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Ed,
Actually it was directed to our singularities on
the list, which you obviously are not, considering what you wrote.
My father taught me this first when he coached basketball teams and seemed to
win against the best teams in the league as a result of his team's
ensemble. I teach ensemble and so I work daily in it and know
that teams grow as entities.
I've seen a lot of funny examples of the other side
such as the Army Chorus filled one night with "stars" who literally couldn't
march on stage in step because they were too singular to join
feet. If that happened in the Old Guard who went on
immediately afterwards someone would have been killed. The Old
Guard threw fixed bayonet rifles from the front row to the back spinning about
the heads of the entire squad of twenty men. You had better be
One. They also had pretty good reputations as lovers I was
told. We, the Army Chorus, marched and lost an
entire week of free time because we were too important to join
feet. All we lost was a little time.
But the science has been done here Harry and
Arthur. Edward T. Hall's classic "The Dance of Life" has
documented it on film and video left in place for over a year and then analyzed
as "proximics." Donald Schoen did the same for Peter
Senge just as Francis Clark did for Piano Teaching but we have an interesting
phenomenon here. It has to do with Productivity.
Charles, This involves you as
well. It is why the Arts are not
"Productive." Productivity takes
simplicity!. If you can't simplify it then it can never be
productive. That is also the reason that modern business
will always be incompetent at "Learning Teams" and (I believe) public
education. Proximics is a complicated study that demands
incredible subtlety on the part of the analyst in going movie frame by frame in
defining the connections that make up the social
interconnections. There are some amazing stories in "The Dance
of Life". If you don't want to read it I will look it up
and share it with you if I must.
We had a similar problem with all of the research
we did on the Francis Clark Piano books. They literally
revolutionized the piano teaching market but you had to have a degree in Piano
Pedagogy to make them work. They were as complicated as
engineering. Most piano teachers have never had an education
course, much less a pedagogy course. So the books were too
hard to teach. No productivity. Today I
couldn't find a Clark teacher in all of New York City to teach my daughter but
the mindless group "scale" method of Suzuki is found
everywhere. Suzuki is productive. Francis
Clark is not by modern economic standards. But you don't get
students who can sight read anything and transpose it into any key in Suzuki but
you get a productive economic product. Might this not be what
caused that Shuttle to disintegrate? We will have to wait to
find out about that.
Donald Schoen tried to incorporate group learning
in an individualist society at the Sloan School at MIT. Pete
Senge popularized it but they both drew their models from cultures that worked
for years and tried to apply them to companies that may not exist
tomorrow. Schoen drew from the Arts and Management
History while Senge drew from teams, the Arts and the Navajo.
The kind of "Group thinking" that creates a synergy
is far different from the knee-jerk "groupthink" that has been treated with
disdain. Groupthink will get you killed while "Thinking
as a team" will save your life. That was what I knew from the Arts
15 years of training before I went into the Army. In the Army
the marching band saved my life on many occasion because I wasn't a killer by
nature but I could sense the flow of group energy. But that is
enough
Got to work elsewhere.
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 9:21
AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] The world of
work
Ray, I guess this was directed at me. I don't disagree that there
is such a thing as group learning. I've seen it in many situations,
including sports. Time and again, wealthy team owners have tried to win
championships by buying up the very best players. It's worked at times,
but mostly it hasn't. Very often, it's teams with good but still rather
mediocre talent that go the distance, provided that the team as a whole has
developed some form of what appears an almost unconscious understanding of
what everybody is doing. We have a hockey team like that here in
Ottawa. Until very recently it was the top team in the NHL.
Why? Not because the players are that good. It seems to be the
coach's special ability to get everybody playing together and in accord.
I'm sure the same is true in music. I sing in a choir, or pretend
to. Ever so much depends on the director. Some have it, others
simply don't.
