Agile Mentors Podcast from Mountain Goat Software

Most teams aren’t broken because of individual incompetence. They’re struggling because the group itself isn’t set up to thrive. In this episode, author and researcher Colin Fisher joins Brian to reframe how we think about team performance, conflict, and psychological safety through the lens of real science, real practice, and a little jazz.

Overview

Group dynamics aren’t fluff. They’re the operating system behind every Agile team’s success (or struggle). Colin Fisher, author of The Collective Edge, joins Brian to share what decades of research and hands-on observation reveal about high-performing teams. From ideal team size (spoiler: it’s 4.5), to avoiding the trap of blaming individuals for systemic issues, Colin offers a practical, thought-provoking look at how to build more resilient, collaborative, and human-centered teams.

Expect fresh insights on team launch moments, role clarity, feedback culture, remote collaboration and how to keep your team “groupy” in the best possible way. 

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Colin Fisher
Collective Edge by Colin Fisher
Colin's Free Newsletter
LinkedIn
YouTube
#80: From Struggling to Success: Reviving Agile Teams with Mike Cohn
#143: What Still Makes Teams Work (and Win) with Jim York
Self-Organizing Teams Are Not Put Together Randomly by Mike Cohn
Agile Skills Video Library
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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Colin Fisher is a former professional jazz musician turned organizational behavior expert who now helps teams unlock their creative and collaborative edge. A professor at University College London and author of The Collective Edge, Colin draws on decades of research—and a bit of jazz improv—to help leaders understand what really makes groups tick.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as always Brian Milner and today I've got the one, the only Colin Fisher with us. Welcome in Colin.

Colin Fisher (00:11)
Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Milner (00:13)
Very delighted to have Colin with us. If you haven't crossed paths with Colin before, you're in for a treat. There's just a lot of stuff here that I think you're going to find really interesting. Colin, primarily here, what I want to point you to is he's the author of a book called The Collective Edge, which is really an amazing book about group dynamics and how groups and teams work together. It distills down just a ton of research that's happened over the years.

and makes it really accessible and readable. He has a PhD from Harvard. He's also on the faculty of the UCL School of Management. And in kind of looking him up previously, kind of doing some further research, I found out that he's also a jazz trumpet player. So that's really interesting. I love that. Do you still get to play very often?

Colin Fisher (01:02)
Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. So I moved to London about 10 years ago and my kids are getting older now. So it doesn't feel as, is important and, to be at home every single moment. Now, you know, a 17 year old doesn't want to hang out with you quite as much. So I've gone back out. I'm playing in one band, a shout out to suede jazz collective where they just sort of think I'm, I'm another musician, another professional musician who's out there.

Brian Milner (01:24)
you

Colin Fisher (01:29)
And I try, know, I talk in the book about going to this jam session at a club called grow and I try and go there on Thursday night. So if you're, if you're in London on the Thursday night looking for something to do or last Friday of the month, look me up. I may have some good things for you to come here.

Brian Milner (01:45)
I can promise you that the next time that I find myself in London on that timeframe, I am definitely gonna be there. That's gonna be awesome. Yeah, so I wanna get us into our topic area, because I know there's a lot for us to dive into here, but I think Colin, what I wanna start with is just, we have a lot of people that are trying to guide teams and maybe from a management level or leadership level, but maybe also from a...

a scrum master level or project manager kind of level of a team. And what I'm really want to start with is what do you feel like is the biggest misunderstanding that leaders have about how teams actually work?

Colin Fisher (02:23)
I mean, there are so many, I had to write a whole book about it, But I mean, I think the most common problem, so if we're starting kind of at the biggest level is just people get very focused on either the technical aspects of their jobs and especially when you're doing this kind of project based work, you know, there's a lot of focus on the project itself. And then people, when there are problems,

Brian Milner (02:26)
Right, right.

