Creating common ground and a shared worldview

As we have seen previously, troubles talk for the most part tends to be a collaborative interactional activity with respect to a number of interactional domains. Right from the start team members suggest or point to a given trouble, which if the topic is picked up, gets jointly constructed as a trouble, after which its severity and the different aspects of the trouble and its potential impact are negotiated. From its onset, troubles talk is thus about developing a shared understanding of an issue and of establishing a common worldview towards this issue. However, it seems that often the common ground and the shared worldview established in troubles talk goes beyond the construction and sharing of the trouble itself, to more broader themes in their lives.

This seems particularly important since the team considers itself to be intercultural and occasionally explicitly reflects on areas in which behavioural expectations or common ground diverge due to “their cultures”. This occurs most notably in regard to participation in team meetings and the degree of initiative that is expected. Yet, little of these difficulties are visible in troubles talk, though we see a hint in Example 5.3-3 where David contests the legitimacy of Akshya’s India example. For the most part though, troubles talk seem to allow the team to find and build common ground relatively easily.

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It also seems important to look back at the setting in which team members find themselves, especially at the beginning of the teamwork: All team members had relocated for this year, most of them even from another country. In addition to completely new surroundings, team members found themselves in the completely new role of being a mature student, after having had a successful career. While a lot of their interactions tended to be task-focused and quite professional, troubles talk seems to have provided them with the important opportunity to actually make sense of this new role and environment and for checking and comparing each other’s experiences and understandings of certain issues without running the risk of violating professional interactional norms or having very serious heart-to-heart-interactions with people who were complete strangers at the beginning of the year. The topics covered in the troubles talk (section 5.1) seem to confirm this, given that a large majority of troubles talk episodes deal with some aspect of “being an MBA student”.

If we look at the extracts already shown, some of the most obvious examples in the data stem from troubles talk episodes about professors and difficult exams in which team members gained the assurance that they were not alone in finding a particular behaviour unacceptable or were struggling with specific situations. I will now turn to two interesting examples to show this in more detail. Both are related to how the team works together and what their priorities are, and it becomes evident how troubles talk also affects the decisions they take as a team and their general dealings with each other:

5.7-1 P2-M1-E10: The team is planning the timeline for their project. Lines 398 till 412 are coloured in grey as they are accompanied by continuous loud laughter overlapping the whole interaction, that gets re-ignited with every spoken turn.

380 David: Alright (.) so it says that interviews would be useful but not essential/ so should we? (.) Alright bear in mind that we have 20 days?

381 Bev: What 20 days? £We've got how many days?£ 382 David: When is this due? hhhh

383 Bruno: I guess Tuesday morning its 384 ((laughter))

[11 lines omitted in which they establish the deadlines and Bruno and Jay keep joking with each other]

395 Bev: Yeah 19 days and {module name} is 18 days so

396 David: S:o bear in mind that we have got {module name} to do at the same time

397 Bev: hhhhh

398 David: And we’ll also have a group project in {module name} due at some point as well hhh

399 Akshya: Which hasn't been even [(xxx)

400 David: [They hadn't even had (xxx) about that/ let's keep this as simplistic as possible hhh

401 Jay: Yeah 402 Bev: hhhhhhhh

135 404 Bev: I totally just [(xxx)

405 Akshya: [Do you just want to do 406 Bruno: But I would like to (xxx)

407 ((laughter and some overlapping conversation)) 408 Bruno: Keep it very simple hhhhh

409 Bev: PLEASE/ no research hhhh 410 David: I want no more hhh

411 Bruno: No more {module name} for the next 100 days hhhhhh we're going to=

412 Bev: =WE don't care (xxx) please hhh 413 Jay: Yeah let's do something simple

414 David: So let's just take a really simple operation 415 Jay: Yeah yeah

416 Akshya: {UNIVERSITY NAME} {university name} accommodation 417 Jay: {SUPERMARKET NAME}

418 David: Like someone that makes coffee or something like that 419 Bev: Yeah hhhhhh

420 David: And we just go look that a coffee here and they take it over there In this extract the team takes a fairly important decision on the whole project (to keep it simple and not do extra research), which is constructed as the only sensible decision after a set of troubles has been jointly identified. David’s initial question sounds fairly neutral but already hints at a potential trouble as he points to the deadline in order to establish how they should approach this project. From the onset the project is thus treated as having to be accomplished in a very limited amount of time. The others immediately subscribe to this view, with Bev contesting in line 381 that they even have 20 days to accomplish it and Bruno joking that it is probably due on Tuesday morning, which is received with loud laughter. Within a very small number of turns the team thus constructs the time available to be extremely limited and, after establishing the actual deadlines, more items get listed that diminish the time available for this project that go completely unchallenged. Thus, it seems a natural conclusion for David to state: “Let's keep this as simplistic as possible hhh” in line 400. The whole exchange is accompanied by loud laughter that further constructs the situation as ridiculous. Team members together laughingly construct their grievances until in line 413 Jay says in a more factual way “yeah let’s do something simple”. By this time the decision has been made and all team members seem to have fallen in line with that decision. Right after this exchange team members then move on to brainstorm organisations they could focus the project on (line 416 onwards), and the main criteria later explicitly established for this are a) it has to be nearby and b) it needs to be a simple organisation. There are no objections voiced and the team manages to achieve a decision quite quickly, while the team meeting continues in a quite cohesive and humorous fashion. “Keep it very simple” also remained something of a slogan (or motto) for this entire project. This does not mean that team members did not work hard, however several decisions ended up being made based on this principle, including getting rid of some more complicated work they had done for the final presentation.

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We can see that this exchange establishes a remarkable cohesion in the team. In this extract team members very quickly adopt a shared view of their project based on a troubles construction that seems to bode well for the relational aspects of their work. The sequence features loud laughter, humour and overall a high involvement style.

However, there is a counter-story to this seeming success. While their collaboration on the project was fairly smooth, the project discussed here ended up being graded with their lowest score. In the interviews, Alden made it clear that he was not on board with this decision and that in his mind, if you do something simple just to get the project out of the way you do not get high marks, nor do you learn anything and that, in contrast, his purpose in coming here was to learn. This reveals a completely different perspective on the trouble and the solution the team constructed in response.

The team did not know this, as Alden did not voice his perspective in the meeting but looking back at the data we can find him completely absent from this exchange, although he was in the room. While he often stays quiet, in this exchange we cannot even hear him laughing on the recording, which is often the case in other instances. While there are quite a few instances in the data where he does voice objections to decisions and approaches to work, he chooses to stay silent here. Disagreeing with the approach at this point in time would have forced Alden to take a stance against the rest of the team, thus threatening the rapport established and positioning him as an outsider. It seems questionable whether after an exchange like this, providing a counter narrative would have made any difference as well, which seems somewhat unlikely. Alden seems to come to the same conclusion. Jay, who ended up being the taskmaster for this project stated in the final interview “I don’t remember how we made this decision (.) but it was the wrong decision”. This quote does not refer to the instance we have just seen, but to the decision to take out the more complicated things they had done from their presentation. However, it seems unlikely that that decision would have been made without the common ground developed here that simplicity and saving time is key.

What this extract has shown is how quickly and powerfully common ground and a shared outlook can be formed around a trouble. However, it has also shown that while there is a great potential for building relations, there is also a risk of excluding team members who are not on board and possibly steering the team in a wrong direction as counternarratives beyond the common ground are to some extent made impossible, at least without harming the rapport that is being established.