The Potential of Wisdom Teams

• Bill Russell’s Experience of Alignment and Synergism

• His play would rise to a new level
• He would be in the white heat of competition, yet not feel competitive
• Every fake, cut and pass would be surprising, yet nothing could surprise me
• Like we were playing in slow motion

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Alignment

• A necessary condition for EMPOWERMENT

• Empowering non-aligned individuals worsens the chaos and makes managing
the team even more difficult
• For Jazz musicians, it is called “being in the groove”

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Alignment and Synergism

• Meetings will last for hours, yet fly by

• No one remembers who said what, but knowing we had really come
to a shared understanding
• Of never having to vote

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Team Learning: A definition

• The process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to

create the results its members truly desire
• It builds on the capacity of shared vision
• It also builds on personal mastery
• Knowing how to play together
• Teams are the key learning unit in organizations

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

The Discipline of Team Learning

• The team’s accomplishments can set the tone and establish a

standard for learning together for the larger organization
• Has three critical dimensions

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

 Three critical dimensions
• First, there is a need to think insightfully about complex issues
• Teams must learn how to tap the potential for many minds to be more intelligent than
one mind
• Second, there is a need for innovative, coordinated action
• Third, there is the role of team members on other teams
• A learning team fosters other learning teams through inculcating the practices and skills
of team learning

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

The discipline of team learning

• Is a collective one
• It is meaningless to say that “I,” as an individual, am mastering the
discipline of team learning
• In the same sense that it is meaningless to say “I am mastering the practice
of being a great jazz ensemble.”
• Involves mastering the practices of dialogue and discussion

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

 Dialogue and Discussion

• Are potentially complementary, but most teams lack the ability to

distinguish between the two
• Teams must learn how to deal creatively with the powerful forces opposing
productive dialogue and discussion
• Argyris: defensive routines--ways of interacting that protect us from threat or
embarrassment, but which also prevent us from learning

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Skills!!

Dialogue Discussion

Inquiry Reflection

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Defensive postures

• Systems thinking is especially prone to evoking defensiveness

because of its central message, that our actions create our reality
• The problems we perceive are caused by our actions, not by external,
exogenous forces outside of us

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

 Practice
• The discipline of team learning requires practice
• Teams do not practice enough, generally
• A great play or great orchestra does not happen without practice
• Neither does a great sports team
• Such teams learn by continual movement between performance
and practice

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

The State of Team Learning

• TL is poorly understood
• We cannot describe the phenomenon well--no measures
• There are no overarching theories
• We cannot distinguish team learning from groupthink
• There are few reliable methods for building team learning

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Need for Team Learning

• Has never been greater

• Complexity of today’s problems demands it
• Actions of teams must be innovative and coordinated

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Skills Underlying Team Learning

Team Learning

Personal Shared Systems

Mastery Vision Thinking

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Werner Heisenberg

• Science is rooted in conversations

• Cooperation of different people may culminate in scientific results of
the utmost importance
• Collectively, we can be more insightful, more intelligent than we can
possibly be individually

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

David Bohm

• A leading quantum theorist

• Developed a theory and method of “dialogue” when a group
“becomes open to the flow of a larger intelligence
• Quantum theory implies that the universe is basically an indivisible
whole

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Bohm’s recent research on dialogue

• A unique synthesis of the two major intellectual currents

• systems or holistic view of nature
• interactions between our internal models and our perceptions and actions
• Reminiscent of systems thinking which calls attention to how
behavior is often the consequence of our own actions as guided by
our perceptions

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Bohm on the PURPOSE OF SCIENCE

• not the accumulation of knowledge, since all scientific theories are

eventually proved false
• Rather, the creation of mental maps that guide and shape our
perception and action, bringing about a constant “mutual
participation between nature and consciousness”

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Bohm’s most distinctive contribution
• Thought is “largely a collective phenomenon”
• Analogy between the collective properties of electrons vs. way our
thoughts work
• Leads to an understanding of the general counter productiveness of
thought

