Blue:INCOMPLETE WORK IN PROGRESS

Team consciousness

(return to Co-creative Learning Teams or see some keywords)

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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

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5. Team consciousness

Eight unconnected people

1. Teams have more ready potential for co-creativity than a group of strangers.
2. An effective team is a living system and, therefore, conscious.
3. By 'conscious' we mean many microlevels of awareness that self-coordinate.

Organisational consciousness

1. Marvin Minsky saw human consciousness as inferior to computers.
2. Although this was philosophically dubious it can be applied to teamwork.
3. Minsky merely saw consciousness as a "low-grade system for keeping records" (1988)
   • he was inspired by a programming language called LISP
4. It perpetually checks its own functions'').
5. We can call his model team consciousness.
6. For the purpose of teamwork we can measure consciousness using two factors:
   • a) The total number of possible relationships among team members.
   • b) The average quality of relevant communications across those relationships.

Role-call consciousness

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

A Roll Call in a Team

1. In a hierarchical team:
   • a). the team manager calls the name of each team member
   • b). every team member responds to the manager in turn
2. In a team of 8 (including 1 manager) this would create 7 (roll call) relationships.
3. In terms of organisational consciousness this is a low result

The Roll Call

1. If all 8 were to roll call one other there would be 29 meetings
2. The hierarchical roll-call meeting is 25% less conscious than the inclusive one.
3. Fixed team hierarchies are suboptimal in terms of consciousness.

Hierarchical consciousness

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)

Fig. 8 - Aspects of individual and collective agency

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.
   • See synergies and numbers

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An evaluative framework

*	CATEGORY	AWARENESS OF EXTERIOR STATE	INTERNAL CONNECTEDNESS
1.	Shamanic Consciousness	100% aware of surroundings	100% information sharing internally
2.	Functionally Semi-conscious	Aware of its predicament	Low awareness of its situation
3.	Zombie Organisation	Oblivious to new circumstances	Functions by habitual actions
4.	Comatose/Vegetative State	Unaware of its predicament	Functionally unaware of itself

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#	TEAM CRITERION	FATAL?	OPTIMAL:	FATAL?
1).	Team size	too big	optimal	too small
2).	Team diversity	too diverse	optimal	too similar
3).	Team consciousness	too isolated	optimal	too enmeshed
4).	Frequency of messaging	too frequent	optimal	too infrequent
5).	Message positivity	too distracting	optimal	too impersonal
6).	Delays between messages	too long	optimal	scarily short

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care
choirs
jeong
Commensal systems
optimism

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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

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