KATHERINE BECKS
Kbanks
TeamLearning2015.pptTeam Learning
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Team Learning A Definition
- Is the process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire
Requires Personal mastery
Shared Vision
Need alignment before empowering the individual or there will be more chaos
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Team Learning’s 3 Dimensions
- Think insightfully about complex issues
More heads and experience better
- Innovative coordinated action
Each team member is conscious of other team members and be counted on to help with other actions
- Role of team members on other teams
Needs to be a connection between teams on all levels
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Team Learning Needs Dialogue & Discussion
- Dialogue – is the free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues, a deep “listening” to one another and the suspending of one’s one views. From Greek words Dia = through Logos = word or more broadly the meaning
- Discussion – is the process of identifying and selecting the best view to support decisions that must be made at this time by presenting and defending different views.
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Dialogue & Discussion Require
- Learning how to deal with forces opposing dialogue
Defensive routines that protect from threat and embarrassment – either smooth over differences or initiate a no “holds barred” war
Systems thinking is very prone to evoking defensiveness because of its central message that our actions create our reality
- Practicing Dialogue & Discussion and Team Learning
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Team Learning & Systems Theory
- Bohm’s work sees thought as largely collective, and believes that man can only improve his thought collectively
- In systems terms the whole organizes the parts and becomes unique and different from the parts
- Sees collective IQ as greater than the Individual IQ
- Synergy between Dialogue & Discussion is the power of Team Learning
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Discussion & Team Learning
- Discussion analyses a common interest from many points of view
- Discussion is geared to “WIN”
- Emphasis on winning is not compatible with discovering truth
- Discussion needs to be synchronized with Dialogue for team learning
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Dialogue & Team Learning
- Original meaning or Dialogue was meaning passing or moving through – a free flow of meaning between people
- In Dialogue the group accesses a larger “pool of common meaning” which cannot be accessed individually
- Purpose is to go beyond any individual view by suspending but exploring their assumptions
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Dialogue & Team Learning
- There is no winning
- People are together in trying to gain greater insight as a group
- Purpose is to explore complexity, gain insight and reveal the incoherence of our thought
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3 Types of Incoherence of Thought
- Thought denies that it is participative
- Thought stops tracking reality
- Thought establishes its own standard of reference for fixing problems, probably problems that it help create initially
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Dealing with Incoherence
- Have to uncover the incoherence to reduce its power
- Thought has to represent not pretend that it doesn’t not
- People have to see the representative and participatory nature of thought
- In Dialogue people become observers of their own thinking
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Conditions Necessary for Dialogue
- ALL Participants have to suspend their assumptions
- All participants must regard one another as colleagues
- There must be a facilitator who holds the CONTEXT to the dialogue
Attend to Process
Balance discussion
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Reflection, Inquiry & Dialogue
- Assumes that there is a larger pool of meaning
- Needs to be focused down
See a picture larger than any single view
See from multiple view a new larger view
Articulate the new shared view
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Dealing with Current Reality
- Explore conflict around a vision
- Reduce urge to polarize
- Identify defensive routines
Need to be identified
Need to be discussed
- Be open to alternative views
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Practice: Dialogue Session Rules
- Have a members meet
- Explain ground rules
- Enforce ground rules: if members moves to discussion from dialogue identify the move
- Make possible and encourage team members to raise most difficult, subtle and conflictual issues to the team’s work.
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Team Learning & Systems Thinking
- Use circular vs. linear thinking
- Represent multiple level and departments on a team
- Identify personal mental models (usually focus on your place in the organization)
- Think longer term
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