to do is talk about closed-loop communication. As soon as I say punch, everybody else goes phew, yeah, it ain't me. So I'm not going to pay attention to this.

Gareth Lock: 49:49

Conversely, if you want to get some critical information to somebody, you want to draw their attention first. So you use something called the cocktail party effect bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, garith, oh, who's talking about me? And so if I'd say punch, and I wait for you to respond or at least turn or break what you're doing and then I can ask the question. Because if I ask the question first and then say to you, punch, you'll go, yeah, what, what was that? And if we don't have a psychologically safe environment, you'll try and gaff off what the question was and answer it. And if I don't have a safe environment I'll go, yeah, ok, and let it pass. And so we've had an exchange, technically communication out back, but actually the understanding or the attempt was completely missed.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:38

Yeah, hey, we're coming up close to time here, but I do want to end on a not necessarily a high note, which we could be a high note here in debriefing. Let's go to the debrief, let's talk about that. We kind of started on that, we brought that up to everybody's attention, but can you give us some pointers on effective debriefing approaches? What do you coach with when you're working or delivering these workshops? What are you showing?

Gareth Lock: 51:04

folks. So the framework that I taught. I have sort of three frames that are all three frameworks that I'll use. One is a good team learning debrief, and that follows the word debrief, and you've got show notes, yeah, cool. Well, it's in under pressure as well. So that the but I was going to send, I've got a PDF that people can download. So D define the aims and goals of the mission. Did we achieve them? What's the scope of the debrief? Is this going to be five minutes, 10 minutes, two hours? So people know that. And if the debriefer, that the leader, is waffling hey, gareth, I thought this was like a 10 minute debrief. We're already 45 minutes into this. Oh, okay, an example.

Gareth Lock: 51:47

E, for example, creates psychological safety, create environment, where you, as the leader, talk about a mistake that you've just done on that task. So you break down this authority gradient that says you know what? I am not perfect, I'm human, I make mistakes too, and what I'm going to try and do is encourage others. Then we'll talk about basics or pre pre execution. Before you started the task, did we set the team up for success in terms of resource scheduling, people, and then we'll move into the execution review, execution, and actually that's quite a boring bit and it doesn't add much to learning. It provides you anchors for learning later on, but you don't need to go, and then we did this and then we did that, and this is God. Here we go and then the real learning happens. And I talked about those four questions of what did we do well, why, what do we need to improve on and how. And the questions for I and E relate to individual what did I do well and why, what do I need to improve on and how I'm going to do it. And then the E is what does the team do well and why, and what does the team need to improve on and how they're going to do it.

Gareth Lock: 52:55

And each one of the team members takes a red teaming idea of think, write, share. So actually we get people to write their debrief down so that, you know, take a little bit of time, reflect on it, capture those ideas, and then we'll you know, we'll run through it in a structure. And then the F is the find fix file take forward. And in the training environment, what we do is we say what's the key lesson you learned from this simulation, this planks exercise that you're going to apply to your own workspace. So they've got to reflect on what they've just done and own it. And then at the end of the two days we'll basically wrap up and they're the coaching goals.

Gareth Lock: 53:31

And then we've got a task focus which basically is either an eye or an E. So what did we do well? Why, what do we need to improve on and how? That's the task one or for a person, debrief and a reflection.

Gareth Lock: 53:44

One thing I do well, one thing I need to do more of, one thing I need to less of, and that is just interpersonal. You can do that. Just walk into the coffee shop and just as a peer group or as a one up or one down, just having those conversations, because there are lots of blind spots that people don't have and if you don't have a feedback mechanism, you're going to be hidden to them. And again, today you know spending a lot of time reflecting on today's training because it's really fresh. Somebody went, came up to me at the end and said I thought I was pretty good communicator and now I realize the value of some of the words, especially when we talk about how leaders respond matters. You know, do you jump in and blame or do you sit there and be curious and go how did that make sense for that person to do what they did?

Gareth Lock: 54:31

And then they talked about their blind spots. They need to have those, and so coming on exercises like this or these training days was critical, because nobody does that light shining like consultants or external people can be department different departments, but somebody who's got nothing to lose who can ask the difficult, pointed questions, the ones where you dig into the debrief and people give a one word answer you go. No, I want more than that. I want to know how it made sense for you to do that. I don't know. Well, what about? Was that a distraction? Was that why you missed that? Oh, I didn't even notice that. Or, you know, we talked about the tables for planks not being in the right place. People don't realize that they're you know, when you were talking about your planks on the floor, what was their reaction when you said to them you do realize that you could have put on the table.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 55:22

Yeah, they're embarrassed, they're like we didn't know we could.

Gareth Lock: 55:26

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 55:29

So they crawled around. I was shocked. I'm like okay, I took, I took a lot of pictures, yeah.

Gareth Lock: 55:35

Well. So it's that bit of how does it make sense and to me, that's the critical thing that comes out of a debrief is you're trying to explore from your team members and that includes the leader how did it make sense for them to do what they did and what are they going to put in place to make improvements? Awesome.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 55:54

Hey, gareth. So here's what I want to do. I want to turn it over to you, after I give a quick announcement, that after you share with folks how to contact you and what you're up to these days, I do want to invite our guests and our listeners to stay back and join us on on the YouTube as you and I go a little bit deeper, maybe into some hop, some human factors, some things that we're using, and maybe share some ideas there on how we can improve the way we're delivering workshops. But before we go to that, over time, how can our listeners get in contact with you?

Gareth Lock: 56:24

So my website is thehumendivercom and there's a contact page on there. Or you can do garethloc at thehumendivercom and that'll find me. You'll find me on LinkedIn posting lots of controversial things to get people thinking differently. Or if you really want to get hold of me, I can pick up. Pick up an email and we can have a phone call. Zoom teams doesn't matter.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 56:48

Okay, and I think we failed to do something really important. What does diving have to do with everything we just talked about?

Gareth Lock: 56:57

I formed the human diver in 2016 when I wanted to bring my capabilities from military aviation crew resource management non-technical skills into the diving space. So sports diving and I'm now working in military diving space as well, and a little bit of commercial, a little bit of scientific diving as well. And people are people, so the work that I've done in oil and gas and healthcare and software teams, military aviation applies anywhere. So I'm the only person that's really running structured crew resource management non-technical skills programs in the diving space, and it's a challenge because nothing happens. Therefore, why do we need to improve? And it's the same as software. It's the same as other business we judge success by the absence of bad outcomes, and you don't know how close your toes are to the line.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 57:54

Well, hey, thank you very much, gareth. I'm going to invite our listeners on over for overtime on YouTube and you and I will continue the conversation there, so see you in a moment.