Team Learning

THE POTENTIAL WISDOM OF TEAMS

“By design and by talent,” wrote basketball player Bill Russell of his team, the Boston Celtics, “[we] were a team of specialists, and like a team of specialists in any field, our performance depended both on individual excellence and on how well we worked together. None of us had to strain to understand that we had to complement each other’s specialties; it was simply a fact, and we all tried to figure out ways to make our combination more effective…. Off the court, most of us were oddballs by society’s standards—not the kind of people who blend in with others or who tailor their personalities to match what’s expected of them.”1

Russell is careful to tell us that it’s not friendship, it’s a different kind of team relationship that made his team’s work special. That relationship, more than any individual triumph, gave him his greatest moments in the sport: “Every so often a Celtic game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game,” he wrote, “and would be magical. The feeling is difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened I could feel my play rise to a new level … It would surround not only me and the other Celtics but also the players on the other team, and even the referees … At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in the white heat of competition, and yet I wouldn’t feel competitive, which is a miracle in itself … The game would move so fast that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken … To me, the key was that both teams had to be playing at their peaks, and they had to be competitive….”

Russell’s Celtics (winner of eleven world championships in thirteen years) demonstrate a phenomenon we have come to call “alignment,” when a group of people function as a whole. In most teams, the energies of individual members work at cross purposes. If we drew a picture of the team as a collection of individuals with different degrees of “personal power” (ability to accomplish intended results) headed in different directions in their lives, the picture might look something like this:2

The fundamental characteristic of the relatively unaligned team is wasted energy. Individuals may work extraordinarily hard, but their efforts do not efficiently translate to team effort. By contrast, when a team becomes more aligned, a commonality of direction emerges, and individuals’ energies harmonize. There is less wasted energy. In fact, a resonance or synergy develops, like the “coherent” light of a laser rather than the incoherent and scattered light of a light bulb. There is commonality of purpose, a shared vision, and understanding of how to complement one another’s efforts. Individuals do not sacrifice their personal interests to the larger team vision; rather, the shared vision becomes an extension of their personal visions. In fact, alignment is the necessary condition before empowering the individual will empower the whole team. Empowering the individual when there is a relatively low level of alignment worsens the chaos and makes managing the team even more difficult:

Jazz musicians know about alignment. There is a phrase in jazz, “being in the groove,” that suggests the state when an ensemble “plays as one.” These experiences are very difficult to put into words—jazz musicians talk about them in almost mystical terms: “the music flows through you rather than from you.” But they are no less tangible for being hard to describe. I have spoken to many managers who have been members of teams that performed at similarly extraordinary levels. They will describe meetings that lasted for hours yet “flew by,” not remembering “who said what, but knowing when we had really come to a shared understanding,” of “never having to vote—we just got to a point of knowing what we needed to do.”

Team learning is the process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire. It builds on the discipline of developing shared vision. It also builds on personal mastery, for talented teams are made up of talented individuals. But shared vision and talent are not enough. The world is full of teams of talented individuals who share a vision for a while, yet fail to learn. The great jazz ensemble has talent and a shared vision (even if they don’t discuss it), but what really matters is that the musicians know how to play together.

Management teams, product development teams, and cross-functional task forces depend on learning together. Teams are “people who need one another to act,” in the words of Arie de Geus. Decisions made by an individual often require a team to put them into action. An individual can learn something without the organization changing what it does. But if teams learn, they become a microcosm for learning throughout the organization. Insights gained are put into action. Skills developed can propagate to other individuals and to other teams (although there is no guarantee that they will propagate). The team’s accomplishments can set the tone and establish a standard for learning together for the larger organization.

Within organizations, team learning has three critical dimensions. First, there is the need to think insightfully about complex issues. Here, teams must learn how to tap the potential for many minds to be more intelligent than one mind. While easy to say, there are powerful forces at work in organizations that tend to make the intelligence of the team less than, not greater than, the intelligence of individual team members. Many of these forces are within the direct control of the team members.

Second, there is the need for innovative, coordinated action. The championship sports teams and great jazz ensembles provide metaphors for acting in spontaneous yet coordinated ways. Outstanding teams in organizations develop the same sort of relationship—an “operational trust,” where each team member remains conscious of other team members and can be counted on to act in ways that complement each other’s actions.

Third, there is the role of team members on other teams. For example, most of the actions of senior teams are actually carried out through other teams. Thus, a learning team continually fosters other learning teams through inculcating the practices and skills of team learning more broadly.

Though it involves individual skills and areas of understanding, team learning is a collective discipline. Thus, it is meaningless to say that “I,” as an individual, am mastering the discipline of team learning, just as it would be meaningless to say that “I am mastering the practice of being a great jazz ensemble.”

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. By contrast, in discussion different views are presented and defended and there is a search for the best view to support decisions that must be made 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.

Team learning also involves learning how to deal creatively with the powerful forces opposing productive dialogue and discussion in working teams. Chief among these are what Chris Argyris calls “defensive routines,” habitual ways of interacting that protect us and others from threat or embarrassment, but which also prevent us from learning. For example, faced with conflict, team members frequently either “smooth over” differences or “speak out” in a no-holds-barred, “winner take all” free-for-all of opinion—what my colleague Bill Isaacs calls “the abstraction wars.” Yet, the very defensive routines that thwart learning also hold great potential for fostering learning, if we can only learn how to unlock the energy they contain. The inquiry and reflection skills introduced in Chapter 9 begin to release this energy, which can then be focused in dialogue and discussion.

Systems thinking is especially prone to evoking defensiveness because of its central message, that our actions create our reality. Thus, a team may resist seeing important problems more systemically. To do so would imply that the problems arise from our own policies and strategies—that is “from us”—rather than from forces outside our control. I have seen many situations where teams will say “we’re already thinking systemically,” or espouse a systems view, then do nothing to put it into practice, or simply hold steadfastly to the view that “there’s nothing we can do except cope with these problems.” All of these strategies succeed in avoiding serious examination of how their own actions may be creating the very problems with which they try so hard to cope. More than other analytic frameworks, systems thinking requires mature teams capable of inquiring into complex, conflictual issues.

Lastly, the discipline of team learning, like any discipline, requires practice. Yet, this is exactly what teams in modern organizations lack. Imagine trying to build a great theater ensemble or a great symphony orchestra without rehearsal. Imagine a championship sports team without practice. In fact, the process whereby such teams learn is through continual movement between practice and performance, practice, performance, practice again, perform again. Management teams need analogous opportunities to rehearse decisions, examine their interactions, and learn before the next performance.

Despite its importance, team learning remains poorly understood. Until we can describe the phenomenon better, it will remain mysterious. Until we have some theory of what happens when teams learn (as opposed to individuals in teams learning), we will be unable to distinguish group intelligence from “groupthink,” when individuals succumb to group pressures for conformity. Until there are reliable methods for building teams that can learn together, its occurrence will remain a product of happenstance. This is why mastering team learning will be a critical step in building learning organizations.