The Tuckman model, also known as Tuckman’s stages of group development, is a model that describes the stages of group development and dynamics over time. It was created by Bruce Tuckman in 1965 (original article called “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups”, if you wish to read it, you could get it, for example, from here) and has since become a widely recognized framework for understanding group behavior.
The five stages of the Tuckman model are: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. These stages describe the process of a group forming, resolving conflicts, establishing norms and expectations, working effectively together, and disbanding.
In practice, the Tuckman model is used in many different settings, including team building and organizational development. It “provides” a useful framework for understanding how groups interact and how they can be helped to develop and improve.
As for its validity, the Tuckman model has been widely recognized and used for many years, and is considered a well-established framework for understanding group dynamics – that is one of the reasons why it became so popular. However, not only it is important to note that the model is a generalization and may not always fit every situation perfectly. But also if something is popular, widely well-known, and accepted, it does not mean to be true. It is simple to teach – so it was used widely for teaching!
After enormous widespread use of the model within the Agile community, people started to challenge it and looked for ways to prove to disproof it. Here is the InfoQ article: “Tuckman Was Wrong! Doc Norton on Reteaming Models”, summarizing Doc Norton’s presentation at Agile India 2019. You can watch the full presentation:
or read a blog post by Doc Norton preceding his talk and summarizing crucial points.
And this is original research by Pamela Knight from 2007 that Doc is referring to in his presentation or read a review/explanation of that work in an article by Conrad Giller.
Here is another article by Bao Lan Nguyen, summarizing critics of the model.
Historically, stuff that is easy to teach and to understand (and could make sense and correlate with some of your past experience) got widespread regardless of being true or false. That is just a reality… If you are hard-wired in your brain to the Tuckman model and it is still hard not to use it, to shift your perspective a bit, I would definitely recommend checking out the book by Heidi Helfand called “Dynamic Reteaming”.