Teamcraft

In this Teamcraft episode, Mark and Andrew talk about their fascination with the origins and evolution of the word "team", and how it came to indicate near-magical properties of cooperation when compared to other words like ‘group’, or perhaps, ‘committee’...

The journey starts with the discovery that there are some misattributions of the word team gaining its special meaning, but that it may well have been emergent in groundbreaking research by the Tavistock Institute in the 1950s and 1960s.

The episode uncovers the research carried out by Eric Trist, Ken Bamforth and a number of other Tavistock researchers’ into the newly nationalised British coal industry’s. The forced adoption of a new style of industrialised ‘longwall mining’ had profound long-term, social and psychological impact on miners and mining communities.

Mark and Andrew discuss how the Tavistock Institute discovered highly effective ‘composite’ teams working in a Yorkshire coal mine, and laid the foundations for the school of “socio-technical design”—a concept that integrates the technical and social aspects of workplace systems.

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:24 - Historical insights on teamwork

00:02:18 - The Tavistock Institute and their research

00:04:34 - History of coal mining in Britain

00:07:17 - Industrial rivalry and mining dangers

00:09:37 - Nationalization and modernization of mines

00:11:20 - Explanation of British mining processes

00:17:26 - Introduction of Longwall Mining System

00:24:17 - Impact of Industrialized Mining on Workers

00:26:16 - Hierarchical Changes and Worker Morale

00:31:15 - Tavistock's Intervention in Mining Practices

00:36:26 - Discovery of Composite Teams

00:40:26 - Principles of Socio-technical Design

00:36:00 - Trist’s principles for a new paradigm of work

Thanks for listening!

Music by Tom Farrington