We tend to think of team dysfunction as obvious: shouting matches, missed deadlines, or toxic politics. But in modern organisations, dysfunction is often quieter and more insidious. It hides inside the very things we are told to strive for.

Last month, I wrote about why the traditional “Forming, Storming, Norming” model no longer fits the complexity of 21st-century work. In its place, I proposed a new pattern: The Five Movements.

(If you missed that article, I recommend reading Why Tuckman’s team development model no longer fits 21st century teams first to understand the core framework.)

To recap briefly: instead of marching through linear stages, modern teams cycle through five recurring movements to stay effective:

  • Aligning: Creating shared purpose.

  • Belonging: Building psychological safety.

  • Co-Creating: Designing shared ways of working.

  • Adapting: Sensing and pivoting in response to change.

  • Sustaining: Managing energy and endings.

These movements are designed to help teams navigate uncertainty. But a map is not the territory, and every model, no matter how useful, has a shadow side.

I have seen teams that were perfectly “Aligned” but couldn’t innovate because they were paralysed by their own rigid plans. I have seen teams with high “Belonging” that were lovely to work in but produced mediocre results because no one wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings.

If you don’t know how to spot these shadows, you might spend your time polishing a virtue that has already turned into a vice. Here are ways to recognise when the five movements go wrong, and how to bring your team back into the light.

The shadow of aligning: rigid dogma and strategic stagnation

In the Aligning movement, the goal is clarity and shared purpose. Teams need a direction to travel in, or they simply drift. However, when a team becomes too attached to its initial alignment, it falls into the trap of rigid dogma.

The agreed plan, which was initially designed as a hypothesis to navigate uncertainty, hardens into an immutable law. Teams in this shadow confuse sticking to the plan with success. They view new information not as valuable data but as an annoyance that disrupts their alignment.

This creates a dangerous blindness. While the market shifts or user needs evolve, the team marches efficiently toward an outcome that is no longer valuable. The purpose gets lost in the service of the document. The team becomes so aligned on the “what” that they forget the “why.”

Diagnostic signs

  • Conversations often end with “But we already agreed to do X” which effectively shuts down new insights.

  • The team hits its milestones perfectly but misses the broader business outcome.

  • Dissent is framed as disloyalty to the shared vision.

The leadership correction To break a team out of rigid dogma, you must separate the destination from the path. You need to create an environment where the goal is fixed but the plan is fluid.

  • Shift from contracts to bets: Stop treating your quarterly plan as a contract that cannot be broken. Frame it as a “bet” based on current information. Ask the team to identify the assumptions behind the bet. If the data changes, the bet must change.

  • Establish “kill criteria” early: When you align on a project, agree in advance on what would cause you to stop or pivot. Ask “What evidence would convince us that this is the wrong direction?” By defining this while you are unemotional, you make it easier to abandon a failing plan later without feeling like a failure.

  • Reward the disconfirming evidence: Usually, we celebrate the person who delivers the feature. You must also publicly celebrate the person who finds the data proving the feature is unnecessary. If you praise someone for saving the team from wasting time on the wrong path, you prove that truth is more important than dogma.

The shadow of belonging: artificial harmony vs. psychological safety

Belonging is the bedrock of psychological safety, but its shadow is artificial harmony. In this state, the team prioritises interpersonal comfort over intellectual honesty. They mistakenly believe that safety means freedom from tension. As a result, they withhold critical feedback, nod along to mediocre ideas, and avoid the difficult conversations necessary for high performance.

This is the “country club” dysfunction. The team feels good. Members like each other, and the meetings are full of supportive comments. But beneath the surface, problems fester. Because no one wants to be the bad guy who breaks the vibe, errors go uncorrected until they become crises. This is not true safety; it is fragility. True safety allows for the heat of conflict while artificial harmony suppresses it.

Diagnostic signs

  • Meetings are consistently polite, short, and end in unanimous agreement.

  • Team members complain about issues in private (the meeting after the meeting) but never raise them in the group.

  • There is a lack of diverse viewpoints and the team drifts toward groupthink.

