INCOMPLETE WORK IN PROGRESS

Team consciousness

(return to Co-creative Learning Teams, an article on Languaging-Co-creation or see more keywords)

The Whole Course

1. Systems Thinking
2. Self-regulation
3. Self-coordination
4. Living systems
5. Team consciousness
6. Team synergy
7. Team sizes
8. Team diversity
9. Lucky Teams
10. Team Evaluation

Consciousness

1. If our teams are to act as living systems then they would be conscious.
2. The word implies awareness but in a more complex form.
3. Do we mean awareness of events happening inside or outside?
4. Hypothetically, perfect shamanic consciousness would mean both.

Levels of Team Consciousness

1. Let is imagine a team that was totally shamanic.
2. It would be 100% conscious of its interior state and its exterior context.
3. This gives us one criterion for measuring the consciousness of teams.
4. But it doesn't explain what we might mean by consciousness.

Organisational Consciousness

1. In 1988 Marvin Minsky claimed that computers are more conscious than humans.
2. His theory was inspired by the list-based programming language (LISP).
3. This programme constantly checks functions including its own working parts.
4. Although this may resemble how human consciousness works, the parts are different.
5. Human consciousness emerges from a biological organism that evolved to survive.
   • i.e. the chemical vagaries of blood, gut, brain, heart, nervous system etc.
6. Computer consciousness emerges from a machine designed for specific tasks.
   • i.e. the predictable behaviour of silicon logic gates and keypad switches
7. Therefore AI can simulate human consciousness but cannot instantiate it. (Lerchner, 2026)

Team Consciousness

1. Despite Lerchner's argument, as the framework applies to both systems we can apply it teams.
2. Imagine each team member continuously checking each of the others...
3. Let us call Minsky's idea organisational consciousness or team consciousness.
4. While it is a mechanistic concept it may help us to ask what makes teams effective.
5. Here are some possible criteria that contribute to the consciousness of a team:

A Checklist

• Although this is hypothetical some measures might be useful.
• (see more detail)

Reclaiming the We?

1. Another factor is a strongly collective sense of identity as a group.
2. We might define a team as a group with a strong sense of collective identity.
3. Some have argued that modern citizens have lost our sense of we.
4. The economic system has eroded our strongly collective sense of unity.
5. Instead we became individuals defined by how we shop.
6. How might we include willingness, generosity empathy in the word we?
7. The following terms describe strong, informal, interpersonal ties.
   • c.f. African word Ubuntu: 'I am what I am because of who we all are'.
   • c.f. Chinese terms such as 'guanxi' (關係) and 'wu wei' (無爲)
   • c.f. the Korean word jeong (정)

Fig. 8 - Aspects of individual and collective agency

care
choirs

jeong
Commensal systems
optimism

Team Hierarchies

1. Managerial hierarchies inevitably reduce team consciousness
   • e.g. vertical organisations create an ‘iceberg of ignorance’ (Yoshida, 1989)
2. This means that information is biased or shared unevenly throughout the system.
3. Our team levelling tool encourages a more holacratic state.
4. Participative, action-based learning is more memorable than theory-based learning.
5. Creative learning is more likely from within small rather than large teams.
   • See synergies and numbers

An evaluative framework

Further reading

1. Backwell, J. & Wood, J., (2012a) Network Consciousness
2. Backwell, J. & Wood, J., (2012b), Network Consciousness and Paradigm Change
3. ⇒ go to NEXT SESSION or return to The School of Co-creation