AoEC Team Learning Masterclass, December 13th, Edinburgh

Stimulus from Academic reading, Jenny Campbell

Structure of this paper involves 4 questions posed during the reading:

1. Why is it important that teams learn collectively? (And within this, how important is it that

they all learn the same thing?)

2. How do teams learn collectively?

3. Learning norms within organisation, any good?

4. So what?

1. WHY IS IT IMPORTANT THAT TEAMS LEARN COLLECTIVELY?

Topline:

1. To increase their individual and collective capacity (Hawkins)

2. A learning organisation is one that is continually expanding its capacity to create it’s future .

(Senge)

3. Learning is knowledge which in turn is capacity to effect action – learning includes therefore

the need to take action. (Senge)

4. Organisational learning or systemic learning relies on an increased understanding of

interdependence. (Senge)

5. Transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that groups of people can

reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of the individual members’

talents. (Senge)

6. The real potential of this discipline is to help teams re-create themselves so that gains in

capability don’t last just one season, and are sustaining and self-reinforcing. (Senge)

7. The only relevant learning in a company is the learning done by those people who have the

power to take action. (Arie de Geus, Shell) => implies need for including suppliers,

customers, partners etc. One critical element of this wider team learning is developing a

collaborative way to design the broader infrastructure which determines how teams are

identified and supported in their work.

8. A key mechanism through which learning organisations become strategically and

operationally adaptive and responsive. (Harvard)

9. Learning in teams increases learning of individuals. (Harvard)

10. Team Learning only makes sense if the team shares a common purpose - this which provides

a reason for learning together. (Jenny!)

11. From Harvard’s Three Perspectives on Team Learning

3 contexts for team learning:

1. Outcome improvement (learning curves in operational settings)

2. Task mastery (coordination of task knowledge)

3. Group process( learning processes themselves in teams)

2. HOW DO TEAMS LEARN?

David Clutterbuck(2007) defines the learning team as ‘ a group of people with a common

purpose who take active responsibility for developing each other and themselves’.

Focus on alignment of team – it’s about enhancing a team’s capacity to think and act in new

synergistic ways, with full coordination and a sense of unity, because team members know

each other’s hearts and minds. As alignment grows, they develop the capacity to use their

disagreements to make their collective understanding richer. (Senge)

Learning and execution (delivery and efficiency) are often at odds: learning by its nature

involves uncertainty, false starts, occasional dead ends. Team learning has to be recognised

as essential – organisations have to learn to tolerate forays into the unknown. (Harvard)

Through dialogue

o A sustained collective enquiry into everyday experience and what we take for

granted.

o The goal is to open new ground by establishing a ‘container’ or ‘field’ for inquiry: a

setting where people can become more aware of the context around their

experience, and of the processes of thought and feeling that created that

experience. Reference Human Systems Dynamics.

o Pay attention to spaces between the words.

o A true turning to one another, full appreciation of another

o Designed with following in mind

Invitation. Starts the build of the container – choice to participate; safety;

free up from traditional structures and hierarchy

Generative Listening

Observing the Observer. Help create silence in order to notice self and team.

Suspend assumptions. Suspend assumptions in front of team – surface

them, display, inquiry – to suspend and invite other dimensions.

Use disagreement as an opportunity

Starts with self-mastery and self-knowledge (Senge)

Requires patience! You can expect times of frustration and embarrassment.(Senge)

Embrace diversity

Discovering the team’s learning style (ie collective learning style over and above individual

members)

Using Kolb, each point on the wheel has a team equivalent:

Public reflection involves discussion on mental models and beliefs, and challenge within this. This

leads to mutual understanding which in turn leads to shared meaning and shared insights. These are

most crucial steps .

Teams need to unlearn. ‘ Organizations which have been poisoned by their own success are

often unable to unlearn obsolete knowledge in spite of strong disconfirmations.’ (Harvard)

Characteristics of learning team

o External facilitator, at least to start off with

o Ground rules for learning – truth, relevancy, all voices, criteria, check-ins, safety,

forgiveness (BIG!)

o Where the unconscious team processes are brought into consciousness –

mindfulness resonances

Summary of Harvard Findings

Concepts Outcome Improvement

Task Mastery Group Process

Motivating Concern

At what rate do groups improve their efficiency

How do team members coordinate knowledge and skill to accomplish task

What drives learning-oriented behaviours and processes in organisational workgroups

Concept of Team Learning

Learning is performance improvement – usually efficiency improvement (learning curve) ‘Practice makes perfect’

Learning is task mastery through leverage of members’ knowledge and skills ‘ Know what each other knows’

