In a team building session with 25 members of a leading French luxury brand, Paris-based facilitator Patrick Duhoux found a simple way to help team members understand their differences so they could work together better and speed their path to high performance.

Human Nature As part of our nature, humans are born into the world with two innate qualities that promote survival and growth. All humans are wired to find and follow patterns. We are innate conformists. This bias towards conformity has many advantages. It promotes cooperation, establishes norms, enables learning, and saves energy. To underscore the latter, when we follow an established pattern, we don’t need to think, problem-solve, or exert effort to learn something new. Thus, we conserve energy, and in nature, energy is a precious resource. 

It was six hours before the big workshop in Las Vegas. 88 people were signed up, and less than half had done their FourSight assessment. The group activity I planned to facilitate hinged on knowing people’s profiles. It wasn’t going to work with half the results.