The Team Discovered

This hopeful, poignant, and deeply insightful book brings the wisdom of Dialogic OD and the heritage of Diagnostic OD into an expansive view of how to best support teams in a world of immense diversity and attention poverty. Bennett Bratt offers a new approach to team development that meets today’s teams where they live: in a complex world with intense demands and precious little time. This book challenges widely used approaches to team development that utilize data showing a gap between current and desirable team performance. Most methods presume some kind of evaluative comparison is helpful: comparison to other groups, comparison to large data sets, comparison to best practices, comparison to a theoretical ideal. Instead, Ben explains why a dialogic approach to the use of questionnaire data is better at helping teams author their own narrative of effectiveness, one they will own and live into. While showing how to make data useful, Bratt persuasively argues that comparison is at best, a distraction and at worst, debilitating.

The book illustrates how to bring the mindsets and tools of Dialogic OD to team coaching through an extended case example. Join a pair of OD practitioners, Ava and Orlando, as they learn about the unique facets of the client team and its VP leader Juliette. On the heels of recent significant changes, including a reorganization, the team and leader discover their unique path to greater effectiveness using Dialogic OD mindsets and tools customized in a team coaching setting.

Part exploration of the Dialogic OD mindset and part illustrative story, this book brings empathy not only to the impossibly difficult circumstances teams and their leaders all too often find themselves in, but also to the OD practitioners who enter into their dynamic world with their own narratives of what “good” means. Join them as they negotiate towards solutions with the greatest possible utility and take up the mindset and tools that bring Dialogic OD to life in the world of teams.

Chapters

Part 1: Context and Concepts

Diving In
The Underpinnings of a Mindset
Defining Teams and Comparing Mindsets
A Case for the Dialogic Path Forward

Part 2: Dialogic Team Coaching in Action

Entry and Contracting
Discovery
Mining, Focusing and Owning
Pragmatic Improvements
Exit

Conclusion and Implications

Watch a 12 minute video with Ben discussing the book

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About the Author

Bennett Bratt MA

Bennett Bratt is CEO and Founder of The Team Effectiveness Project, LLC. Previously he was VP of HR at T-Mobile USA leading the Talent and Organization Capability function, and he has had various leadership and internal roles at Sun Microsystems, Volkswagen of America, and Ford Motor Company.

His Team Elements™ framework and coaching methodology have helped hundreds of teams and leaders de-mystify and re-envision their team experience, take ownership for their path forward, and ensure that each diverse voice is included in the process. His clients range from the C-Suites of Fortune 100 corporations to teams of all varieties in nonprofits, governments, and higher education institutions.

He earned BA and MA degrees in Political Science (Calvin College and Tulane University, respectively) and an MA in Counseling from Michigan State University. He resides near Seattle, WA. Reach out to him at ben@teamelements.com

Endorsements

Geoff Bellman

Principal, Extraordinary Teams Partnership. Author of Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results and The Consultant’s Calling: Bringing Who You Are to What You Do

I feasted upon this book. The story is threaded with clients’ and coaches’ challenges, dilemmas and aspirations, and it resonates so deeply. This short book will help coaches understand what they do so well, while also pointing clear direction to where they could learn and grow. What an exciting window into the complex and impactful world of Dialogic team coaching.

David Clutterbuck

EMCC Special Ambassador and Visiting Professor, Henley Business School. Author of Coaching the Team at Work and editor of The Practitioner's Handbook of Team Coaching

The business world is awash with team diagnostic instruments, most of them of dubious validity. Here we have a much-needed antidote to the atomistic approach of diagnostics. The aim of team coaching is to enable teams to have the conversations they need to have with themselves, and this book is a route map to successful teaming.

John Boudreau

Senior Research Scientist and Professor Emeritus Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California

Grounded in well-crafted Dialogic theory, this compelling story shows the emergent power in co-creating meaning with our clients. This book is a fresh reminder of what we know deep within ourselves: that humans can be wonderfully and smartly connected in small, adaptive, and effective social ecosystems. For leaders and HR/OD in particular, this is a wonderful path to ownership of and improvement within our commonly lived experiences.

Peter Block

Author of Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used and Community: The Structure of Belonging

The Team Discovered breathes fresh energy into the field of Organization Development. It makes the case for the integration of analyzing the world and experiencing the world—both of which are needed to act on the world. I love this book’s focus on language as the basis for transformation; the artist’s belief that every team and moment is unique; attention as a casualty of the modern world; the work of leadership development as creation every step of the way. It is a welcome antidote to the longing for structured, predictable, and measurable interventions. It is a pleasure to recommend that you read this book.

Kate Cowie

author of Finding Merlin: A Handbook For The Human Development Journey In Our New Organisational World and founding Editor of Practising Social Change.

With clarity, sensitivity and respect, Bennett Bratt describes the experience of life in teams today, recognizing that each one is a unique social system. He offers practical suggestions for OD practitioners to help teams support themselves, make meaningful connections, create coherence, and collaborate to achieve their desired outcomes. His story makes for a lively and compelling read, and it reassures practitioners that they can summon the courage to ‘not know’, to model staying in the flux and flow of things, as they enable their clients to become increasingly more adaptive to the complexity of the world around them.

Kristy Feldkamp

Global Head of HR, Personal Systems, HP Inc

If you’ve grown weary of quick-fix team effectiveness approaches that ultimately don’t stick, The Team Discovered is the antidote. Bennett Bratt makes a strong case for meeting people and teams where they are and co-creating a path forward. He starts with the premise that the team has the answers and paints a compelling story with all-too-familiar characters that help bring to life an approach that is refreshing and liberating.

David Firth

Author of Unconditional Communication: Shaping Better Relationships and Bigger Futures, Together

This book is a gracious, smart, provocative promotion of the gritty, messy, wonderfulness of human life that shows up when we stop searching for easy answers.

Joe Garbus

Chief Talent and Inclusion Officer, Marsh

Finally, a very clear, practical connection between the truly dynamic, diverse nature of team success versus the worn, mechanistic models that get us only partway there. The very nature of teams is how dynamic and fluid they are. Ben’s easy handling of complex content brings intellectual depth and precision with a practitioner’s experience of the real world to help teams be successful in the ways they need to be.

Mike Murray

Assistant Vice Chancellor of Strategic Initiatives, University of Colorado - Boulder

What greater gift than to be met where we are and valued for our uniqueness. In The Team Discovered, Bratt encourages us to explore what is possible when normative judgments and preconceived notions of the ideal are left behind. His wisdom shines through for the benefit of all who read this book and apply the principles therein.