The rarest skill of all – a builder of teams Shooting from the lip

IT’S just before the Bok rugby – Saturday. I’m thinking about thinking. In their past four matches, England have spent huge time in their opponents’ territory, but haven’t “finished”, scored. So they’ve lost.

It occurs to me: That’s a weakness. Or a strength. If they LEARN.

The most powerful word, for any group trying to achieve something. Anything.

After those defeats, England had an extraordinary opportunity:

To understand their greatest weakness. And learn how to address it. For an equally great improvement.

The site valuebasedmanagement. net explains: “For Peter Senge (1990), change is teaming and learning is change. ‘Deep down, we are all learners.’” In

Senge salutes teams of people “continually learning how to learn together”.

But first: we’re warned to detect seven terrifying organisational “learning disabilities”.

“I am my position” – with this disability, individual units miss bigger pictures and inter-unity.

“The enemy is out there” – the disability of finding an external agent to blame.

“The illusion of taking charge” – reactivity mistaken as proactivity.

“The fixation on events” – not “patterns”.

“The parable of the boiled frog” – blind to gradual changes.

“The delusion of learning from experience” – because some effects are beyond the current limits of our awareness.

And “The myth of the management team” – with this disability, management protects itself from the threat of appearing uncertain or ignorant in the face of collective inquiry, resulting in “skilled incompetence” – “people who are incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning”.

But all’s not lost. Senge advises “Five Disciplines” as antidotes.

1: Systems Thinking. 2: Personal Mastery. 3: Mental Models. 4: Building Shared Vision – when “people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to”. 5: Team Learning – engaging in true dialogue.

I WhatsApp a famous rugby coach – explain my core strategy:

“There are many ‘moving parts’ in any system. To succeed, we need to do one thing better, more intensively, faster and more consistently than anyone else – together: LEARN.”

His response: “True. But: Our sickness is we cannot get 10 experts to sit down. Come up with those four things in rugby we need to do very, very well and make it happen.

“As in politics, it’s all about money and fame. Not getting the job done.

“But: Your model does work in willing hands.”

Ah. Collective “willing hands” – the precondition for group learning.

So, that means our single-most important person is: The One Who Inspires, Who Can Build a Team.

They don’t even have to know a thing about rugby. (Or whatever game we’re playing.)