The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge

Author:Peter M. Senge [Senge, Peter M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-47764-4
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

11

TEAM LEARNING

THE POTENTIAL WISDOM OF TEAMS

“By design and by talent,” wrote basketball player Bill Russell of his team, the Boston Celtics, “[we] were a team of specialists, and like a team of specialists in any field, our performance depended both on individual excellence and on how well we worked together. None of us had to strain to understand that we had to complement each other’s specialties; it was simply a fact, and we all tried to figure out ways to make our combination more effective…. Off the court, most of us were oddballs by society’s standards—not the kind of people who blend in with others or who tailor their personalities to match what’s expected of them.”1

Russell is careful to tell us that it’s not friendship, it’s a different kind of team relationship that made his team’s work special. That relationship, more than any individual triumph, gave him his greatest moments in the sport: “Every so often a Celtic game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game,” he wrote, “and would be magical. The feeling is difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened I could feel my play rise to a new level … It would surround not only me and the other Celtics but also the players on the other team, and even the referees … At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in the white heat of competition, and yet I wouldn’t feel competitive, which is a miracle in itself … The game would move so fast that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken … To me, the key was that both teams had to be playing at their peaks, and they had to be competitive….”

Russell’s Celtics (winner of eleven world championships in thirteen years) demonstrate a phenomenon we have come to call “alignment,” when a group of people function as a whole. In most teams, the energies of individual members work at cross purposes. If we drew a picture of the team as a collection of individuals with different degrees of “personal power” (ability to accomplish intended results) headed in different directions in their lives, the picture might look something like this:2

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