5 Pillars to Build Team Mental Models.

Jeffery et al. (2005) suggested the following 5 advices for building team mental models:

1. Clarification of team objectives and tasks, environment and variables.
Team members clarify objectives and tasks and identify collaborative modeling and effective communications as team goals. Open and thorough discussion builds understanding of each other and exercises the collaboration and communication process (Jeffery et al., 2005).

2. Establishing roles and responsibilities.
Clarifying team member roles and responsibilities should be accomplished after the team defines team objectives and the tasks necessary to accomplish the objectives and sets collaborative modeling and effective communications as team goals. This requires the development of team interaction models that represent a blueprint for how the team works as a team (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1993).

3. Information processing, communication, and collaborative modeling rules and procedures.
Team members should address techniques they will use for communicating, feedback, and sharing mental models in order to accomplish team objectives (Jeffery et al., 2005).

4. Knowledge of team members’ background and style.
Team members need to understand other team members’ knowledge, skills, abilities, preferences, strengths, weakness, and tendencies (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1993).

5. Collaborative modeling scheme.
This plan includes rules and procedures for articulating individual models and the process the team will use to develop a shared mental model (Jeffery et al., 2005).

These imperatives indicate important milestones in the facilitation sessions, which Visual Thinkers/Graphic Facilitators can follow in the progress. Visual Thinkers/Graphic Facilitators can make a certain checklist based on these five imperatives to make sure they put their efforts efficiently on rather important things. Then the participants can work together better because of the creation of the fundamental agreement on criteria of the task, personal roles, ways of common communication, each others’ backgrounds and styles, and a collaborative scheme to develop TMMs.

According to these imperatives, Visual Thinkers/Graphic Facilitators in this process also need to introduce their roles and functions to the participants. They have to make sure that the participants understand proper rules of VT/GF in the process in order to avoid miss-led information and make the best out of VT/GF.