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Group norms
published March 26, 2010
Kari “Poppis” Suomela is a finnish polar explorer and today I had a privilege to participate to a seminar where he was speaking about his conquests to north and south pole. Only eleven others had skied to both poles unsupported and unassisted before him, so he is what I consider a “tough dude”.
In his speech he told one thing that was very interesting in terms of group norms. He told that before the trip, whole group undergoes same training program in order to avoid conflict later. Even though explorers all start from different levels, during training period each one is making a similar investment in terms of practicing. This way they can completely drop discussions about who cut training and who not while skiing on ice raft. According to Poppis, it is important that all unnecessary conflicts can be avoided.
So what are they actually doing in terms of social psychology? Firstly, They are increasing group cohesion by setting a bar high for members, which is one way to increase group cohesion. Group members will value membership more when their investment for a membership is high. Secondly, they are setting a group norm against whining, so that they can concentrate on important things.
Effective group norms are very important for technology teams also. For example, if group has not agreed on their values or definition of done, their process will be a mess which will cause unnecessary stress later in a project. If everyone have agreed that in order to mark task done, code has to be reviewed first, there will be much less whining because the team has established a norm for valuing high quality. This way it is much easier to succeed with code reviews and avoid situations where e.g. someone will not want to show his code. However, group must decide these norms by them selves and this will not work when norms are forced from outside.
For more information about polar exploring, go to www.thepole.fi
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