We're really excited that we are back again with another Squiggly Careers Skill Sprint. Over 25,000 people have learnt with us on our sprint and we'd love you to come and learn with us in January. We are going to be learning like lobsters. And the reason this matters is because learning has never been more important at work, but it's also never felt harder to do. And we think that lobsters are the role models that we've all been missing.

So sign up for the Sprint at squigglyprint.com and you'll join a community of people who all get to

learn like a lobster and overcome those barriers that are getting in the way of their growth.

Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah and this is the SquigglyEek Care where each week we borrow some brilliance and turn that curiosity into action which we think will help your career.

And today we're going to talk a little bit about teams, but we're going to talk about how you can reset your team so that you can achieve more together.

And we are borrowing brilliance from Colin Fisher and his book. So if you are watching now, I'm sort of holding up the book, which is called Collective Edge. Now, if you can see me holding it at the book, it hasn't even got its wrap on it. I read books in the bath and then I clearly ruined them. So I got it really wet and it went all crinkly. But at least it proves I've read it. Yeah. And it's quite nice. It looks nice. And Colin actually is, he's interesting to do some research on because he's naturally very squiggly because before becoming a professor and a researcher, he was a jazz musician. So some of his work on kind of groups and teams was like very much inspired by, you know,

and was like, how do you get the synergy of what it's like to play in a jazz band where it sort of looks spontaneous.

But he's like, actually, no, it's very intentional and very, like, thoughtful.

And well, I guess sort of like how you bring together the right people so that then like the brilliant spontaneity just

happens. You know, as in like you don't plan a jazz set, I guess. I don't know loads about

jazz. This is where we're going to get to job. But equally he's like, but his point actually,

the words he uses is you need to create the right conditions and then you can outperform.

So his definition of collective edge is that as a group,

you are achieving outcomes. So you basically are achieving more than you would if you just added

up like individual capabilities. Okay. So if like you're smart and I'm smart and the rest of the team

are smart, you've got lots of smart people. That doesn't necessarily mean that you've got a super smart team. You have to do something different with that group of people for it to be better together. Yeah. So I suppose you could, if everybody's smart, you'd still have a smart team. Yeah. But I suppose I think what he's really saying is it's almost like there's an edge to be found. If you can achieve this synergy, he uses this word synergy quite a lot,

from being very intentional about creating some of these conditions.

And his argument is that most teams don't.

So probably what most teams have is just lots of smart people, essentially.

But you don't quite get the synergy or the edge because of things like

coordination losses, free riding. I was like, oh, Helen, you're doing a bit of free riding,

or process breakdowns. And actually, when you start to get into it, it's some surprising things,

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