Colin Fisher (02:51)
people get focused on individuals and that there's a sort of attribution of, you know, things, especially going poorly to, there's some kind of problem with an individual or there's some kind of problem between, uh, you know, two people. that the reality though is that a lot of this stuff is at the group level. It's stuff about the structure of the group and it's about the norms of the group. So if I've got you paying attention to the

And if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably somebody who's looking to think kind of at that group level. You're already ahead of the game because so many people are just sort of unaware that group dynamics might be something they need to be paying attention to.

Brian Milner (03:35)
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. When I think about the leaders I've interacted with, and they talk about the problems they're having with their teams, it's very much, I've got this thing I need to get done, and there's a problem that's taking too long. This person doesn't understand what they need to do. And so what you're saying, and what you're trying to focus here on is that there's a larger kind of

structural problem here that is the group dynamic that really is kind of more core. that kind of what you're saying?

Colin Fisher (04:05)
Yeah, I mean, the group groups are sort of the hidden driver of almost everything that's going on in organizations. But especially if you're, you know, if you're an agile, if you're in scrum, if you're in software development, you know, you guys are at the forefront of. You know, doing this kind of team-based project organizing that, you know, everybody else has been trying to copy another lines of work for a while. But I, so I think.

You know, there's some things that that gets really right, but there's also some very common problems that just emerge over time because we're actually our, our, although we're social creatures and we're, our brains are designed for us to live in groups. We're not designed to work in bureaucratic organizations that have the kinds of pressures and that they do. And so.

A common thing like, know, when we want to have a group, we want to include a lot of people, we want to sort of get everybody who we possibly could involved in things. But that one of the main findings from research on groups is that there's an ideal number for real collaboration, a number of people that you would want to collaborate with. And that this comes out of research where my mentor, Richard Hackman had

did a study where he was asking groups of different sizes out in the world, do you think your group's too big or too small? So you would rate what size is your group? To what extent do you think it's too big? To what extent do you think it's too small? And the important thing there is where those lines cross. Where do we think it's just right? And that that number, which I'm trying to get people to call Hackman's number after my mentor, is 4.5 people.

So that we want that that's where the kind of sweet spot for collaboration is. And I think most, for most people, this would be intuitive if I'm saying like, Hey, I want you to have organized a dinner where there's one rule at that dinner. You have to have only one conversation. You can't splinter into subgroups. can't have little sub conversations. Everybody's got to at that dinner has to just have focus on that single conversation.

And so if we say that it's like four or five people, you know, we're all going to get to talk. We're all going to get to contribute. We're all going to be heard and understood. But now if I say that dinner's got 10 people, it's like, right? Like we, you can pull that off. That's not impossible, but it's going to be a lot harder. But all of a sudden, if we've got 15, 20, 25 people, there's no way, right? We can't do that. And yet when we have these meetings,

Brian Milner (06:44)
Yeah.

Colin Fisher (06:53)
even in, you know, agile and scrum methodologies where it's like, you know, usually at the forefront of these things, we've, do that all the time. We've got so many people that there's no way everybody can contribute. There's no way everybody can feel heard. And there's no way that everybody's going to get on the same page. If you have, you know, an hour long meeting, much less a much shorter meeting. So, you know, we set ourselves up for failure really right from the start.

with the number of people that we're thinking about collaborating with.

Brian Milner (07:27)
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. I love that. it's, it's, you know, there's, there's been lots of different numbers thrown out there over the years. I know like right now, Scrum is, is saying it's usually 10 or less that are on a team, including Scrum master and product owner. But I think, you know, when you're focused on the actual work being done, you're talking about the developers in that group. And that's, that's kind of closer to the number that you're talking about here.

Colin Fisher (07:39)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Milner (07:51)
Amazon used to have the two pizza team kind of rule of, should be able to feed a team with two pizzas. So yeah, there is something I agree that's magical about kind of a smaller size. And I love your analogy because that's so true. When you go out to dinner with friends or anything else, when the group starts to get too big, it splinters. And that splintering happens naturally in a work environment as well because...

