Gerry Starnes asked me to post the definition, but I have been away from
my library for some time, and have only now been able to provide the
quote:
"A team is a small number of people with complementary skills, who are
committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which
they hold themselves mutually accountable."
Last week I attended a workshop conducted by Peter Senge and Fred Simon.
Simon was the program manager for the 1995 Lincoln Continental. In his
part of the workshop, Simon challenged my idea of a "team" by stating that
he began the work of building a learning organization by convening his
entire team "off-site" - all 300+ of them. He said that in the course of
the work the team expanded and contracted, and that at one point the
number exceeded 1000. I looked around the ballroom, where just a bit
fewer than 1000 people were assembled, and my mental model refused to
budge. I stick with Katzenbach and Smith. Nevertheless, it was clear from
the presentation that practicing the disciplines with facilitation from
Peter Senge's organization (not clear whether it was an Innovation
Associates project or a project of the Center for Organizational Learning
or both) enabled a high order of open communication among the "team
members" and that shared vision as described in The 5th Discipline drove
the process. Simon gave really good examples of how the various practices
applied in the development of his program. Readers of this list will be
interested in two aspects of his talk:
First, the structure of his presentation was a "story". The story
contained little stories within it to explain how events and ideas
interlocked. Its tone and its style were strongly reminiscent of the
elders telling their tales around the campfire.
Second, he talked about "the hard stuff" which has been referred to here
as "results". He compared 1995 Continental results with Ford data for
other new products. Where Ford normally experiences a 50% on-time rate
for engineering release, the Continental had 98% in a month early. Where
Ford's evaluation and validation prototypes generally have about 50% of
parts on time, the Continental had 87% and 93% respectively.
Perhaps most impressive of all is their quality audit performance, using
an in-house index of problems found in a finished product. Where in pilot
production 55 is a standard measure and 35 was best-ever, the Continental
came in at 28; and where the Ford standard for final audit is 9, the
Continental came in at 5.8.
The part the audience liked the best was Fred's story about his conflict
with the finance manager and how they used the ladder of inference in a
dialogue to expose their mental models and the assumptions they led to.
This was a very powerful example of LO practices in a concrete situation
and reinforced the understanding that people can work together who
disagree with each other. This is one of the lessons Katzenbach and Smith
discuss in "The Wisdom of Teams", which is where I started this diatribe.
Thanks for your patience.
--Jack Hirschfeld Can analysis be worthwhile? Is the theatre really dead? jack@his.com