I get the feeling that you would like a "playbook" with instructions on how to be a team. Unfortunately, the instructions are necessarily vague, because "being a team" is something that occurs in an infinite variety of situations and conditions. It always boils down to vague things like "equipment, environment, and team", instructing you to remain aware of buoyancy, trim, and position, and keep a mental checklist of who's where and doing what, what is working, what has been lost, and where you are in the dive.
Jim Miller's death was a combination failure -- failure of procedure, which was not sufficiently detailed to prevent an error, and failure of situational awareness on the part of his team. I talked to his dive buddy, in whose arms he died. Do you think he didn't acknowledge that there was a team failure there? If you have a team of three, you have three thinking individuals, which ought to give you three times the likelihood that an error will be picked up and corrected before it snowballs. I can tell you from my Cave 2 class that it can also be possible that you have three brains that aren't working and worse, are failing in ways that don't dovetail very well, so things CAN snowball.
All of my GUE training beyond Fundies, and all of my UTD training as well, has been largely about functioning as a team. Individual skills are developed at a lower level, altough they continue to be polished. But the technical classes really ARE about working together, solving problems, communication, and planning. You're asking for training and teaching materials about being a team -- it's coming. You just haven't gotten there yet. And as my C2 class showed, you can't always put round pegs in square holes. Some teams don't work -- each person has strengths and weaknesses, and it's best if any weakness is covered by someone else on the team who is stronger in that area. For example, my long-term classmate and dive buddy is imperturbable in the water. You can't shake his buoyancy control or his trim, no matter what you throw at him. But he doesn't always think things through to see what the best course of action is. I have much weaker diving skills -- you CAN shake me up (or give me vertigo) but I think really well, as long as I am not narced, and I solve problems quickly. As a team, we work extremely well. Pair me with a person with weak buoyancy and positioning, and I don't do well at all.
And this kind of thing is true all the way up the ladder. NOBODY is perfectly rounded and absolutely superb at everything. That's true of teams in every environment in the world. What you do, as you team-build, is figure out how to make things work the best you can. And that's what training dives are about. You make mistakes and fix them, and in time, you make fewer, and you learn about one another as teammates, and what you can expect people to do well, or not do well.