Colin Fisher (07:55)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Brian Milner (08:18)
These three or four people work together all the time, but they don't talk to the other three or four people because they're doing their own thing. So you have the natural split in teams anyway. I know I asked this question a lot of times in class. Well, if it's 4.5 is kind of the ideal, is there a lower threshold that are two people a team?

Colin Fisher (08:41)
Two people can't, I mean, this is hotly debated amongst group scholars. generally, two people can have a lot of the attributes of a team. And I think we, a lot of times when we're teaching about these things, we'll teach like there's this really hard dividing line between a group and the team. But in reality, this is a continuum. We're on a continuum of more or less groupiness.

Brian Milner (08:44)
You

Colin Fisher (09:06)
And like these real teams of 4.5 people who are like, you know, a basketball team or a jazz ensemble or these kinds of teams, those are the groupiest groups where they have all the attributes of groupiness that we would want. And that when you get into dyads, they have some of them, but not as many. it's all most people would say, like, we really get into most of group dynamics once we have three people. And it's harder to have some, some of the things we talk about as important in group dynamics.

when it's only two. Some of those things just won't happen as much.

Brian Milner (09:38)
Agreed. Yeah, I absolutely agree. All right. So let's let's kind of carry forward that if we we've got our 4.5 people ⁓ that we want and we got a project that we want to have them focus on. How do we set that group up for success? What's what's the keys? If I'm that leader, what can I do to enable them to get off on the right foot and really have a strong foundation?

Colin Fisher (09:45)
Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's so important. that getting off to a good start, when you compare like how much of the variance in, group performance can we explain from stuff that happens before the group exists, stuff that happens right in that first meeting and then everything else that happens after that. The results are really striking. So I I'm going to again, harken back to Richard Hackman here, which is coming up a little more than it usually does.

so he had, he had the way of talking about this, which he called the 60 30 10 rule and the 60 30 10 rule says that 60 % of how groups going to do is determined before it ever meets that. And, those are by things of who's going to be on the team. What, tasks is that team going to be charged with? Are those goals communicated well and do people understand what they are and what the, its importance is?

And so that stuff usually happens before a group ever meets, but those are the most powerful drivers of group performance. But then the 30 is actually what happens in that very first meeting at the launch. And that's because we do form our impressions of what a group's going to be like very, very quickly, but that the kind of norms of behavior and our personal orientation towards that group.

Also tend to form in that first meeting and it's really sticky. It's not that you can't change it at all. It's just, it gets progressively harder to change. And so it's, it's easy to imagine when it's like, you know, where am I going to sit? You know, are we going to make small talk before the meeting or are we all going to stare at our phones and pretend we were not in the same room together? You know, those kinds of norms we see, but there's also more important stuff like who's talking a lot and who's not talking at all.

You know, is this a group that's going to be important to me is, or is this one where I feel like I'm kind of peripheral and I don't understand why I'm here. And so those things are also forming in that first meeting. So to get your group off to a good start, the most common thing, and I'm sure you've heard this from 10,000 different perspectives. The problem is that people have different perceptions of what they're trying to achieve. What is the goal?

And that, Communicating that goal really clearly so that we know the end point. know what mountain we're supposed to climb. We're not trying to go to different places. That's really important, but it's also really critical that people understand why it's important, you know, for the organization, for the team and for them personally. And often that's why they specifically are there.

Now, you're in a domain that has really strong roles, like if I'm the trumpet player up on stage with a jazz band, I know I am there because of the instrument I'm holding. A lot of it's determined by the context. But when we get into new kinds of tasks, stuff we haven't done before and stuff that's a little more uncertain, that's where you really have to tell people. Because it's not determined just by their job descriptions, why they're there, what they're supposed to bring to that team.

