Difference reveals collective capacity

I was on a call with a colleague of mine and we were discussing a recent workshop she had given. She was teaching systems thinking theory and practice. Instead of offloading a bunch of content to people she designed a highly experiential and relational workshop that allowed the group to discover what they already know about working in systems.

At one point, relating to some learning around working with teams, a person in the workshop asked the question “What do I do when my team isn’t meeting me where I am at?” Instead of answering the question, my colleague invited others to share experiences they had that could help the questioner.

Now this is not a radical approach to teaching by any stretch of the imagination. But my colleague expressed the same delight that I have whenever it happens to me. It is a helpful assumption for me to believe that a group’s capacity is always bigger than I think it is and often times all that is required is a question that draws on different people’s different experiences to reveal that capacity.

The more homogenous a group is in its relevant experience the less internal variety is has to draw on. There is great peril in this of course, because the moment novel thinking is required, it might not be available to the group. They may be completely dependant on an external source of knowledge or they may not have access to the knowledge they need when they need it.

A diverse group is a different thing altogether. It is a system that is capable of learning because it can ask its own questions and provide a range of answers to those questions that might encourage people to experiment with different approaches. Or it might discover that further knowledge is needed and use its different relationships and networks to pursue questions, answers and ideas. Regardless, it is the presence of differences in a group that contribute to its capacity. A group’s capacity is distributed throughout its people, and that capacity is what gives the group the capability of creating new knowledge and experimenting in a safe-to-fail way.