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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 teamwork is to work as a living system then it should be fully conscious.
  2. Unfortunately, discussions about consciousness can quickly get deeply philosophical.
  3. But a tech pioneer claimed that humans are far less conscious than computers (Minsky, 1988).
  4. He was referring to the programming language LISP which constantly checks all its functions.
  5. His idea may not satisfy philosophers but it is a useful basis for discussing teamwork.
  6. Rather than thinking about individual consciousness we might envisage team consciousness,

Team Consciousness

  1. We might call Minsky's concept team consciousness.
  2. While it is a mechanistic idea it could be a useful model for teambuilders.
  3. We can analyse team consciousness using some key parameters:
#CRITERIONFATAL?OPTIMAL:FATAL?
1).Size of the organisationtoo bigoptimaltoo small
2).Diversity of member typestoo diverse optimaltoo similar
3).Connectedness between memberstoo isolatedoptimaltoo enmeshed
4).Proportion of the team who messagetoo lowoptimaltoo high
5).Frequency of messaging too frequentoptimaltoo infrequent
6).Warmth of messagingtoo distractingoptimaltoo impersonal
7).Delays between messagestoo longoptimalscarily short
    • Although this is hypothetical some measures might be useful.
    • (see more detail)

One White Bit 56376 200

Levels of Team Consciousness

  1. Suppose a perfect team is 100% conscious of its interior AND exterior environment.
  2. This would give us a basis for measuring its potential for working well.
  3. Here is a hypothetical set of conditions by which to evaluate a real team.
*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 Hierarchies

One White Bit Iceberg Of Ignorance

  1. Suitably managed - a large team can deliver creative output.
  2. However, our first priority is the support of participants, not outsiders.
  3. Managerial hierarchies inevitably reduce team consciousness
  4. e.g. vertical organisations create an ‘iceberg of ignorance’ (Yoshida, 1989)
  5. This means that information is shared unevenly throughout the system.
  6. Participative, action-based learning is more memorable than theory-based learning.
  7. Creative learning is therefore more likely from small teams, rather than large ones.
  8. ⇒ go to NEXT SESSION or return to The School of Co-creation

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