4. Team consciousness

(a sub-section of Co-creative Learning Teams)

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Consciousness

1. Our aim is to help autodidactic and co-creative learners to work in teams.
2. We therefore need effective ways to understand how to make this work.
3. One way is to see teams as systems that are alive and therefore conscious.
   • n.b. here, we use the term for convenience, not for philosophical purposes.)
4. So a simplified definition would be adequate for our practical purposes.
5. By consciousness we simply mean 'being awake, responsive, alert, aware, etc'.
6. Some brain researchers see 'consciousness' as microlevels of awareness (Zeki, 2017)
7. They found consciousness distributed across different regions of the brain.
8. We might find this to be analogous to a cluster of specialist team members.
9. This makes it clear that teams must learn to coordinate themselves.

Eight unconnected people

1. A well coordinated team may be more co-creative than isolated strangers.
2. But this probably means establishing team relationships that are playful and open.
3. Our team levelling tool encourages a more holacratic state.

Inward and outward modes of consciousness

1. Teams must manage their own coherence and their dealings with outsiders.
2. Modernity has given most of us a well-developed sense of the individual self.
3. This elevated interest and the importance of the individual's interior reality.
4. The term self-consciousness was coined in the 19th century by Coleridge.
5. It justifies the separation of consciousness into interior and outward states.
6. Here is a rudimentary chart with hypothetical states of consciousness:

	CATEGORY	AWARENESS OF EXTERIOR STATE	INTERNAL STATE
1.	Shamanic Consciousness	Fully aware of surroundings	Fully aware of itself
2.	Functionally Semi-conscious	Aware of its predicament	Low self-awareness as a team
3.	Zombie-like state	Oblivious to new circumstances	Functions by habitual actions
4.	Comatose/Vegetative State	Unaware of its predicament	Functionally unaware of itself

Organisational consciousness

1. Can we compare human consciousness with computers and AI systems?
2. Marvin Minsky saw human consciousness as inferior to computer consciousness.
3. This is because he saw it merely as a "low-grade system for keeping records" (1988)
   • (the programming language LISP perpetually checks all its functions).
4. While this is a doubtful theory at ecological and philosophical levels it is useful for teamwork.
5. We might call Minsky's model team consciousness.
6. Using this approach we can benchmark team consciousness using a few factors (see below)
   • N.b. this method uses Vadim Kvitash's systems based framework called relonics.
   • N.b. experienced team members set upper and lower viability thresholds

SOME KEY FACTORS	SUBOPTIMAL	VIABLE	SUBOPTIMAL
Number of members in the team	too many	<—★—>	too few
Diversity of membership	too diverse	<—★—>	too similar
Team consciousness	too granulated/dispersed	<—★—>	too specialised
Isolated:connected members ratio	too high	<—★—>	too low
Team responsiveness	too unresponsive	<—★—>	too manic
Proactivity within the team	too lethargic	<—★—>	too controlling
Team communication	too vague/sparse	<—★—>	too explicit
Frequency of messaging	too frequent	<—★—>	too infrequent
Message positivity	too distracting	<—★—>	too impersonal
Delays between messages	too long	<—★—>	too impatient

Possible number of relations

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

A Roll Call in a Team

1. In a team of 8, if each hugs all of the others there would be 29 hugs.
2. But a team of 7 +1 coordinator implies only 7 (roll call) meetings.
3. Therefore in terms of team consciousness this is a poor result.
4. (i.e. the inclusive meeting is 4x more conscious than the roll call).
5. If the team were to grow in size this disparity would increase.

Hierarchical consciousness

The ‘iceberg of ignorance’ (Yoshida, 1989)

1. Above a certain team size, managerial hierarchy tends to become more fixed.
2. Rigid team hierarchies are therefore suboptimal in terms of consciousness.
3. This is illustrated in what Yoshida (1989) called the ‘iceberg of ignorance’.
4. Managerial filters ensure that information is shared unevenly across the team.
5. 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

When all meet all

Modes of engagement

MODE	ATTRIBUTES		OPPOSITES
Cerebral / thoughtful	critical thinking / thoughtful / rational	<—>	thoughtless / irrational
Hands-on / embodied	tacit/practical/action-oriented level / present-to-hand	<—>	cerebral / remote / detached
Emotional / empathetic	personable/emotionally literate / compassionate	<—>	Heartless
Playful & creative	gregarious / inventive / subversive / heretical	<—>	joyless

1. IMMEDIATE FACE-TO-FACE <—-> ASYNCHRONOUS DIGITAL

The Quality of Communication

Communicative <—-> uncommunicative

1. Schmitt trigger consciousness
2. Above +handshake
3. Cartesian consciousness (solipsism)
4. LISP consciousness
5. Roll-call consciousness
6. Conductor consciousness
7. Starling consciousness
8. Mob consciousness (+ more Canetti)
9. Ubuntu consciousness

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

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Further reading

1. Backwell, J. & Wood, J., (2012a) Network Consciousness
2. Backwell, J. & Wood, J., (2012b), Network Consciousness and Paradigm Change
3. Zeki, S., 2017. Art and the brain. In The Brain (pp. 71-103). Routledge

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The Whole Course

1. Systems Thinking
2. Self-management
3. Living systems
4. Team consciousness
5. Team synergy
6. Team sizes
7. Team diversity
8. Lucky Teams
9. Team Tools
10. Heart to Heart