Psychologist researcher Bruce Tuckman formed Tuckman’s Model as part of his 1965 paper Developmental Sequence in Small Groups. The US Navy tasked him, along with a group of other social psychologists, with analysing the dynamics of forming a team, and how the leadership style changes as the group develops. Tuckman and his colleagues found there were four stages of team development: orientation, conflict, cohesion and functional-role relatedness. But that doesn’t sound particularly catchy, does it? So Tuckman reworked them into four simple – and more memorable – stages: forming, storming, norming and performing.