“In great teams conflict becomes productive.”

This is one of my favorite quotes from Peter Senge’s classic book on business: The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. In context, Senge is measuring greatness by how quickly teams learn and conflict is an important part of the learning process. He makes a strong case that teams are the fundamental learning units of an organization – and that organizations that learn faster than their competitors have a sustainable competitive advantage. In fact, it’s the only sustainable competitive advantage in the long run.

Why are teams, rather than individuals, the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations? Senge builds his case on four contentions:

1)       individuals learn faster in teams;

2)       skills and knowledge propagate through teams;

3)       all important decisions are made in teams;

4)       extraordinary results are delivered through teams because the whole is greater than the parts.

What are the tools teams use to learn? Senge calls them “dialogue and discussion.” You might be more familiar with them as “brainstorming and continual questioning,” our old friend the Challenge Process.

Conflict, as noted earlier, tends to arise during the discussion, or analytic phase, when the team is driving towards a decision. Productive conflict is characterized by a lack of defensiveness amongst participants. Unproductive conflict is a hallmark of mediocre teams where “one of two conditions usually surround conflict. Either there is an appearance of no conflict on the surface, or there is rigid polarization.”

Senge concludes his section on team learning by detailing the defensive routines people develop for both conditions, their consequences, and the difficulties in addressing them. One key requirement to overcoming defensive routines is “a ruthless commitment to telling the truth about our current reality.” Hmmm, sounds a lot like the MBM Guiding Principle of Humility and its focus on intellectual honesty in order to “constructively deal with reality.”

Challenge Process, Humility, Peter Senge