Read time: 5–6 min

Every team goes through a rough patch.

Not because the people are wrong for each other. Not because the idea is bad. Not because someone is failing. But because groups of people working toward something under pressure follow a predictable pattern — and part of that pattern is uncomfortable, and almost everyone misreads it when they are inside it.

Knowing the pattern does not make it disappear. But it gives you something genuinely useful: perspective when you are in the middle of it, and tools to move through it faster.

Where this comes from

In 1965, educational psychologist Bruce Tuckman published a paper identifying a pattern he had observed across group development in different contexts — military units, therapy groups, laboratory teams. He proposed that groups move through four predictable stages as they develop into effective working units. In 1977, he added a fifth stage with colleague Mary Ann Jensen.

The model has been cited, replicated, and refined for decades. It holds up because it describes something real — not because groups are mechanical, but because the tensions it identifies are universal. Competition for roles, unspoken expectations, working style collisions, and the gradual development of trust all follow patterns consistent enough to be worth knowing before you live through them.

The five stages

Forming — Orientation. The team comes together. Everyone is polite. People are reading the room, figuring out who has authority and on what questions. Work gets done slowly or not at all. Commitment is tentative.

This stage feels productive because it is harmonious. It is not actually productive — it is cautious. Do not mistake the absence of conflict for the presence of alignment.

Storming — Conflict. The politeness gives way. Disagreements surface about goals, roles, working styles, and decision-making. People realize their unspoken expectations were never actually shared. Frustration emerges. Some people compete for influence. Others withdraw.

This is the stage that surprises and alarms most teams, because it feels like something has gone wrong. It has not. Storming is not a sign of a broken team — it is a sign of a real one. Teams that skip Storming entirely are usually suppressing the conflict, not resolving it. Suppressed conflict resurfaces later, at worse moments, with worse consequences.

Norming — Cohesion. The team resolves or works around its conflicts. Roles become clearer. Trust begins to build — not because everyone suddenly likes each other, but because people have developed reliable expectations about how each person will behave. Norms emerge around how decisions get made, how disagreements get raised, how work gets reviewed.

Norming is when teams start to feel functional. It is not the peak — but it is the necessary precondition for it.

Performing — Productivity. The team operates at its best. Work flows. People know what they are responsible for without being told. Decisions get made without drama. The output is genuinely more than the sum of individual contributions because the team has learned to function as a system.

Most teams reach Performing eventually. The question is how long it takes — and how much runway, financial and relational, gets consumed in the earlier stages.

Adjourning — Closure. The team disbands, either because the project is complete or because the composition changes significantly. This stage captures what happens at the end of a team's life cycle: the reflection, the transition, and sometimes the grief that comes with it.

The part that actually matters

Every time a team member is added or departs, the team resets. Not all the way back to zero — but meaningfully back. The dynamics shift, the norms have to be renegotiated, and trust has to be rebuilt around the new configuration.

This is why early-stage startups are so fragile around co-founder changes. It is not just the loss of that person's skills. It is the disruption of the entire system the team had built around them. When a co-founder leaves, the team does not lose one member — it loses the version of itself that had learned to work with that member.

This is also why research on team performance consistently finds that teams with higher stability — even if the initial composition is not ideal — outperform teams that cycle through members trying to optimize. The disruption of Storming repeated multiple times costs more than the benefit of finding a slightly better person.

Why shared self-knowledge shortens the hard part

There is a practical shortcut through Storming that most teams never use: naming your differences before they become friction.

When a teammate behaves in a way that frustrates you — the person who keeps generating new ideas when the team needs to execute, the person whose questions feel like attacks, the person who pushes back every time scope changes — knowing why they do that changes how you receive it.

It is the difference between thinking something is wrong with the person, and recognizing a working style that is different from yours. One response closes the conversation. The other opens it.

Teams that have named their differences explicitly — through frameworks, through honest conversation, through the kind of self-reflection that most people skip — move from Storming to Norming faster. Not because the differences disappear, but because they have already been acknowledged.

That is the function of every assessment in Block B. Not self-knowledge as a personal exercise. Self-knowledge as a team accelerant.

One thing to watch for

Notice which stage your team is in each week. There is no assignment for this — just a useful habit to build.

The teams that struggle most at mid-point presentations are almost always the ones that spent too long in Storming and never fully found their Norming. The pressure of a deadline does not move a team through the stages faster. It just makes the unresolved tension more visible, at the worst possible time.

The earlier you name what is happening, the faster you move through it.

A note for GVP students

You will form your team early in the program. This article is here so that when the rough patch comes — and it will come — you recognize it for what it is.

Storming is not failure. It is stage two of five. Your job is not to avoid it. Your job is to move through it as quickly and honestly as you can, so the team arrives at Performing before the final presentation rather than after it.

The assessments in Block B — TeamFlow, FISHE, MBTI, BOSI, Culture Map — are not administrative boxes to check. They are the material for the conversation that gets you to Norming faster. Use them that way.

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