Ray,
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.
arthur
Ray, go into any
organized bureaucracy, public or private. For profit or not for
profit. NGO or whatever and I think you will find more groupthink than
thinking as a team. Groupthink yields more "brownie points" for
individuals who want to blend into the protective coloration of the group.
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
>
>
>
>
>
>
_______________________________________________
> Futurework mailing
list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
|