The leadership correction To dismantle artificial harmony, you must actively teach the team that conflict is a requirement of the work, not a failure of the culture.

  • Redefine safety as the permission to dissent: You need to explicitly state that psychological safety is not about being nice. It is about the safety to speak truth to power. Tell the team that you measure their trust in each other by how willing they are to disagree, not by how often they agree. If there is no friction, there is no trust.

  • Appoint a “challenger” by design: In critical meetings, assign one person the role of the challenger. Their specific job is to poke holes in the consensus and ask “What are we missing?” or “What if this goes wrong?”. By giving them a temporary role, you remove the social fear of being difficult. They are not being negative; they are fulfilling a duty to the team.

  • Mine for conflict: When a decision is reached too quickly, you should refuse to accept it. Ask the room “Who sees a risk here that we are ignoring?” or “I will not accept this plan until we have heard three reasons why it might fail.” You must force the team to practise disagreement until the muscle memory is built.

The shadow of co-creating: process paralysis and navel-gazing

Co-creating is the movement of designing how we work together. The shadow emerges when the team becomes more fascinated by the process of work than the work itself. This is process paralysis.

In this state, the team falls into an endless loop of optimisation. They hold workshops to design the perfect workflow, debate which software tool is superior, and write elaborate charters, yet they ship very little value. Collaboration becomes a tax on productivity. Every decision requires a committee and every action requires a consensus. The team confuses being busy with meetings with being effective. They are co-creating a bureaucracy, not a solution.

Diagnostic signs

  • The team spends more time talking about how to do the work than actually doing it.

  • Simple decisions take days because “everyone needs to be consulted”.

  • The team has beautiful documentation and roadmaps but low output.

The leadership correction To cure process paralysis, you must impose constraints that force the team to value output over optimisation. You need to remind them that a perfect process that delivers nothing is worthless.

  • Impose a “bias for action” constraint: You should set strict limits on “meta-work”. For example, establish a rule that the team is not allowed to discuss process improvements again until they have shipped the next prototype. Force them to earn the right to optimise by delivering value first.

  • Distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions: Use the Amazon mental model of Type 1 (one-way door) and Type 2 (two-way door) decisions. Stop the team from co-creating on Type 2 decisions. If a decision is reversible, it does not need a committee or a workshop. It needs a decision maker to just pick a path and move.

  • Implement “minimum viable process”: Teams often try to build a process for a problem they do not have yet. Insist that no new rule, meeting, or template can be created until the lack of it has caused actual pain. You should build process to solve yesterday’s problem, not to prevent tomorrow’s imaginary one.

The shadow of adapting: agile fatigue and whiplash

Adapting is the ability to pivot in response to change. However, when a team adapts too frequently or without a stable core, they suffer from strategic whiplash.

This often looks like “shiny object syndrome”. The team reacts to every piece of new data, every stakeholder request, or every trend by completely changing direction. They never stay on a path long enough to gain traction or mastery. Because everything is always in flux, the team cannot build momentum. Members become exhausted and cynical because they realise that whatever they are working on today will likely be abandoned next week. They stop committing to deep work because they expect the goalposts to move.

Diagnostic signs

  • The team has started five major initiatives in the last quarter but finished none.

  • Team members describe feeling dizzy or suffer from “change fatigue”.

  • There is no clear North Star. Instead there is only a series of reactive tactical moves.

The leadership correction To fix strategic whiplash, you must act as a dampener to the noise. You need to provide the stability that allows agility to function.

  • Introduce “stability islands”: You cannot be agile if the ground is constantly shaking. Agree on fixed periods (such as a two-week sprint or a six-week cycle) where the plan is locked. During this time, new information is noted but not acted upon. This gives the team the psychological permission to focus and finish without fear of interruption.

  • Raise the burden of proof for pivots: Changing direction has a hidden cost in cognitive load and morale. Do not let the team pivot just because it feels easy. Require a “pivot memo” or a formal argument. Ask “Is the value of this new direction significantly higher than the cost of throwing away our current work?” Make the team prove that the change is worth the pain.

