A white water rafting team completes its course. Image by JulianOMarini courtesy Pixabay.com.
Probably the best-known and most widely used group development model is Tuckman's four-stage model — also known as "Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing." [Tuckman 1965] It was later enhanced to add a fifth stage, "Adjourning." [Tuckman & Jensen 1977] The model is broadly useful, but there are some tricky bits. One of those is understanding how Storming works for task-oriented work groups. For a brief review of Tuckman and Jensen's model, see "Tuckman's Model and Joint Leadership Teams," Point Lookout for January 18, 2023.
Some have proposed that a useful metaphor for Storming in group development is a stretch of white water in a rafting trip down a river. The metaphor does have some value. And it can also be misleading, because there are differences between a task-oriented work group in the Storming stage and a group of white water rafters heading down an angry, turbulent river. In this post I explore just a few of those differences.
I begin by clarifying what I mean by task-oriented work group. Task-oriented work groups are variants of what Tuckman called groups that operate in a natural-group setting. There are differences between a
task-oriented work group in the
Storming stage and a group of
white water rafters heading
down an angry, turbulent riverFor Tuckman, natural groups included what we today would call, for example, task forces. More examples: teams, project teams, red teams, review panels, boards, or even just work groups. Tuckman explains, "Presidential advisory councils and industrial groups represent examples of natural groups." With this definition in hand, let's compare the Storming stage of development of a task-oriented work group to what happens in a group engaged in the adventure of a white water rafting trip.
| In White-Water Rafting… | In Task-Oriented Work Groups… |
|---|---|
Rafting guides know very well what's up ahead. On any given trip, the guide might have taken that very trip just last week, or yesterday, or even this morning. | The rafting-trip metaphor is misleading about risk. Organizational leaders — executives, managers, project managers, and scrum masters — might know more about what lies ahead than some group members do, but unlike the rafting guide, they can't see the future as clearly or in enough detail to eliminate nearly all risk. |
The stretches of white water — the metaphorical "challenges" — almost always occur in the same order and with unchanged spacing between them. When changes do occur, they usually occur in response to well-understood weather conditions, or on a time scale much longer than the time scale of the rafting trip. | Knowing the order of the challenges we face is an invaluable aid to planners. They use that information to arrange for the right resources to be available at the right times. Although we might have this kind of information for a rafting trip, we certainly don't have it for most of the projects we work on. |
People very rarely join the rafting group in the middle of the trip. | Many task-oriented work groups must deal with the consequences of people joining the team in mid-task, either to replace someone who was suddenly assigned to duties elsewhere, or to provide skills that are needed for a specific subtask, or to provide an extra pair of hands. |
People very rarely intentionally get out of the raft in the middle of the trip. | In many organizations, people belong to several teams. And they cycle in and out depending on what work is scheduled for a particular time period. For example, specialists might work intensively with Team A in July and August, and then move to Team B to help Team B with something else. In effect, with respect to Team A, they become inactive until January, when the work they did in summer is due to be tested as an element of a larger system that won't be ready for testing until January. In short, team rosters can be unstable, not only by chance, but also by plan. |
In white water rafting, there are no do-overs. The raft goes in one direction only and that's downstream. | We sometimes repeat work, when we discover something that requires it, or when our objectives change, or when requirements change, or when schedules change. |
Two raft crews never decide to merge into one crew and then get rid of one raft and fire one of the raft guides. | Project teams, departments, and entire enterprises sometimes join together and reorganize. These structural changes really have no parallel in rafting trips, except possibly in emergency rescues. But they have dramatic impact on group development in organizations. |
Last words
Metaphors might seem at first to provide useful insights about the systems they represent. But take care not to identify too closely with a metaphor. 
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