Team Learning: a discipline that goes far beyond team building

Team learning is not team building and should not be taken on lightly... But you can focus immediatly on your organisation's chief concerns and issues....
Abstracts written by Charlotte Roberts, taken from The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Team Learning

The discipline of team learning goes well beyond conventional "team building" skills such as creating courteous behaviors, improving communication, becoming better able to perform everyday work tasks together, or even building strong relationships. This discipline inspires more fundamental changes, with enduring application that will ripple out through the organisation.

Team learning is also the most challenging discipline - intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. The process of learning how to learn collectively is unfamiliar. It has nothing to do with the "school learning" of memorizing details to feed back in tests. It starts with self-mastery and self-knowledge, but involves looking outward to develop knowledge of, and alignment with, others on your team. Most of us have had no training in this. This discipline will lead you there. Do you have the necessary patience with yourself and others?

Members of the team should know that there will be times of frustration and perhaps embarrassment, as they develop their collective capabilities. Ideally, they should have the opportunity to chose the practice of team learning, with no penalty if they say "no" (although this may be unrealistics if the rest of the team says "yes").

CHARACTERISTICS OF A LEARNING TEAM

For a team which practices this discipline, it is helpful to have a reason to talk and learn - a situation that compels deliberation, a need to solve a problem, the collective desire to create something new, or a drive to foster new relationship with other parts of the organisation.

This first concern will become the preliminary "practice filed" for the team's development. As it gains confidence and ability, the team will move on to consider other matters.

THE TEAM FACILITATOR

The team can develop skills faster if it has an outside facilitator who is trained in techniques for building reflection and inquiry skills, as well as dialogue facilitation. Team members of unknowingly collude to misrepresent reality to each other, and cover up the ways in which they do so......

GROUND RULES FOR LEARNING

Teams need to set up their own ground rules for conversation. These may include agreements to tell the truth as each person knows it, bring relevant information immediatly to the team, or limit the time each person can speak. Teams may decide to clarify how decisions will be made and by whom, and to establish ways to safely check and challenge each other. Once the rules are set by consensus, it is important for the team to discuss how it will deal with violations. These rules are meants to help the team shape its conversations, not as an end in themselves; and they should never become so dominant that they override the team's purposes and learnings.

When results don't turn out as expected, you and the other team members will need to master the art of forgiveness. Looking for someone to blame may mean abandoning the team's learning. Forgiveness means standing with the persons who were leading the experiment at hand, and helping the team discern what forces at play contributed to the unexpected outcomes. Forgiveness also means not holding the mistake as a trump card to be used some time in the future when politics would encourage it.