Teams and Experts, Teams of Experts, Experts at Teaming

I was interested by something I read recently by Anders Ericsson, possibly in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”, about how people really achieve expert mastery. It made me wonder about how teams achieve team mastery and how Dialogue Life can help.
“As a rule, experts practice things differently. Better than the rest of us, and similar to each other.” Anders Ericsson
Anders Ericsson “Many individuals seem satisfied in reaching a merely acceptable level of performance, such as amateur tennis players and golfers, and they attempt to reach such a level while minimizing the period of effortful skill acquisition. Once an acceptable level has been reached, they need only to maintain a stable performance, and often do so with minimal effort for years and decades.”
Anders Ericsson “Deliberate practice presents performers with tasks that are initially outside their current realm of reliable performance, yet can be mastered within hours of practice.”
Most of the knowledge and skill that distinguishes the best froim the rest is tacit knowledge that either cannot be made explicit or takes too long to explain. It also varies so subtly, but importantly, when it is affected by a varying context that itself cannot be desribed in sufficient detail in time to remain relevant. This tacit knowledge can only be developed through repeated practice and experience. When this learning takes place in a small team, each learner interweaves more vicarious and personal experience than they can obtain alone. They can see how others deal with a common situation and what happens. The actions of others opens their minds to alternative ways of behaving that may not have occurred to them spontaneously. Often they realise what they did not know before and why it is important. They do not need to make their ignorance explicit, so they can internalise their learning quickly and easily without embarrassment.
Dialogue Life helps teams to become expert at teaming. It gives timely feedback so that teams can learn how they are behaving and how their behaviour affects team performance. Team performance is the product of all the team members’ individual behaviours, each of which is, at least partially, the outcome of each other’s behaviour. Dialogue Life’s systemic approach recognizes that the actions of each team member simultaneously depend on and affect every other team member.
Many tools help people in teams to understand and value their differences. Relevant diversity is vital to help teams perform. Dialogue Life shows teams how to make the most the diversity they have and how to turn the differences into solid performance.

 In Harvard Business Review 2007 Ericsson et al wrote, “Real expertise must pass three tests. First, it must lead to performance that is consistently superior to that of the expert’s peers. Second, real expertise produces concrete results. Brain surgeons, for example, not only must be skillful with their scalpels but also must have successful outcomes with their patients. A chess player must be able to win matches in tournaments. Finally, true expertise can be replicated and measured in the lab. As the British scientist Lord Kelvin stated, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.”

 Marcial Losada has shown that teams that have become expert at applying the three key behavioural ratios do produce performances better than other good teams. They do produce concrete results. And their expertise can be replicated and measured in the lab.