Why Great Teams Need a Shared Mental Model

At the end of every Six Nations, the same ritual plays out.

Teams review their campaigns. Coaches dissect performance. Pundits hand out opinions. This year the highest praise for France and Ireland, while England faced tougher questions.

Every team is making sense of performance.

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One Tale: When a Winning Formula Stops Working

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In rugby, that starts by building a shared understanding of what happened. The results, yes, but also — territory, possession, set piece, breakdown, discipline, distance covered. The team needs to "get on the same page" and develop a common lens to see where games are won or lost.

It's not a simple process.

England’s picture is unclear. Their kick-heavy approach once drove territorial dominance. But opponents seem to have adapted — better backfield coverage, sharper counter-attacks. Their strength no longer converts.

The point is before you can fix performance, you need agreement on how to see it.

Was the strategy too predictable? Is our breakdown too slow? Are we just missing too many chances to finish a move? Each explanation has merits. None fully explains it.

In science, this is described as a developing a "shared mental model". Sports teams rely on them to frame the performance conversation that needs to be had and action to be taken.

Only then can you identify the people, skills and behaviours that will make the difference next time.

The same is true at work.

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One Tip: Use 5 Questions to Reset Your Team

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When teams get stuck, it’s often due to misalignment.

Different people in the team don't have quite the same way of viewing how the team needs to operate . They end up pulling in slightly different directions.

One solution is to develop a shared mental model for how the team should work.

We’ve (mostly) moved on from the idea that teamwork neatly progresses through stages like forming, storming, norming — a bit too tidy for real life. There’s no shortage of more robust models of teamwork.

The thing is, the key isn’t to find the perfect model. It’s to have a shared way of framing the conversation. We suggest using the “Team Compass” as it's based on research but is simple to remember. It’s framed around five questions:

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• Why are we here? (purpose)
• Where are we starting from? (current reality)
• What’s the plan? (strategy, plans and goals)
• Who’s on the team? (roles and strengths)
• How do we work together? (norms and ways of operating)

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These questions draw on decades of research into what drives team effectiveness — but most importantly, they give teams a practical way to step back and reflect.

You don’t need perfect answers. The idea behind the Team Compass is to help teams have a shared language as they discuss a route forward.

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One Truth: The Best Teams Need Less Communication

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A shared mental model is the internal map people use to understand how the team works, how work flows, and what others will do next.

In studies of fighter pilots running complex simulations, the best teams built shared mental models through simple, repeatable practices. Aligning before action with clear briefings, agreeing the structured communication during simulations and reflecting together afterwards.

In reality, they didn't communicate more — they were the ones who needed to communicate less. They had developed a shared mental model which helped them anticipate, adjust, coordinate wit each other in real time.

At work, high-performing teams need to develop at least two models:

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• A model to think about tasks to be done (sprints, processes, goals, plans, constraints)
• A model to understand the how the team operates (roles, strengths, people)

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Most teams focus on the first and ignore the second.

A shared mental model is just a frame to view the world. Building a shared picture of the work — and each other — that’s good enough to act on and then updating it through reflection.

This shared framework does not develop automatically - just by working with each other. You need to invest in the rituals that bring them to life.

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⚡️ Final Thought

When reviewing performance, the instinct is to jump to solutions.

But the best teams start somewhere simpler: Do we have a shared understanding on what’s going on?

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