The next stop on our Team Effectiveness "journey" was collaborative research. I had the insights about the power of teams, the learnings from Marty Linsky, Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Peter Hawkins and others, and a successful pilot study in a real organisation.

I was keen to understand how we might accelerate the process of diagnosing teams through the use of reliable and valid data assessment to get to the heart of the team's strengths and focus areas.

Our working theory was that teams armed with the right information about their reality could have their key insights and self develop or make change, with less external intervention necessary per team, enabling the organisation to scale impact more deeply. To test this, we generated hundreds of survey questions (also known as items) based on our own learnings from top experts, many years of practice, and the pilot study. Questions that we believed would be able to predict team effectiveness.

Then, we went in pursuit of research partners who could help us test and validate our thinking. We were lucky to find best research partners a team could ask for, the University of Newcastle, in particular the amazing Heather Douglas, Jessika Tisdell and Emina Subasic at the School of Psychological Sciences.

First, they conducted a literature review, and assessed existing tools. Then, together with the UON team, we put together an expert review panel, a group of eight independent experts in leadership, HR, and psychometrics. The experts reviewed the items we'd generated, helping to filter and improve the items.

Lastly, the UON team conducted a validation and psychometric analysis. This involved recruiting 500 full-time employees residing in Australia, each from a different team. These people answered all the items, producing crucial data to enable the validation psychometric analysis.

When we got the results (in this report I'm holding), we were blown away. We were able to predict team effectiveness, and break down team functioning into key factors that could be measured.

However, the job was far from done! It's a long way and a lot of work from validated theory to actual practice, and most importantly to getting tools into the hands of teams. Right now, that work is very nearly complete, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you very soon!