Quote from Peter Senge as an intro to the next post

Team learning.

Have you ever been involved with a team of people who functioned together superbly? It may have been in business, school or sports. People trusted each other, complemented each other's strengths, compensated for each other's weaknesses, aimed for goals higher than anyone might have dared individually-and a result produced an extraordinary outcome. In such teams, each member is committed to continual improvement, each suspends judgment as to what's possible and so removes mental limitations, each shares a vision of greatness, and the team's collective competence is far greater than any individual's. Team members also recognize and understand the system in which they operate and how they can influence it.

These characteristics describe the essence of a learning organization. As with any team, the organization doesn't start off great, it learns to be great. Team learning is the process of aligning a team to avoid wasted energy and to create the results its members want. Team learning builds on the disciplines of shared vision and personal mastery, because talented teams are, necessarily, made up of talented individuals. Because the IQ of a team can be much higher than that of any of its members, teams are becoming the key learning unit in organizations.

The discipline of team learning involves mastering the practices of dialogue and discussion. In discussion (a word with the same roots as percussion and concussion) views are presented and defended and the team searches for the best view to support decisions. Participants in a discussion often want to win and see their view prevail. While dialogue and discussion can be complementary, most teams can't distinguish between them. The original meaning of the word dialogue, according to physicist David Bohm, suggests a free flow of meaning between people. Bohm contends that in dialogue a group accesses a "larger pool of common meaning" that can't be accessed by individuals alone. The purpose of dialogue, then, is to go beyond the understanding held by each team member, and to explore complex issues creatively from many points of view. After dialogue, decisions must be made and thus comes the need for discussion, where action is the focus.

-- Peter Senge