Learning is a process of sharing information and reflecting on experience. (Note 2) High performing team (Note 3)

Dominant Independent Variables

Codified Knowledge Co-location or shared manager (for tacit knowledge) Team stability especially for tacit knowledge Knowledge sharing

Group members trained together Development of a stable Transactive Memory System (TMS)(Note 1) Communication

Team Leader Behaviour (Note 4) Psychological safety (Note 4) Team identification Team composition Organisational context (Note 5)

Dominant Dependent Variables

Rate of cost or time reduction

Performance on a novel task

Team effectiveness, or learning behaviour

Findings Amount of experience working together improves team performance outcomes In later work, how people work together and dimension of improvement affects rate of learning

Having coordinated ways of codifying, storing and retrieving individual knowledge is necessary to access individual knowledge in a timely way

Team Leadership and shared beliefs about psychological safety, goals, identity either promote or inhibit team learning behaviours, and in turn team performance

Notes

(1) A transactive memory system which leads to increased accuracy, alignment, and an higher

degress of complexty of understanding of one another, is defined as covering

o Memory differentiation. The tendency for team members to specialise in

remembering distinct aspects of the task

o Task coordination. The ability of the team to work smoothly together

o Task credibility. How much the team members trust one another’s knowledge.

o Dependencies: Task motivation, level of team interaction, ‘team mindedness’ ie

whether members think about themselves as team members rather than individuals.

o Characteristics includes: shared mental models (although there is risk that this may

decrease as role differentiation increases over time); high performance (large teams

with stable TMS achieve improved time outcomes; small teams reaped better

quality outcomes.)

(2) Team learning behaviours include

a. Evidence of sharing errors more readily

(3) Team performance clearly linked to team learning

a. Learning orientation is a significant predictor of team performance but with

curvilinear relationship: it’s about balance

b. Increased speed to market and innovation evidenced

c. Different kinds of learning for different performance needs.

i. Incremental learning for increased efficiencies – no learning will cost

organisation in near-term profit and competitiveness. Best learning to

support this is ‘local learning’ – almost avoiding excess external contact

ii. Radical learning for innovation – no learning of this type may mean

organisation misses opportunities for future competitiveness. Best learning

to support this is ‘distal learning’ - embracing external contact

d. 2 types of learning, both related to performance

i. ‘Learn What’ – best practice, requires boundary spanning to draw on teams

from other parts of organisation or external

ii. ‘Learn How’ – process improvement

(4) Team Leaders can help create conditions for taking risk in front of fellow team members by

Encouraging member participation in decision making, ensuring full diversity of team

put to best use

De-emphasising power differences

Clarifying team goals

Providing bridges to outside parties via leader’s status (thereby increasing diversity

in team discussion)

(5) The extent to which teams create new processes and practices is more likely to occur in less-

centralised organisations – autonomy in decision making

Questions Raised by Harvard:

How learning of individual work teams translate into organisational learning is not understood

(1) How are team learning processes and outcomes coordinated between teams to ensure

organisational goals are met?

(2) How do teams configure and re-configure over time to accomplish organisational work?

(3) What are the coherent patterns of team learning that can be created in an organisational

setting, so that individual teams can learn independently, but in support of common

organisational aims?

2. TEAM LEARNING NORMS – ANY GOOD?

Literature read so far pointing to very little collective learning. 3 major issues

1. Not fully learning – more caught in short cuts. See Kolb short circuits below plus TMS failures

2. Or learning, but not ensuring learning is either the same thing, and/or not learning at deeper

level in order to create new capacity.

3. Goal setting gets in the way of real learning. Learning or mastery goals as part of

performance required.

1. Not fully learning – more caught in short cuts or TMS failures

(The following is an extract from Hawkin’s book:)

There are 5 main limiting styles:

1. The fire fighting or compulsive pragmatist team. This is the plan-do-plan-do trap, where the

motto is ‘ if what we plan does not work, let us plan to do something different’. The learning

stays at the level of trial and error. This sort of team will tend to have a short-term tactical

and problem-solving bias.

2. The post-mortemizing team. This is the do-reflect-do-reflect trap where the motto is ‘ Reflect

on what went wrong and correct it. The learning here is restricted to error correction. Here

the team will over-focus on recent past and what went wrong.

3. The navel gazing theorists. This is the reflect-theorize-reflect-theorize trap where the motto

is ‘Philosophise on how things could be better, but never risk putting theories into test.

