Team Learning[1]

In the process of building and maintaining a learning organization the notion of Team learning is critical because it is what empowers the individuals within the team to work in alignment for the organization’s goals with the best results.

Alignment is the notion that the team members are working in the same direction. When people in a team notice that some in the team are not working for the same or stated goals then that team is out of alignment. The first goal of team learning is to achieve alignment. “alignment is the necessary condition before empowering the individual will empower the whole team.”

Today’s exercise in determining LCCH’s shared goals, Mission, Vision, Values, USP, and founding myth is part of developing our alignment. Reviewing these choices from time to time is a way of keeping our alignment.

The second aspect of team learning is building the team’s capabilities and capacities to create the results our team truly desires. Team learning “builds on the disciplines of developing a shared vision. It also builds on personal mastery”.

“The discipline of team learning involves mastering the practices of dialogue and discussion, the two distinct ways that teams converse. In DIALOGUE there is the free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues, a deep ‘listening’ to one another and suspending of one’s own views”; “a sustained collective inquiry into everyday experience and what we take for granted”; “a setting where conscious collective mindfulness can be maintained and inquiry can happen”. By contrast we engage in discussion most of the time, “in DISCUSSION different views are presented and defended and there is a search for the best view to support decisions that must be made in at this time. Dialogue and discussion are potentially complementary, but most teams lack the ability to distinguish between the two and to move consciously between them.”

Our goal today is to learn to identify and enter into dialogue before discussion and to lay the ground rules for moving consciously between them. Then we need to practice team learning every two weeks from now on. In this way we can not only master the discipline but lead by example as we create the team learning culture of LCCH for new members and for generations to come.

Perception is often a communal enterprise. The language we use is full of collective perceptions of reality. Every group we belong to has its own set of assumptions about reality which may or may not actually correspond to reality. Thus, our prejudices, assumptions, deep core, language, leaps of logic, and beliefs, participate in making our reality. In so far as our reality corresponds to actual reality, we will be successful; in so far as our reality corresponds to popular reality, we will be safe socially (unless popular reality is in opposition to actual reality – in which case nature will eventually ruin us).

The goal of dialogue is first, to take our collective knowledge and experience and separate out and identify our own prejudices and assumptions about reality and second to examine our prejudices’ and assumptions’ coherence to reality. The incoherence of our own thought is hopefully revealed, we become observers of our own thinking, and the team moves forward with a better and more useful understanding of each other and of reality. “Through dialogue people can help each other to become aware of the incoherence in each other’s thoughts, and in this way the collective thought becomes more and more coherent.” The heart of team learning is dialogue in community, It is analogous to mindfulness in individual meditation – instead of focusing on breath and that one had a thought pass, we focus on the words and body language of the team and notice that a thought was articulated.

Suggested Ground Rules for Dialogue – with consensus and changeable with experience:

• Suspension of assumptions: examine our assumptions about our direction and strategy without ownership. View them as a scientist would look at a specimen of some bug – detached but engaged; objectively without position; and most importantly by asking hard questions without defensiveness as a response.
• A personal commitment to the truth with a sincere way to safely check and challenge each other’s perceptions. And when the results don’t turn out as expected we need a mutual and personal commitment to forgiveness in action not just in words.

According to the authors, dialogue space can be thought of metaphorically as a container containing the “sum of the collective assumptions, shared intentions, and beliefs of a group.” Almost any amount of dialogue before discussion will make the discussion a bit better and yet there are four phases of dialogue that the authors have witnessed. Not all phases are reached every time, and they do require practice as such I offer them here as a guide for what we may experience.

Phase 1) instability of the Container: as the group members come together with their individual stances the need of dialogue is to recognize the group as observers and observed and the realization that one can “suspend their views, loosening the grip of their certainty about all view”. Members embrace a level of chaos. The first danger is viewing this divergent chaos as bad. It is not. It is reality. A proper question to ask is “where is this divergence, this chaos, this instability, this barrier coming from?” the danger in seeing chaos as bad manifests itself in defense mechanisms (such as justifications – through argument, or avoidance – through trying to smooth things over) which lead to unproductive discussion. On the other hand, if we view the chaos as the surfacing of data that leads to real or potential conflict then we can move toward skillful discussion.

Phase 2) Instability in the Container: “Having chosen to live with chaos, groups begin to oscillate between suspending views and ‘discussing’ them. At this stage people may find themselves feeling frustrated, principally because the underlying fragmentation and incoherence in everyone’s thought begin to appear. Normally this would be kept below the surface, but now it comes forward”. More extreme views are often put forward; sometimes a bit of politeness is lost. “To manage the crisis of collective suspension…everyone must be adequately awake to what is happening. People do not need to panic and withdraw, to fight, or to categorize on viewpoint as ‘right’… All they need to do is listen and inquire: ‘what is the meaning of this?’ they do not merely listen to others, but to themselves: ‘where am I listening from?’,…”what can I learn if I slow things down and inquire within myself?’”

Phase 3) Inquiry in the Container: with practice the group can build and maintain trust in vulnerability such that a collective pain of separateness when not in dialogue and the insight that dialogue can generate. Dialogue sessions can become addictive in themselves. The crisis is that dialogue becomes highjacked way from a tool to skillful discussion and the group becomes a therapy group rather than a team learning to get the best results for the organization. While group therapy may be a new benefit it should be its own separate meeting.

Phase 4) Creativity in the Container: the gold standard where real generative dialogue happens naturally and results are first class.

[1] All quotes are from chapter 11 of The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge or Chapter 52 of The Fifth Discipline Field book