Included under the heading of working and playing well with others is the necessity of learning from each other. However, for years our educational system has focused on rewarding individual learning and performance. Only when I was working on my MBA degree did I experience the “team project , with very little guidance, I might add on, how to work in a team.
Back in 1990, Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline-The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization hit the bookstores. Among the five core disciplines that he introduced was something called “team learning along with the premise that teams – not individuals – are the fundamental learning unit in an organization.
In a post a couple of days ago, I talked about the record snowfall that hit New Mexico and the Albuquerque area last week. On this, the fifth day after the snowfall the Albuquerque public schools remain closed because most of the school parking lots remain unplowed. Certainly, the sheer amount of snow and the fact that the city lacks the equipment that many snow-belt metropolitan areas have to handle storms of this magnitude is contributing to the slow return to normal life around here. Mayor Martin Chavez of Albuquerque acknowledged that while the city has done a pretty good job of responding, it could probably improve its performance next time and so he has formed a task force to look at how the city could be better able to handle such events in the future. In the spirit of team learning, I would offer the possibility that the first action of this task force should be to contact officials in snow-belt cities such as Minneapolis, MN, Chicago, IL, etc., to find out what these cities have learned about dealing with major snowfalls so that Albuquerque does not have to reinvent solutions that might already exist.