Our mission is to make outdoor ed accessible and easy for everybody so why not start your students day or week with an experience focused on key life skills such as communication, leadership, collaboration and conflict resolution.
Today we will be focusing on a team work model and the model is called DOC, that's an acronym for drive, organisation and cohesion.
Before we dive into the different sections and what it is used for, why is there a thing called a team work mode? Well it's a framework which allows you to identify key attributes of a team and there are loads of different attributes and team models that look at things in a specific way and some are specific for different industries but some of them are more general.
DOC , drive, organisation and cohesion, this model has been developed by outdoor professionals for the outdoor industry. It was developed by Justin Lowe and Andrew Robinson and they developed this model when they were working with youth groups and charities like Princes Trust.
They were working with small teams and helping them transition from leaving college and going into the work environment. During this process they focused on developing personal growth and social skills growth so that when they go into the work environment they have all of the social skills dialled in and ready to go so they perform well, they manage to succeed at their job and they have been given the life skills and coaching bits that they need to make the step from a sheltered education environment to a not so sheltered work environment.
They developed this team work model so it highlights the fundamental building blocks of a team.
Firstly D stands for drive and that is looking at the reasons why people do things. A lot of people when they use this model will be like "build a tower as tall as you can", the driving factor is people want to build the tallest tower. Unless you have picked a very competitive group, like a group of footballers who have this natural competitive drive that they must be better than everybody else, they must be the winners, they are probably not the only group, any kind of sports team that you were working with where their sole driving factor will be I want to have the tallest and best tower.
With a lot of other teams there will be multiple driving forces which are making them take part in the challenge. For example, let's take you as a teacher, you have fundamentally two kinds of drives that are making you select this job, one is a more spiritual, rewarding growth model which would be I want to pass on the knowledge I possess to the next generation and to make sure they feel like they are being supported and educated in the best way possible. To help them succeed in the future, you are a nurturer and a grower and have a supportive loving influence, that would be the spiritual drive that would keep you helping your students on a day to day basis.
The other factor is a bit more matter of fact, a bit more black and white which is you do have a life, your life is expensive to live, you have a mortgage or rent to pay, you need to buy food, you have a family and you need to finance all that. So you must go to work so you have chosen to take on a career where you can earn money and still get your spiritual reward, where you can pass on and nurture and help people through their educational journey. There are probably other factors that made you go into teaching but these are two broadly speaking good driving points as a teacher for this example.
Being able to identify what peoples key reasons and driving forces are it allows you to adapt the way that you communicate. If you can start speaking to someones driving influences, the core reason why they are doing something, suddenly you can start adapting the way that you communicate so it resonates with that and the buy in from that person is going to happen a lot more rapidly and is going to be a little bit deeper as well. You will have someone who goes, this person really understands me and they understand the hardships and successes that I go through, I can trust them, I can communicate with them, I'm on the same page as that person.
Identifying the drive and identifying the language that surrounds those drive key points, those reasons why you are doing it, allows you to speak and communicate with them more effectively.
The second part is O which is organisation and this is about organising yourself , your team mates and the resources that you need to complete the challenge or job or task. You need to organise those three sections so you are in the right place at the right time, doing all the things you have agreed to do and you have some sort of flexibility in your role that if you do hit any unexpected hiccups in your plan you can adapt and overcome them or change direction and go completely in a new direction.
Organisation is key, once you know what your job is, what you bring to the team, what other team members are doing, where they are going to be, what they bring to the team as well as what resources you have got. Well them you have the blue print, the resources to work with and move forward, start to work as a team and become effective as you know what everyone is meant to be doing.
The last thing C is cohesion, this is all about getting your team to work as one organism.
Let me go back to the footballers, so a football team works really well as everyone knows what they are there for. They are there because they love football, they are passionate about football, they love to win, they love the competitive element and they like the pay cheque that goes with it. These are the driving factors for them being there, they are organised because they know who is the goalkeeper, who are the defenders, who are the midfielders and who are the strikers. Cohesion is now starting to be able to move as they know what the task is, in this example it is moving the ball from person to person and to overcome any challenges the other team is imposing. To be able to pass back to the goalkeeper, change direction, go down the sides, then go down the middle, then a bit of defending, then trying to get the ball into the box to score a goal.
Cohesion is all about the independent part of your team, now that they know why they are there, what they are meant to be doing, what resources they have is all about coming together and working as one unit to be able to overcome and complete a challenge.
Cohesion is the relationships you build between people, the way that you communicate between people, the systems that you have in place to be able to make sure you are nurturing those relationships and making sure they are all positive and going towards growth.
This teamwork model is all based around trying to identify different things that will make a team work well. This model is also really good and a perfect model to use with our students because you can identify what their drives are and it's a brilliant for a vision board.
If you are trying to get them to think long term like, what are they going to do when they leave school and go to college? What are their driving factors? What do they want to do? What is going to be their spiritual and emotional pathway? What is going to be their financial and black and white pathway? How are they going to live? What are they going to do? Then they can start to think about how they are going to organise themselves.
If you are providing this in line with a team challenge it is brilliant because you can say, our driving factor is we are going to overcome this challenge and we are going to do be doing this by developing this skill and this skill. We are organising ourselves because there are six students who have all their resources laid out in front of them, they know how long they have got, they know how to organise themselves so they can overcome and take on a plan and make sure they go towards completing this challenge, making a positive impact and developing that team.
The last thing is cohesion and that is always the tricky bit as it takes a bit of trial and error and a bit of time to develop these. So drive, organisation and cohesion, the DOC teamwork model is brilliant to start producing and providing to your students but I recommend doing it over a couple of sessions so maybe introduce this at the beginning of a team challenge. Leave this written up on the board so your students can refer back to it each time you take on a new challenge.
As a review point when you are reviewing and reflecting and having a discussion after a team challenge, you can point at the board and ask them to identify the drive factors and why we were doing it. Can anyone identify the organisation that went into their approach, so what did we do? Who has taken on what roles? What resources did you have? Did you have someone looking at the clock and managing the time.
Then you can move onto the cohesion, was it fluid? Did it feel effortless and did you feel you could complete this challenge without any frustration,pressure or friction between any of your team mates? Was there some bumps in the road we can identify and how we can overcome those bumps? Was it a lack of communication and was the communication done with the incorrect language? Were we speaking to an oganisation point rather than a drive point, where a drive points have a bigger emotional buy in, happens quicker and deeper and people react to them more quickly.
There are lots of great things we can start to draw out from the learning from the DOC model. This DOC model has been around for 2-3 years and there are lots of ways of adapting it. You can go quite deep into the reviews and the reflections, you can front load a session where you can deliver it before you go in a team task or you just mention it afterwards as a taster of what it is.
It is very good simple model that works really well especially when you pair it to team challenges and problem solving tasks.
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