Team Learning

The previous post trigged a wish to share some excerpts from my master thesis with you!

In many organisations today, people are organised in groups to perform specific task. These groups are often called teams. The team can contain knowledge workers that acquire, generate and share knowledge. They work and learn together. Senge (1992) calls this team learning. Flood (1999) claims that often the aim of team learning is to achieve alignment in people’s thoughts and energies. This brings us back to the notion of mental models and that the mentioned alignment in thought is a shared mental model, or at least a similar mental model with common elements or schemata. If we have people that work with the same tasks within a similar context it could be that they have in some sense similar mental models regarding the task, thus a common understanding (Senge, 1992). Davenport and Prusak (1998) mention that without a common understanding of terms, knowledge sharing might not occur. Sometimes multiple and contradictory meanings for fundamental terms exists in many organisations and create barriers to consolidate information and knowledge. In support of this, Senge (1992) claims that discussion and dialogue are the most important practises in a team. He argues that discussion and dialogue are necessary counterparts in a quest for consensus. This consensus can be seen as alignment in the mental models between the knowledge workers.

Davenport and Prusak (1998) notes that the traditional management attitude is “Stop talking and get to work!”, while the advice to a knowledge worker should be “Start talking and get to work!”. This communication and alignment in energy and thought can result in what some organisations call best practices, where people learn from each-others’ success. The sharing does not only occur within the group, but it also influences other groups in the organisation, meaning the groups are not disclosed to influence from the outside. Team learning and knowledge sharing within a team enables us to act with today’s knowledge instead.

Another perspective posed along the same lines is to understand tacit knowledge sharing in a team, as people “following rules by being members of communities, with the disposition to reciprocally adjust our use of signs to that of the rest of the community” (Gerrans, 2005). This means that a community has its own rules and we act accordingly.