Forming. Storming. Norming. And the other one… the lesser known history of Tuckman’s team model

Forming. Storming. Norming. Performing. You may well have heard these stages of group maturity before, but do you know where the theory came from?

This article is inspired by the Teamcraft podcast episode, available wherever you get your pods.

In 1965 a young psychologist, freshly minted with a PhD from Princeton, joined the Naval Medical Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. His role as a research psychologist was to investigate the best team behaviours for small crews on naval vessels. Handed a stack of fifty research papers to pore through for clues, his groundbreaking analysis resulted in the model that was to make him famous; Bruce Tuckman’s ‘Stages of Group Development’.

Tuckman’s four stages (later joined by a fifth, ‘adjourning’), known as the Tuckman Team Model, is never far from being mentioned in any conversation about teams. Most managers have heard of ‘storming, norming, something, something’, but haven’t heard of the man who invented it, or looked into the fascinating history behind his most famous model.

This article isn’t so much an explanation of what Tuckman’s model is, as it is an exploration of how a slightly misunderstood concept has become such a common reference point in understanding…