Why Great Teams Don’t Think Alike – THE FACILITATION PRACTICE LAB SERIES. BLOG 4 OF 5.

Part of a learning series: 

This blog is part of a series sharing my learnings from the Future Green Facilitation Practice Lab in Sintra, Portugal. This time, focusing on how different working styles and environments affect team collaboration.

What makes a team work well together?

At our 5-day Facilitation Practice Retreat in Sintra, Portugal, we brought facilitators together to practise, experiment with different techniques, exchange ideas and learn from one another in a hands-on environment.

Rather than simply learning more facilitation theory, the retreat was designed around practice: trying activities ourselves, experiencing what it feels like to participate in them and reflecting on how they could be adapted for different teams and organisations so we can be the best facilitator in our industry.

On Day 1, with one of our exercises, we focused on better team collaboration.

It’s easy to focus on roles, responsibilities and expertise when building a team. But through two simple facilitation activities, we explored something that often gets overlooked: how people actually work best.

🌿 Where Do You Work Best?

We started with a visual mapping exercise exploring how different environments affect the way we work.

(We were also on a beautiful regenerative farm far away from distractions, eating local, organic food daily, which helped us stay focused!)

Using coloured dots, participants identified where they tend to feel:

🔵 Bored
🩷 Creative
🟠 Focused
🟢 Distracted

Thanks to Heather for running this activity so thoughtfully.

From offices and meeting rooms to forests, mountains and other spaces, the activity quickly showed how much our environment can influence the way we think and work.

The idea originated from an activity at Rutherford’s Lab in Christchurch, New Zealand. On the original board, open-plan offices received a high number of responses associated with boredom and distraction, while places such as forests, mountains and boats scored strongly for focus and creativity.

The lesson isn’t that everyone needs to leave the office and head to the mountains.

Instead, it creates an opportunity for teams to ask:

If the office isn’t where people do their best creative or focused work, there are practical ways to respond. Teams could introduce protected no-meeting focus blocks, encourage walking time, give people flexibility to work elsewhere or simply recognise that different tasks may require different environments.

It’s also a simple but effective icebreaker. You quickly learn who needs silence to concentrate, who gets their best ideas outdoors and who thrives around other people.

Disconnect to reconnect

🧭 Compass Points: How Do You Show Up in a Team?

Our second activity explored the different working styles people bring into a group.

Compass Points uses four directions to represent different approaches:

North: Action-oriented. Ready to jump in and get started.

South: Communication-focused. Wants to make sure everyone has been heard before moving forward.

East: Big-picture. Interested in possibilities and wants to explore ideas first.

West: Detail-oriented. Wants to understand the who, what, when, where and why before taking action.

Participants chose the direction that best represented how they typically show up when working in a group.

We then explored three questions:

1. Why is your direction effective?
2. Which other direction would you most want on your team?
3. Which direction would you find most difficult to work with?

The conversations that followed revealed something important:

💡 A Team Full of People Like You Isn’t Always the Best Team

One of the most interesting reflections was that few people wanted to work in a team made entirely of people with the same style as themselves.

Too many Easts might spend so much time exploring the big picture that the team struggles to move forward.

Too many Norths might take action quickly without giving enough time to different perspectives or important details.

A team dominated by South might value consensus so highly that making a difficult decision becomes challenging.

And a group of Wests might have every detail covered but take longer to move into action.

The point isn’t to decide which style is best.

It’s to understand what each person brings to the team and where different styles can complement one another.

Awareness can also make moments of friction easier to understand. Instead of assuming someone is slowing things down or moving too quickly, we can recognise the different needs and perspectives behind their approach.

Learning how much we need each other’s differences

🤝 Build the Team Around the Objective

The Compass Points activity also led to a bigger conversation about how organisations put teams together.

Teams are often built around functions. Marketing works with marketing. Operations works with operations. Sustainability works with sustainability.

But what if we also considered the skills, perspectives and working styles needed to achieve the objective?

A marketing challenge might benefit from someone in UX or product. A highly technical project may benefit from someone who naturally focuses on communication and relationships. A strategy team needs people who can imagine possibilities, examine the details, bring others into the conversation and ultimately move ideas into action.

This helps break down silos and creates teams based not simply on job titles, but on what the challenge actually requires.

🌱 Better Collaboration Starts with Better Understanding

Our first day of the 5-day Facilitation Practice Retreat was a reminder that collaboration doesn’t automatically happen because we put a group of talented people in the same room.

We need to understand how people think, communicate, focus and contribute.

Simple facilitation activities like these can surface conversations that rarely happen in everyday meetings. They give teams a shared language for discussing differences and help turn those differences into strengths.

And sometimes, the colleague whose working style challenges you most may be bringing exactly the perspective your team needs.

💡 WANT TO BRING A STRATEGY SPRINT TO YOUR TEAM?

You do not need to be a facilitator to benefit from the approach we practised in Sintra.

At Future Green, we use Strategy Sprints to help leadership teams tackle complex challenges, align around priorities and turn ideas into a practical roadmap for action.

Whether you are developing a sustainability strategy, launching a new initiative, or aligning stakeholders, a facilitated Strategy Sprint can help your team move from discussion to decisions and action.

→ Find out how a Future Green Strategy Sprint could work for your team –