Who are we?

I guess a logical follow-up question to “Who am I” and “Who are you?” (see previous posts), is “Who are we?”. Before even trying to answer that question, logically, I will need to know what I mean by “we”. Trouble is that I can come up with a never ending list of different “we’s”, all of which are groups of people I feel I belong to. Can be my family, my colleagues, my iceskating-club-members, ice-skaters in general, et cetera. For all of these groups counts that I would be interested to learn more about it (some more than others). So let’s make a choice, and focus on one group in particular: the colleagues in my team.

Thinking about what my team does, I come up with answers along the lines of the processes that we own, or the projects that we run, basically the deliverables that we have as a team. We use different methods, designs, systems and tools to get were (we think) we need to be, and we (sometimes) share a vision and a set of values that guide us to where we want to go to (why do we do it?).

As I’m scribbling away, drawing the picture below, I realise that I’m not sure if all of us would agree on the answers to even these basic questions. I realise that I’m probably most interested in the purpose-question, while I can think of some colleagues that are more into talking about methods or tools. I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing, but it will require a bit of extra energy to get agreement (if that is at all necessary) on our shared “team identity”. And it feels like being aware of our differences in focus in this can help us better work together. Question is: How can we become better at this?. Well, let’s park that one…

These are just the most basic questions I can ask myself to figure out my team identity. It will be interesting to look for some follow-up questions to dive a little bit deeper into what my team is all about (See later post “How do we do it?“).