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Bohm’s contribution, continued

• “our thought is incoherent… and the resulting counter-

productiveness lies at the root of the world’s problems”

Prepared by James R. Burns

More Bohm

• As electrons, we must look on thought as a systemic phenomena

arising from how we interact and discourse with one another

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Dialogue and Discussion

• Suspending assumptions
• Seeing each other as colleagues
• A Facilitator Who Holds the Context of Dialogue
• Balancing Dialogue and Discussion
• Reflection, Inquiry and Dialogue

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

 Dialogue and Discussion
• Their power lies in their synergy
• No synergy without an understanding of their distinctions
• DISCUSSION--like a ping/pong game where the topic gets hit around
• subject is analyzed and diagnosed from many points of view
• Emphasis is on winning--having one’s view accepted by the group

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

More Dialogue and Discussion

• A sustained emphasis on winning is not compatible with giving first

priority to coherence and truth
• To bring about a change of priorities from “winning” to “pursuit of
the truth”, a dialogue is necessary

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Dialogue

• From the Greek, it means “through the meaning”; “meaning passing

or moving through”
• Through dialogue, a group accesses a larger “pool of common
meaning” which cannot be accessed individually.
• “The whole organizes the parts”

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

 More Dialogue

• Purpose is not to win, but to go beyond any one individual’s

understanding
• In dialogue, individuals gain insights that simply could not be gained
individually
• In dialogue, individuals explore difficult, complex issues from many
points of view
• Dialogue reveals the incoherence in our thought

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

 The Purpose of Dialogue
• To reveal the incoherence in our thought--three types of
incoherence
• Thought denies that it is participative
• Thought stops tracking reality and just goes, like a program
• We misperceive the thoughts as our own, because we fail to see the stream of
collective thinking from which they arise
• Thought establishes its own standard of reference for fixing
problems

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Incoherent thought
• Thought stands in front of us and pretends that it does not
represent
• We become trapped in the theater of our thoughts
• Dialogue is a way of helping people to “see the representative and
participative nature of thought”
• In dialogue, people become observers of their own thinking

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Suspending Assumptions

• [HOLDING THEM IN FRONT OF YOU]

• Difficult because thought deludes us into a view that this is the way it
is

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Seeing each other as Colleagues

• Necessary because thought is participative

• Necessary to establish a positive tone and offset the vulnerability
that dialogue brings
• Does not mean that you need to agree or share the same views

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Dialogue, Colleagues, and Hierarchy

• Choosing to view “adversaries” as “colleagues with different views”

has the greatest benefits
• Hierarchy is antithetical to dialogue, yet is difficult to escape in
organizations

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Dialogue, Colleagues, and Hierarchy

• People who are used to holding the prevailing view because of their
senior position, must surrender that privilege in dialogue, AND
CONVERSELY
• Dialogue must be playful--playing with the ideas, evaluating and
testing them

Prepared by James R. Burns

A Facilitator Who “Holds the Context” of
Dialogue
• In the absence of a skilled facilitator, our habits pull us toward
discussion and away from dialogue
• Carries out many of the basic duties of a good “process facilitator”

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

A Facilitator, Continued

• But the facilitator is allowed to influence the flow of development

simply through participating
• As teams develop skill in dialogue, the role of the facilitator becomes
less crucial

Prepared by James R. Burns

Balancing Dialogue and Discussion

• Discussion is the necessary counterpart of dialogue

• In discussion different views are presented and defended, which may
provide a useful analysis of the whole situation
• In dialogue, different views are presented as a means toward
discovering a new view

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns

Dialog Vs. Discussion

• Dialogue established the view that leads to courses of action

• Discussion leads to new courses of action without establishing that
new view
• Teams that dialogue regularly develop a deep trust that cannot help
but carry over to discussion

19 February, 2000 Prepared by James R. Burns