This part is dedicated to something I was both unfortunate and fortunate to experience during my second project which is, as the title states, a group disharmony. You can also call this simply an unhealthy working environment. In retrospective, I realise that there were many things that I could have done about this situation, but I choose not to act or dismissed my thought as a product of a coincidence. This is the type of a failure that the teachers are talking about. Once you get burned this hard you will remember the lessons learned for the rest of your life.
This topic is something that the producers (project managers) are supposed to be experts at because that is their domain. They are to monitor the working environment and to make sure people are happy. Happy workers are productive workers. In our group, we lost our producer halfway into the production cycle so it could be partly the reason why so many problems appeared. When I told this to a relative of mine, she pointed out that the role of the producer was needed to be filled in by one of the of the other team members to avoid the problem. And it’s true, but my ignorance prevented me from seeing that, so now I know better. One of our team members was aware of the potential danger zones where the problems could arise, but he chose not to share that information with me personally (see 1.3 Blacklisting), and in my ignorance, I didn’t see the evidence of the problems, so now I know better.
I planned to discuss the disharmony and the unhealthy environment in one post, but I decided to cut it in two – the detection of the disharmony and the examples of what may cause disharmonies in the first place.
Let’s talk about the 2 ways of identifying the general state of the environment that I can see in my mind:
Correlations and patterns in the people’s behaviour. Remember how I told a couple of times that people aren’t special snowflakes or a mystery? Well, they aren’t. If you spend time with someone, you will notice their habits and tendencies. And if you notice something that strikes you as odd, don’t dismiss it. Approach the person or the other team members about confirming or disproving these mental queues. What you think is nothing could be a dangerous or straight out destructive behaviour that puts your project in danger. Such behaviours, if not corrected could cost you (personally you, the reader!) greatly in terms of your mental health and the final product of your team. This is an empiric method for tracing dangers. Take notes of something that causes you to feel strong dissonance. If you put on paper several of such occasions, you have a valid proof, that can later be taken to the group and the person in question.
The sense of “something is wrong” / The Intuition. It isn’t always possible to identify problems because they aren’t always apparent. The sense of unease is often shared by several members of the team. Why is this happening? I think this is our subconscious detecting patterns that are too obscure for us to note consciously. This could be a sum of many small things that our brains put together into warning signs and are trying to get this information through to us. If you hear the same confusion from several members of the team about one subject then there is a problem. Don’t dismiss intuition that is nagging at you and the others. Try to confront the subject in question to flush out the hidden issue that is causing the dissonance. Call for other parties to judge the situation. The earlier this is detected the better.
Here is a visual presentation of the two methods – evidence versus intuition. First, we have the scenario of the frog thrown into the boiling water. The frog detects this as a clear difference in the temperature and jumps out of the pot. As we detect obvious disharmonies with ease, we can eliminate them.
And then we have the frog that sits in the pot that is slowly getting heated. The frog cannot detect the difference because of its physiology and slowly boils. The frog and the pot is an easy example that also applies to the mental health of the group.
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