> "As "the nature of life is to grow" (from physics and the Vedas), I
> would surmise that a learning team or a learning person is relatively
> unblocked (psychologically) from his/her/its own nature (to grow). On the
> other hand, a person or team that is usuallyy not learning is probably
> blocked in some way from his/her/its natural instinct to grow. Deming
> would say that the block comes from the systems in which the person or
> team are embedded. Others would say the blocks are in the individuals.
> Others in their interactions. Wherever the origin of the blocks, they
> appear to exist when learning is not the modus operanus. In teams, for
> learning you would probably need a critical mass of relatively unblocked
> people."
I would only add that learning teams are comprised of learning people.
One of the first things that learning people need to learn, when they're
beginning to develop a learning team, is about personal and interpersonal
skills. Among the personal mastery skills that Senge's Fieldbook
considers necessary to working productively on a learning team are vision
and reality awareness; working with matters of the heart;
self-development; self-motivation and then development of skills in
inquiry and advocacy, mental models, differentiation and conflict
resolution. My point, simply, is that one way to determine a learning
from a non-learning team is in the level of personal and interpersonal
skills of the people on the team. My experience is that those teams, that
are blessed with members who demonstrate these skills, seem to exhibit
many of the traits of the learning team (flexibility, adaptation,
self-directing, autonomous, systems-conscious) even without formal
mentoring or coaching (though they can benefit from external coaching).
-- Richard C. "Doc" Holloway, Limen Development Network - olypolys@nwrain.com"My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed." -Christopher Morley
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>