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.

What we need as a team while solving complex problem?

When the world is more flat, people faced a more competitive and changeable world. The problem we have is much more complex and unpredictable than before. Therefore, we need more people with different professional knowledge to work together and solve the complex problem. However, it is not an easy task because the collaboration of the multi-disciplinary team is already a hurdle difficult to overcome for the problem-solving process. That is why we need a team to build up shared understanding or Team Mental Model.

What is Mental Model
In order to understand and predict the reality, people structure a simplified model of the world in their mind. This model reflects the individual's perception of the reality, and they work as a "blueprint" for people to deal with uncertainty and unpredictability of the world (see picture above). They do not have to be perfectly matched. People can take the action without getting all necessary information because of possessing mental models.

What is Team Mental Model (TMM)?
As a group level phenomenon (Klimoski, et al. 1994), TMMs allow team members to anticipate one another’s actions and to coordinate their behaviors, especially when time and circumstances do not permit overt and lengthy communication and strategizing among team members (Lim, et al. 2006).There is an elaborated description of the types of the -TMMs, which is purposed by Cannon-Bowers et al. (1993): equipment models, task models, team interaction models and team attribute models.

Equipment models relate to how things (tangible or intangible) function as well as the procedures to make them function and information about the functioning. Task models involve information about the task to be performed, task procedures, likely scenarios, task strategies, and environmental constraints. The team interaction model is the blueprint for how the team works as a team. Finally, the team attribute model contains information about other team members’ knowledge, skills, abilities, preferences, and tendencies.

For example (see picture above), we might call in designers, engineers, financial analyst etc. to deal with a new business problem.

Therefore, they will need to work as a group and share a Team Mental Model for better performance.

First, they need to build mutual understanding about the task (task model) and define what kind of resource and tools they have (equipment model).(see picture above)

Secondly, they will need to share others' expectations and align them (team interaction model) and understand others' abilities, strengths, and weakness (team attribute model).(see picture above)

Finally, the team have built a Team Mental Model and come up with a proper solution because of the Team Mental Model.(see picture above)

What is worth to say here is that these steps to form a TMM are not necessary in this order. It will depend on the environment, team members' previous experience, conditions in the task etc.