4. The paralysis by analysis team. This is the analyse-plan-analyse some more-plan where the

motto is ‘ Think before we jump, plan how to do it, and think a bit more.’ Learning is limited

by the fear of getting it wrong or taking a risk. The team with this learning bias will spend a

lot of time in ‘Clarification (discipline 2 of 5C model of Hawkins), trying to analyse what is

wrong, getting consultancy help on how it could be done differently, listening to change

proposals but fearful about trialling approaches, or engaging with others until they are

confident they have got the perfect answer.

5. The totalitarian team. This the theorize-do trap where the motto is ‘work it out in theory

and tell them what we have decided. This short trap also leads to a very little leadership

engagement with the wider system, only an imposition of what the team has decided, which

is a great way of creating resistance and failure to win hearts and minds to the way forward.

TMS Failures:

How well does it reflect external reality

Team size

Turnover of people

Collaborative inhibition – complicity in team that team performs lower than any individual

Mutual enhancement – tendency to discuss shared knowledge only rather than knowledge

held by one member only

Politics! Reference mental models

Relying on stereotypes for assessing and assigning one another’s credibility eg gender – TMS

can explicitly perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Candid sharing can appear as a risk to an

established TMS.

2. Or learning, but not ensuring learning is either the same thing, and/or not learning at deeper

level in order to create new capacity.

From direct experience. Team members post-rationalisation on less than successful situations often

include leader saying ‘ we learnt a lot’ but without any attention to the ‘we’ of the statement.

Instead, it’s for each team member to figure out what they individually learn. But if you pay

attention to the ‘we’ with likes of learning events, collective learning – and future holding one

another to account against agreed action on these lessons learnt – makes enormous difference to

increased effectiveness, and possibly to expanding overall collective leadership capacity for

performance.

3. Goal setting gets in the way of real learning. Learning or mastery goals as part of

performance required.

Influence of Goals (extracts from Goals Gone Wild: Systematic Side Effects of OverPrescribing Goal

Setting) – seems to get in the way

‘The beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal

setting has been largely ignored.’ Bad side effects include: rise in unethical behaviour (internally and

externally towards clients/stakeholders); over-focus on one area to detriment of whole system;

distorted risk preferences; corrosion of organisational culture; reduced intrinsic motivation.

‘If you know the exact specific behaviours you want, stretch goals may be just fine. But if you want

employees to engage in other pro-social behaviours (like helping others) and/or act ethically, you

need to be more careful. There is a growing set of research that shows ‘learning or mastery’ goals

have much more effects on performance and intrinsic motivation than ‘performance’ goals.’

4. SO WHAT? (INITIAL THOUGHTS FOR ME AS A TEAM COACH)

To help a team overcome the short cuts for learning:

Deliberately use frame of learning for all team coach sessions. Help it become a habit.

Kolb useful for self-diagnosis – and specifically interesting to use for different types of

tasks that team is facing, may differ.

Use techniques such as collective build for full team learning. Would like to have more

techniques for this, I think this is the key – good process that will be credible and really

advance team learning. In fact only way for credible assignment of time for thinking bit.

Not sure how to ensure team members learning same thing, how do we (team and

coach) know this? When is it important?

What is the balance between performance and learning, and does it matter what type of

learning (ref Harvard 3 types)

With respect to transformational change, help with a process using following

o Get fear out in the open, on the table

o Challenge any denial about need to change. Ensure the real data is being looked

at, and not denied to be better than it actually is. Do this strongly – my

experience is this is really true, denial is endemic in systems.

o Work on unlearning by re-examining the assumptions and truths upon which

success has previously been built- be prepared to create wholly new models. For

this, could use scaling process. Ref Solution-focussed Team Coaching process as

per Meier:

o Coach uses scale of 10 to represent perfect future (around topic); 1 to represent

its opposite. Invites team to determine where they are today. From this

How did you manage to get to this point. What’s the difference between

1 and now

If you think about your best highlight, where was it on the scale

What did you personally contribute to where you are now and this

highlight

How would you know you have progressed just a small step towards 10

Which resources did you use to be able to keep at X and not go lower

5. References:

McKinsey Quarterly: Creating the Learning Organization, interview with Senge. Feb 1992 McKinsey Quarterly: A CEO’s guide to re-energising the senior team. September 2009 Harvard Business Review: Goals Gone Wild: The Systemic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting. 2009 Harvard Business Review: When Goal Setting Goes Bad, March 2009 Harvard Business School: Three Perspectives on Team Learning: Outcome Improvement, Task Mastery and Group Process. Dec 2006 Peter Hawkins: Leadership Team Coaching, 2011 The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Senge, 2002 edition Human Systems Dynamics, Glenda Eoyang

Mindfulness practices. Many references!!