And the best, the best leaders are the ones who are communicating their vision for that, checking that with everybody else who's on the team to see if anybody has questions, if anybody has different understandings of it. that, know, ideally giving people a chance to, respond to that. so that, that's, you know, the, one of the most important things, but then there's another really basic thing.

that often doesn't happen and gets lost in the shuffle, which is who is actually on this team and who am I supposed to be collaborating with? And I mean, you'd be shocked how often that teams don't get that simple thing, right? Right. Like when you have, you know, 10, 11 people showing up, but maybe somebody is not there that day. Maybe some of those people are there for some reason. That's not going to be, they need to continue to be communicated with on this team and that.

It's so often it's just like people don't know who they're supposed to be working with all that well. And both of these things I think are things that leaders can do a lot about. And that one military leader who I was talking to as part of going around talking about this book, said he was taught that the best leaders think of their job as being the repeater in chief. That they come in every day and they're like, this is why we're here.

Brian Milner (14:36)
You

Colin Fisher (14:41)
This is what we're trying to do. This is where everybody, everybody's role is in achieving this. And there's a lot of truth to that because just there's natural kind of coming apart that happens when you don't keep coming back to these issues. And so, you know, the best teams are repeating these things. They're putting it big in their shared workspace that, know, there's really clear indications of who's supposed to be paying attention to what. And that those things.

often are the source of, you know, it's like you see somebody who's checked out, they may not know what they're supposed to be doing. You see, you know, two people who seem like they're arguing about, you know, what the best way forward is. They may have really different views of what the goal we're trying to achieve is. And a lot of these kind of surface level problems come back to these real basic things about the team.

Brian Milner (15:30)
Yeah, this is really good stuff. I agree. it gets to kind of that whole Dan Pink think about the purpose motivating the team and that sort of stuff as well. I want to make sure to dive into a little bit as well, because we're dealing with individual human beings that are trying to work together to produce something. And when you have

Colin Fisher (15:38)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Milner (15:54)
individual humans, have differences in personality, have differences in culture and just personality traits and preferences and all that kind of thing. How can a leader take that into account and how do we help a team really blend when you've got a team of, I don't know, some extroverts, some introverts, some...

some verbal processors, some that need quiet time to think, how do we blend that kind of really core differences in personality to get things done?

Colin Fisher (16:26)
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. This comes up all the time and it's something that researchers have been really curious about too. And I mean, the answer really is surprising. And that is even all these different kinds of people, these different personalities, especially personality doesn't actually matter that much. It doesn't matter nearly as much as you'd think because that we...

we're really good as social creatures at trying to fit into a particular social culture that's there. And that when it's really important to us, and we know why we're there and what we're supposed to be doing, a lot of this stuff takes care of itself. But the flip side of that is, and the reason I think this comes up a lot, is that another critical ingredient of teams is that they are

valuing and actively seeking to understand the different knowledge, skills, and perspectives of their members. Now, perspectives might come into this idea of having really different personalities, but there's the research that people have looked so hard to say like, this combination of introverts and extroverts is gonna do better than some other way, or this is how we kind of get these people.

who are different to work together. But the answer to that always comes back to shared goals and norms that value speaking up, listening to one another and valuing these kinds of disagreements as valuable ways to say, like, we're trying to solve a problem here. We're trying to achieve a task. And that the best way to make sure we're doing that optimally

is to consider different points of view and to consider differences. And so the teams that have these norms, that have these strong goals, tend not to have the kind of conflict that are due to work styles and personality types. And the ones that end up having that conflict, it's often because there's something else missing. There's something wrong with the structure of the team. And so the remedy is not to then say, let's develop special skills.

in navigating the conflict between these people. It's really, because that's sort of in that 10 % of the variance that you might be able to control as managing a team in real time. And it's really to say like, all right, those problems are emerging. Let me first check the 90 % of the variance that I should have been attending to and get that part right. So that's not to say this never happens. Like there's of course people who for a variety of reasons

Don't like each other will struggle to work together. but you know, first, if you have a ton of people, those people on your team or in your organization, you may have other problems with your recruiting and hiring processes that you're getting a whole bunch of people that can't work together over and over, but it's much more likely. I can almost, I struggled to come up with an example where it doesn't come back to.

these people didn't understand what they were supposed to do, they didn't understand their role on the team, or they just weren't actually given very important work, or they were given signals from their leadership in the context that their perspectives were not valued and were not important, and that almost everything comes back to those issues.

