1998 | Uncompleted
Learnings about Group Potential and Dysfunctionality
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Qualities: Each person is much appreciated by the others for their
personal qualities and skills -- although each has very strong reservations
about the limitations and blindspots associated with these skills Interpersonal
skills: Each person favours, and uses very skilfully, a different interpersonal
style -- which others appreciate in many situations but find totally inappropriate
in others
Conflict avoidance: Each person has particular skills for avoiding overt
conflict or engaging in ways they do not personally favour -- effectively undermining
consensus on collective action or discussion of these issues
Vision: Each person has particularly valuable insights into the way
forward and a vision of a desirable future -- but is effectively blind or indifferent
to the insight and vision of others
Articulation: Each person has unusual skills in articulating the way
forward and its associated opportunities -- but has limited capacity to appreciate
the articulation of others, notably because of failure by their proponents to
acknowledge the limitations of such alternative articulations
Management challenge: Each person has valuable insight into the opportunities
and constraints of the collective working environment -- but assumes this is
sufficiently comprehensive to ensure the sustainability of that environment,
effectively denying the relevance of other insights
Working style: Each person has a significantly different understanding
and preference for working style -- and is either insensitive to, or suspicious
of, the style favoured by others
Use of others: Each person has an idea of how the skills of the others
should be most effectively used -- and creates resistance and resentment when
endeavouring to manoeuvre them into a mode they find inappropriate
Acknowledgement: Each person acknowledges some qualities and contributions
of others to them and to third parties -- but fails to recognize the contributions
for which the others would value being acknowledged
Learning: Each person perceives themselves to be willing to learn from
the collective working challenge and from the group situation -- but fails to
recognize what others would value that they learn to ensure the sustainability
of the collective intiative
Attentiveness: Each person perceives themselves as very attentive to
the views of others, which they assume that they have adequately understood
-- except that on vital matters such understanding is perceived by the other
as an irritatingly incomplete caricature of that for which they stand
Enthusiasms: Each person is nourished and motivated by particular and
somewhat unconventional enthusiasms -- which the behaviour of others tends to
erode and undermine
Difficult decisions: Each person is reasonably courageous, if not skilled,
in taking difficult decisions -- but each also has well used skills for channelling
conflicting perspectives and demands for uncomfortable behaviours into unconscious
mechanisms which undermine their efforts to achieve their own goals.
Consistent with the above pattern, a statement such as
this is both part of the solution
-- as well as exacerbating part of the problem