User:ThatPeskyCommoner/Thoughts on team-building

Start with the end in mind

The purpose of the team defines what is needed in the membership of the team. Different purposes require different teams.

All team members must be intelligent and insightful enough to work together, putting aside old baggage when they walk through the team HQ door.

A sense of humour is vital. When things are on the verge of breaking down, a touch of humour can stop it in its tracks.

Ideally the team should include overlapping subsets of people who have been able to work together and communicate well with each other in the past.

Solving a particular problem

Team components must include:

• A team facilitator who has demonstrable trust from much of the community, honour, integrity, and is easy to work with
• People who can clearly see the problem
• People who have fallen foul of the problem

• This includes people who are considered to be representative of the problem, and people who have had the problem

• People who are good at de-escalation (to stop the team tearing each other apart if necessary, and to get people back on-target)

• Good choices are people who've been unopposed (or hardly-opposed) for positions of authority / influence / sensitive matters
• Good choices would include people who have a history of being able to work well with inexperienced people

• People from different ends of the age-range (where applicable)
• People who provide a good gender mix
• People who have a background of instruction or teaching at many levels if the goal is to include re-education of any kind
• People who have, off their own bat, shown a clear interest in the goal required, and have communicated that interest clearly and in line with the required goal
• At least one person who has transitioned from "problem" to "non-problem", or who is in process of transition, or who see-saws

• Interesting point: a bipolar person with good recollection of their end-of-scale moods can be invaluable in this respect, if available

• People who have the ability to sink themselves into something tenaciously

• Interesting point: obsessives have their uses!

• People who have learned different modes of communication applied to potentially-risky areas

• Reason: the internet doesn't work in the way that normal human interaction works. It deprives us of nuances of tone of voice, gesture, body-language, micro-signals. It's far more open to misinterpretation than many people realise.
• Solutions: people who are "no-microsignals specialists"; people who have learned to communicate with other species - ideally potentially-dangerous species - have developed different areas of their brain (quite literally, hard-wired differently through practise). These differences in the wiring give them an almost-instinctive ability to see through the human-language barriers and re-define language in a way which overcomes lack of micro-signals.
• Suggestion: co-opt a few good members from WP:EQUINE who actually have dealt with equines regularly (and/or possibly similar from cattle, zoo, or other potentially-dangerous animals), who can both write well and have worked as a team with each other before. And listen to what their input is, even if others of the team can't quite get a handle on why it's different.
• Scuba divers might be another good kind of choice here - no microsignals, but communication has to be extremely clear despite the lack of them.