Brian Milner (19:53)
Yeah, great, great point. And you bring up the whole area of conflict there and the friction that will naturally occur when you have these kind of differences and people working close together. And I'm just curious to get you to talk a little bit about that whole realm, because I think there is sort of a misunderstanding a little bit.

from folks that that is something to try to avoid that you want to kind of ignore or dismiss, going to try to get past any differences that you have so that you can get back on target with whatever it is that you're there to talk about. And I've heard some people make some analogies in the past like you wouldn't do that in a relationship with your spouse. You wouldn't just say, we can't ever fight. Fights are important so that you

Colin Fisher (20:41)
Mm.

Brian Milner (20:44)
establish that humanity kind of bond between each other and trust and you you go through things. So when you see conflict kind of as a part of that team dynamic, how do you see that playing a role in the formation and what should teams do when they encounter kind of that friction where, hey, I want to do this. No, I think this is the right way to go.

Colin Fisher (21:06)
So if it's that kind of disagreement, if it's disagreement about the task and saying, I think this is the best way to do it, I think it's a different way. That's good. That's a sign of a healthy team where people are sharing their honest views about what the best way forward is. And as long as the team maintains this orientation of it's us against the problem.

We're okay. But once it turns into it's me against you, and this is me trying to get my way and you arguing to get your way, or even worse when it turns personal. And I'm saying, you know, Brian, you always say things like that. Like those are real, those are warning signs and that that is uniformly bad for, for team performance. we, you know, researchers divide the world into task conflict and relationship conflict.

Brian Milner (21:49)
Yeah.

Colin Fisher (22:03)
and sometimes also consider status conflict separately from that. So arguing about the social hierarchy. But the task conflict can be good. The problem is that when emotions run hot and we really care about the project, we care about the work, sometimes that starts to spill over into these other forms of conflict. And that's what you've got to be on the lookout for is where whenever it turns personal,

whenever it's about a contest of wills or one person being right and the other person being wrong. That's the beginnings of dysfunction. And that is something that I, at least as a team leader, when I'm leading a team, I have zero tolerance for conflict going off in that direction. And often when there's a contentious issue that we're bringing up, you know, whether it's hiring, whether it's, know, anything where I suspect we're going to have some disagreement.

You know, again, I become the reminder in chief and say, Hey, you know, we're all just trying to do what's best for, for the team here. Let's all try to solve this problem. We're going to disagree. Let's make, let's have some ground rules for how we're going to do that disagreement. But I really do want to know what, what you all think. And, and for us to really hash that out, we're not all going to get our way at the end of this. There's, there's going to have to be some give and take.

But that that's, that's how we come to the best decisions. so you, know, whatever the reminders you need to give your team are that you're setting those ground rules, you're setting those expectations and that you are doing this consistently because it only, it only takes once of something devolving into a fight that sometimes people, people don't forget easily that there's a lot of psychological research that suggests bad, stronger than good. So

Brian Milner (23:49)
Hahaha.

Colin Fisher (23:49)
Whenever,

whenever something bad happens in your team, you're going to have to do at least four or five times as much positive stuff to offset that negative event.

Brian Milner (24:00)
Yeah. I want to ask you about one last little area here too, before I let you go in our last minutes, because I feel like I'd be negligent if I didn't. Because in today's work environment, just about every team has some kind of a hybrid or remote component to what they do. And I'm curious what your research kind of showed on that and how, if we are in one of those situations, which a lot of us are.

How do you go about trying or what can we do to try to strengthen our team or make our team a stronger, higher performing team when we're never together, when we're always seeing each other like this?

