The Missing Link: Practice

THE MISSING LINK: PRACTICE

It cannot be stressed too much that team learning is a team skill. A group of talented individual learners will not necessarily produce a learning team, any more than a group of talented athletes will produce a great sports team. Learning teams learn how to learn together.

If anything, team skills are more challenging to develop than individual skills. This is why learning teams need “practice fields,” ways to practice together so that they can develop their collective learning skills. The almost total absence of meaningful practice or rehearsal is probably the predominant factor that keeps most management teams from being effective learning units.

What exactly is “practice”? In The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schon identifies the essential principles of practice as experimentation in a “virtual world.” A virtual world is a “constructed representation of the real world.” It can be as simple as the architects’ sketchpad:

Here they can draw and talk their moves in a spatial-action language, leaving traces which represent the forms of buildings on the site. Because the drawing reveals qualities and relations unimagined beforehand, moves can function as experiments … [discovering] that building shapes do not fit the slope and that … classrooms are too small in scale.[14]

The essence of a virtual world is the freedom it allows for experimentation. The pace of action can be slowed down or speeded up. Phenomena that occur very rapidly can be stretched out over time to study more carefully. Phenomena that stretch out over very long periods can be speeded up to see more clearly the consequences of particular actions. No move is irreversible. Actions that cannot be reversed or taken back and redone in the real setting can be redone countless times. Changes in the environment can be eliminated, either completely or partially. Complexity can be simplified by uncoupling variables that are interlocked in reality.

The manipulations that Schon describes in the virtual worlds of the architects and other professionals match precisely what happens when the basketball team or the symphony orchestra practices. They vary the pace of the action—by slowing down the music, by running plays in slow motion. They isolate components and simplify the complexity—by playing individual sections, by running plays without a competitor. They reverse what is, in the real performance, irreversible—they replay the same section over and over, they rerun the play over and over.

Interestingly, the few examples in business of teams which learn consistently over a long period of time seem to be exactly those settings where effective virtual worlds operate. For instance, modern advertising practice is based on the concept of a creative team, where an account supervisor, art director, and copywriter work closely together, often for years. So close are these teams that teammates often switch agencies together, rather than break apart. What makes advertising teams special is that they practice together, as consistently and intensively as the members of a basketball team do. They brainstorm ideas, and then experiment with them, testing them in storyboards or mock-ups, and eventually presenting them—first to higher-ups in the agency, then to the client.

Team learning requires that type of regular practice. But management teams, by and large, are bereft of it. True, they have the abstract, intellectual debates of ideas, and many team members come to learn each others’ intellectual opinions, often only too well. But there is nothing akin to a storyboard or a rehearsal. The main product of the team’s work is decisions about specific situations, often debated and decided under great time pressure, and each decision is final as soon as it is made. There is no experimentation with decisions; worse still, there is little opportunity to form reasoned assessments of the wisdom of different decisions, and there is no opportunity to step back, as a team, and reflect on how we might arrive at better decisions together.