Another habit that I am trying to make stick, at least until the fall chill sets in and our neighborhood pool closes, is a morning swim. I run 3-5 days a week. The time of day varies, and that is part of the challenge for me in being consistent. Still, since I left the military and the the world of mandatory daily PT (physical training) before dawn, I have kept a pretty decent weekly fitness routine. 

This week I decided to tack on a 20 min swim to the end of my run. It is a great way to cool off, stretch out my tired leg muscles, and re-strengthen cardiovascular and respiratory capacity. I swam since early childhood all the way through high school. It really is a great lifetime sport. 

As I was swimming this morning, working a few laps of breaststroke into my routine, a light rain peppered the surface of the water. I was the only one in the pool, and there was such a fascinating contrast between the crystal clear calm beneath the surface and the turbulence of the rain shower coming down from above. 

My favorite stroke by far is breaststroke, and I usually end my swim with a few laps of this stroke near the end of my workout. It is a great way for me to cool down and loosen the joints even more. It was my stroke of choice growing up. I love the combination of a smooth, gliding whip kick and sweeping arm pull, alternating one then other to drive your head up for breath, then back down underneath to ride out the forward motion. 

I was struck this morning by the parallel between my breaststroke movements and the rain-pelted water itself — the dichotomy between calm-below and turmoil-above. I noticed how the speed of the stroke is gained from the undulating motion of the body, right along the boundary between water and air.  

Noticing the environment and my body’s movement within it with such exquisite detail got me thinking about teams.

I thought about how teams need some instability as they discover and deliver work. You would not want a team that is completely stable and conflict-free. The creative and collaborative process of discovery allows for new ideas to surface, connections to be made, and the whole to become greater than the sum of its parts. High performing teams move back and forth between moments of flow and smooth delivery, and more tumultuous and challenging moments of discovery, conflict, and change – this is  where growth occurs. People in organizations, and particularly people in a team, are a complex adaptive system.  There is emergence in team behavior and the action is in the interaction between all members of the team as they go about their work. 

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about ‘and’.

Arthur Eddington, astronomer, 1882-1944

If we need all of these elements to push the team growth areas, then I think excellence lives at the boundary.  At this boundary, the place where turmoil and calm dance together, is the place where teams are pushed outside of comfort zones, then get back into flow. This non-linear growth process from one perspective may seem unstable, but it is how great teams emerge, adapt, and achieve higher levels of performance. 

Until the Next Iteration . . . 

Jason