Colin Fisher (24:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I mean, hybrid, think we have to be clear about two different things, right? One kind of hybrid is sometimes we're in the office, sometimes we're remote. And that means sometimes we're meeting across the computer screen from each other. When we're all meeting across the computer screen, the problem that we're facing is what

what psychologists call psychological distance, that we just seem a little less human to one another because we're programmed to perceive other humans when they're nearby us, when we can see all their nonverbal cues, when we can see their bodies and just physically being able to hear, see, smell all these things, other humans, that makes people more real. But then that has this other effect of we view

people more individualistically. So we, can say like, I understand Brian and I can really like zero in on your idiosyncrasies in a way that when we're virtual, brains tend to view other people more abstractly. And that the problem with that is that sometimes when we view people more as abstract generalizations, we tend to treat them worse, that we treat them more like their tools.

that we're comfortable sort of ignoring or disregarding them in ways that we would not do if we were in person. So if you're a leader and you're having a lot of virtual-only meetings, that's what you're fighting. You're trying to reduce that psychological distance. And that sometimes that is things like, most of us don't blur our backgrounds as much as we used to as we've kind of gotten used to this world because that makes us feel more psychologically close. It looks more like we're in the room together.

Sometimes that means we do little catch-ups at the beginning and we're all finding the boundaries of how much time do teams want to spend on that because we also don't like being on our computers staring at video screens all the time either. So I think different teams can find different ways of doing that. I've seen teams that do show and tells. I've seen teams where they just do really quick check-ins at the beginning. They have optional times for people to kind of do meet and greets before.

And those are all ways of reducing that psychological distance. you know, that's one, that's kind of one set of things. And I also think like, you know, we, we have a lot of opportunities with meeting virtually because we can get different expertise in the room that we could, if we're reliant on who could physically be there in the office, we can communicate through different media.

that especially when you're doing digital work, you can actually do work together in a way that's sometimes actually harder in a room when you're all sitting there in a room together. So there's a lot of opportunities with it too. But the other kind of hybrid, and that people kind of use the word interchangeably, is hybrid meetings. And hybrid meetings means some people are there face to face, and some people are on.

you know, online and then these digital environments like zoom and The the research on those is much less optimistic so to say You know teams tend to figure out how to operate when they operate in a consistent communication and information environment So if we do the same thing over and over, know, we're always meeting in person We're going to develop kind of norms and ways that we we solve problems if we always meet online

Brian Milner (27:56)
Yeah.

Colin Fisher (28:16)
we're going to develop ways of solving problems. But if we keep switching it up all the time, and especially if we switch who's online and who's in person, it's much harder for us to develop those norms of operating. And that the research shows actually that there's not as much of a disadvantage to meeting online as a lot of people had feared, especially for teams that do it consistently over time, that they tend to kind of start to figure stuff out.

if they're well structured in the ways that we talked about in the first place, but that the teams that struggle the most are the ones that keep switching. They keep switching how they meet. They keep switching what the medium is. And those teams are the ones that, you know, hybridity, the hybridity of that meeting is a real cost.

Brian Milner (29:04)
Yeah, so the consistency matters, right? It's just that consistency can, as you said, it's about team norms. And if you're switching all the time, then there's nothing that feels normal. It just feels like chaos. So yeah, I mean, this is really fascinating stuff. And I cannot recommend the book high enough to people who are listening. The Collective Edge is the name of the book again. And we'll put links in our show notes for this.

Colin Fisher (29:06)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Brian Milner (29:29)
But Colin, anything else, anything that people want to get in touch with you further or find out more, is there anywhere you would send them to kind of stay in contact with you?

Colin Fisher (29:39)
Yeah, that's great. Please check out my website, Colin fisher.com. I write a free sub stack newsletter and, I'm on all over LinkedIn more, probably more than I should be. So, find out what I'm up to, in, in any of those places.

Brian Milner (29:50)
Ha ha ha.

Perfect. Thanks, Colin, so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your wisdom with us.

Colin Fisher (30:01)
Thanks so much Brian. It was a lot of fun.