The Five Dysfunctions and Tuckman's Stages

No, this is not a post about a new band, it is about understand Scrum team growth. In my previous post I discussed The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni and how the dysfunctions in that book apply not only to management teams as described in the book but to Scrum teams as well. In 1965 Bruce Tuckman proposed his model of team development. While you may not be familiar with Tuckman’s name, you have probably heard of the stages of his model, forming, storming, norming and performing.

Forming - The team is coming together for the first time. Team members behave independently, they are on their best behavior and very focused on themselves. To move out of this stage, team members must be willing to risk the possibility of conflict

Storming - The team members are learning each others strengths and weaknesses and learning to trust each other. Some of the teams disagreements are passionate, but also can tend to lean toward personal attacks as opposed to healthy conflict.

Norming - The team is finding its operating norms, its house rules as it were that they will be holding each other accountable for. To truly find the norms the team members need to be open and honest with each other and be willing to have passionate discussions to find their norms. Commitment to the team is strong. 


Performing - The team is a well oiled machine, focused on the goal. They work as a unit on getting each story to done in a timely manner with the correct level of quality. In this stage the team members look out for each other and they are comfortable with each other. The team is now fully self organizing around their work and processes.

I have found that there is a mostly linear relationship between Tuckman's Stages of Team Development and the pyramid of dysfunctions. A team that is strongly experiencing all 5 dysfunctions is almost always in the forming stage. Once the team has achieved some level of vulnerability based trust among its members the team will move into the storming stage. As the team starts to master conflict achieve commitment they will enter the norming stage. Finally as the team embraces accountability and is focusing on results they move into the performing stage.

What we learn here is that there are many models of team development. The models are often, if not always, complementary to each other. They just give us different ways to think about the of our teams. The important part is that we are thinking and measuring the growth of the team to make sure that the team is always growing in a positive direction, regardless of the axes (plural of axis) that we use to measure that growth.

Stay Agile.