  • Anchor adaptations to purpose: When a shift is necessary, you must explicitly connect it to the long-term vision. Explain that you are changing the tactic to preserve the strategy. If you cannot explain how a pivot serves the original mission, you are likely reacting to noise rather than signal.

The shadow of sustaining: complacency and the hammock of success

Sustaining is the movement of stewardship. It is about protecting the team’s energy and preserving its intelligence so it does not burn out. But when taken too far, this protection becomes complacency.

This shadow often appears in successful, long-running teams. They use sustainability as an excuse to avoid rigour or ambition. The team becomes overly protective of its boundaries, rejecting stretch goals or urgent bursts of effort by citing burnout prevention, even when their battery is full.

They stop learning because they believe they have arrived. The hunger that drove them during the Co-creating and Adapting phases fades, replaced by a sense of entitlement to the status quo. They are well-rested, but they are becoming obsolete. They have built a hammock, not a high-performance engine.

Diagnostic signs

  • The team reacts defensively to any request to increase velocity or try something difficult.

  • “That’s not how we do things here” becomes a common refrain to shut down new ideas.

  • Retrospectives focus only on celebration, avoiding the discussion of failures or areas for improvement.

The leadership correction To fix complacency, you must break the peace. You need to reframe sustaining as training for the next championship, not retiring to the beach.

  • Reintroduce “eustress” (good stress): A team without any pressure will atrophy. You need to distinguish between chronic stress (which leads to burnout) and acute stress (which leads to growth). Intentionally inject a new challenge, a tighter deadline, or a novel constraint that forces the team to wake up and problem-solve.

  • Audit the “quiet”: If the team has “no meeting days” or “focus time”, check what they are actually doing with it. Are they doing deep, complex work? Or are they just working slowly? You must demand that protected time results in higher quality output, not just easier days.

  • Rotate the talent: Sometimes a team becomes too stable. If the same people have held the same roles for too long, they stop seeing the inefficiencies. Rotate roles or bring in a new member with high standards to disrupt the comfortable equilibrium and ask the hard questions.

Conclusion: leadership as a gyroscope

The transition from the linear Tuckman model to the cyclical Five Movements requires a fundamental shift in how we view the role of the leader.

In the 21st century, you are no longer a driver steering a team down a straight road. You are a gyroscope. Your job is to maintain dynamic stability in a system that is constantly trying to wobble.

When the team tilts too far into the chaos of adapting, you must lean back toward the stability of aligning. When they sink into the comfort of artificial harmony, you must inject the friction of healthy conflict.

You do not follow these movements as a checklist. You sense them. You monitor the energy, the tension, and the output, constantly applying small corrections to keep the team spinning without spinning out. The goal is not to reach a final stage of perfection but to keep the team moving, healthy, and awake to the reality of the work.

Reflection questions

  • The silence test: When was the last time you had a genuine, heated disagreement about the work? If the answer is “I can’t remember”, are you truly safe, or are you just hiding in artificial harmony?

  • The zombie project test: What is one project or process you are continuing to execute simply because “we agreed to it” three months ago, even though the value has disappeared?

  • The comfort test: Are you currently “sustaining” our energy to recover from a sprint, or are you using “burnout prevention” as an excuse to avoid the discomfort of growth?

 

Do you have any tips or advice for developing teams in the 21st century?

What has worked for you?

Do you have any recommended resources to explore?

Thanks for reading!

 

References and further reading

The concepts explored in this article, from the dangers of artificial harmony to the necessity of placing ‘bets’ rather than signing contracts, stand on the shoulders of extensive research in organisational psychology and complexity theory.

While the Five Movements model offers a new map, the territory it covers has been explored by some of the sharpest minds in management. If you want to deepen your understanding of the mechanics behind the shadows, these are the foundational texts that shaped this thinking:

  • For Conflict: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

  • For Safety: The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson

  • For Decision Speed: Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

  • For Stability: Shape Up by Ryan Singer (Basecamp)

  • For Complexity: A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making (HBR) by Snowden & Boone