I believe we lost something as we progressed(?) from hunting/gathering
and primitive agricultural societies to societies based on specialization and
division of labour, and from small group societies to large group
societies. What we lost is an inability to predict and totally trust
each other's responses and reactions to given events. This would have
been vital to small groups of people trying to survive on the Arctic tundra,
in the jungles or in the deserts, and even to people working together as serfs
or peasants or medieval craftsmen. It's not nearly as important to
people who work in large industrial complexes or office buildings because how
they must behave and what they must do is completely codified in things like
position descriptions and job classifications. However, it's not
entirely lost. My wife has worked with the same small group of people
for the past twenty or so years. Within the next couple of years, half
that group will retire, something that she is looking forward to with complete
dread. Why? Because each member of that small group in intimately
aware of the others' habits and needs, and able to fill in for the others,
make whatever adjustments are needed for the others, etc. The new people
she will have to work with for about six years will probably take take some
time to acquire that level of trust and intimacy, if they ever do.
Ed
Ed Weick
577 Melbourne Ave.
Ottawa, ON, K2A
1W7
Canada
Phone (613) 728 4630
Fax
(613) 728 9382
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 9:29
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] The world of
work
As I said:
One of the first rules of education is that
you can't teach anyone something
that they don't have in their experience
already.
Our experiences are drastically
different. I would recommend you look at the brain states
studies of Dr. Paula Washington in Chamber Musicians. The title
is: AN ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIC STUDY OF MUSICAL PERFORMANCE; IMAGINED
VERSUS ACTUAL PLAYING AND SOLO VERSUS CHAMBER PLAYING. It
is a PHD thesis in the School of Education at New York University
1993.
Dr. Washington, a violist, conductor and
teacher a the LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts in New York
City did as you are doing. She wrote her proposal from her
experience and then set out to understand that experience using the Brain
lab at NYU. She found vastly different results from
what you imply. We are not talking metaphor here as
in Sternberg but actual group learning as a result. I did
research in it for the Francis Clark Piano Library in group study in the
1960s and I've known about it for forty years. I certainly mean
no disrespect as our experiences are obviously different as are our academic
studies. I would simply say that this is an area of
expertise that I have a lot of time and work in and I have
arrived conclusions that are not explainable in other manner than as a
group consciousness that operates as an organism and that springs from a
type of brain state that all must share together in order to participate and
that it is measurable by Electroencephalography.
Best
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 7:09
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] The world of
work
> Sorry about this, but this is the message I intended to
send. Somehow a
> draft version got out first.
>
>
Ed
>
> > Just for purposes of discussion- can we try to
think 'outside the box' of
> > capitalism as it exists today,
especially in the U.S.
> >
> > Would most of you agree :-)
(I don't know the symbol for tongue-in-cheek)
> > that, with all
due respect to Harry, it might be possibleto control
> > capitalism
so that it works for the good of the general public, including
> >
the capitalists? No, they would not be able to make their obscene
profits
> > and salaries; but could there be incentives such that
creativity would be
> > encouraged, especially since the risks
would be reduced?
> >
> > Selma
> >
>
> Selma, you're getting very close to what the Soviet Union was
like. It
> wasn't really communism, it was state capitalism that
was supposed to
> benefit everyone, but that in actual fact benefited
some far more than
> others. The Soviet Union started out as an
ideal egalitarian state, but
> soon demonstrated something that may be
inherent in human nature, that
> people will want to exercise control
and will divide themselves into classes
> to do so.
>
>
Personally, I don't think there is any possibility of achieving
anything
> like benign, good for all, capitalism. An individual
company can perhaps
> operate for a time without too much internal
conflict by making its
> employees its major shareholders (United
Airlines?), but, typically, that
> company has to operate in a
competitive market that is anything but benign
> and friendly.
It may have to cut costs and lay people off, just as
> privately held
firms do.
>
> One has to see society divided into interest
groups. What is good for
> capitalists is not necessarily good
for labour and v.v. IMHO, the only real
> hope labour has is
maintaining its bargaining power, but that has become
> difficult
because labour has changed and is no longer clearly definable.
> Auto
workers may still be "labour" (and well paid labour), but what about
>
clerical or administrative workers in the financial sector? And what
about
> techies? They probably see themselves as aspiring Bill
Gates's, or at least
> they probably did until the dot.com
crash. What people seem to have lost is
> a sense of common
purpose and an understanding of which side of the
> bargaining table
they're on.
>
> Ed
>
> Ed Weick
> 577
Melbourne Ave.
> Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7
> Canada
> Phone
(613) 728 4630
> Fax (613) 728
9382
>
>
>
>
>
>
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