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Team consciousness

(return to Co-creative Learning Teams or see some 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 Tools

5. Team consciousness

One White Bit 8 Individuals

One White Bit Eight unconnected people
  1. Teams have more ready potential for co-creativity than a group of strangers.
  2. If effective teams are a living systems you'd expect them to be conscious.
  3. By 'conscious' we mean many microlevels of awareness that coordinate themselves.

Organisational consciousness

  1. But how does human consciousness compare to AI systems?
  2. Marvin Minsky argued that it was inferior to the consciousness of computers.
  3. He saw consciousness merely as a "low-grade system for keeping records" (1988)
    • (the programming language LISP perpetually checks all its functions).
  4. If we apply this to teamwork we might call his model team consciousness.
  5. In this context we can benchmark team consciousness using three factors:
    • a) The ratio of actual-to-potential number of relationships across the whole team
    • b) The viable level of responsiveness of the individuals
    • c) The average quality of team relevant information exchanged

Possible number of relations

  1. At its simplest or lowest level team consciousness is like a roll call or head count.

One White Bit Roll Call Consciousness

One White Bit A Roll Call in a Team
  1. A dispersed team might consist of a group of workers managed by a coordinator:
    • i). the coordinator calls the name of each team member in turn
    • ii). every team member responds to the coordinator in turn
  2. If a team of 8 includes 1 coordinator this implies 7 (roll call) relationships.
  3. However, in terms of team consciousness this is a poor result

One White Bit Full Team Consciousness

One White Bit When all of the members say hello
  1. Because if all 8 were to roll call each other there would be 29 meetings
  2. The meeting offers less than 25% of the consciousness of the inclusive one.
  3. Fixed team hierarchies are therefore suboptimal in terms of consciousness.

Hierarchical consciousness

One White Bit Iceberg Of Ignorance

One White Bit The ‘iceberg of ignorance’ (after Yoshida, 1989)
  1. And if we call Minsky's description team consciousness it is a low level.
    • e.g. vertical organisations create an ‘iceberg of ignorance’ (Yoshida, 1989)
  2. This means that information is biased or shared unevenly throughout the system.

Reclaiming the We?

  1. In a team of 8 individuals, if each classmate hugs all the others there would be 29 hugs.
  2. Another factor is a strongly collective sense of identity as a group.
  3. We might define a team as a group with a strong sense of collective identity.
  4. Some have argued that modern citizens have lost our sense of we.
  5. The economic system has eroded our strongly collective sense of unity.
  6. Instead we became individuals defined by how we shop.
  7. How might we include willingness, generosity empathy in the word we?
  8. 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)

One White Bit Me To We Transition

One White Bit Fig. 8 - Aspects of individual and collective agency

One White Bit

Team Hierarchies

  1. Our team levelling tool encourages a more holacratic state.
  2. Participative, action-based learning is more memorable than theory-based learning.
  3. Creative learning is more likely from within small rather than large teams.

One White Bit 56376 200

An evaluative framework

*CATEGORYAWARENESS OF EXTERIOR STATEINTERNAL CONNECTEDNESS
1.Shamanic Consciousness100% aware of surroundings100% information sharing internally
2.Functionally Semi-consciousAware of its predicamentLow awareness of its situation 
3.Zombie OrganisationOblivious to new circumstancesFunctions by habitual actions
4.Comatose/Vegetative StateUnaware of its predicamentFunctionally unaware of itself
#TEAM CRITERIONFATAL?OPTIMAL:FATAL?
1).Team sizetoo bigoptimaltoo small
2).Team diversitytoo diverse optimaltoo similar
3).Team consciousnesstoo isolatedoptimaltoo enmeshed
4).Frequency of messaging too frequentoptimaltoo infrequent
5).Message positivitytoo distractingoptimaltoo impersonal
6).Delays between messagestoo longoptimalscarily short

One White Bit Noun AugusteRodin 8247183 @1200
One White Bit Noun Accountability 6994389

care
choirs
jeong
Commensal systems
optimism

Further reading

  1. Backwell, J. & Wood, J., (2012a) Network Consciousness
  2. Backwell, J. & Wood, J., (2012b), Network Consciousness and Paradigm Change

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