Teal Projects & Rapid Learning

A NY colleague of mine, Michael Josefowicz, has reminded me that work needs to be fun, joyful, ideally easy.

And another colleague in Florida, Dasaratha Rama, has set a very high bar for us in terms of rapid learning and application.

Developments and advances in our small team recently have been encouraging in many senses, albeit not something that pays bills any time soon. First of all, our small team explored Trello, with a small project to help with Learning Trello. Right now we are exploring Slack. Underpinning all this is what we all, I think, hope is a Teal approach to working together.

Open to all styles, listening, respectful of one another, but still willing to challenge where something is unclear. But united by a keen bond to "do the right thing wherever possible", to be as altruistic as we can. That Teal openness is a boon in learning terms. We are all, to greater and lesser extents, open to challenge ourselves, and open to learning. The results in learning terms are often very tangible, albeit we have the classic problem that we all learn at different speeds, and start from different places. It seems very Theory U ...

(Love the comment about social theatre saving time and money, at 1:06!)

And we all have very disparate styles, five or six main co-creators very much "separated by a common language". Despite English being the lingua franca, the styles we use are vastly different. Here is a summary of the styles we use: 1) Ex forces: terse, jargon driven, landscape focused, avalanche

2) Ex business: tenacious, opportunistic, seeking sustainability,

3) Academic: process, learning, teaching, publishing, application

4) Former creative agent: riffing, poetic, connected, expansive, tidal

5) Scientist: micro focused, determined, obssessive

6) Project manager: blunt, tasks, teams, tools, support, goals

Adapting our language sets to work in teams is hard, often meaning we go slower than we would like. But we are slowly finding ways to ask each other for examples, when things are not clear, so we can see things in their language and translate into ours.

Perhaps after the Slack exploration, we can next explore how to make our collaborations easier, more fun. And what language sets we might use to better facilitate our team development.