array9

Alternative title: Some thoughts on an increasingly team-less society

Here is an abused word, giving the impression of something wholesome, but regularly used to condemn many good people for "not being a good team player".

I think a team has to be a group of peers, with like-minded goals, whereas it is now used, by implication, to refer to a strongly hierarchical structure, such as the Infantry? These are totally different; adults versus infants? Think of any modern football team.

Good teams are difficult to create. You don't get to the "fairy Castle" by going directly towards it! Almost by definition a team has no fixed or formal structure of any consequence. Such frameworks may exit, but they are intuitively understood, without any strong rules being enforced. Perhaps this is essentially a naturally occurring democracy.

This may be describing the "hunter" group, rather than the "farmer" group, from our past.

The people who are really not team players are those that have difficulty with being peers, that ask for (rather than just get) commitment, that demand "objective" ranking, accountability, and individual ownership. You can see this all as a bias towards "pull", rather than "push", whereas in a good team, a "pull" is a symptom of a component failure. A "pull" creates change issues of priority, scheduling, and authority. This is the cost of synchroneity, relative to asynchronous operations: the heavy hand rather than the light touch.

Hope this pushes some thoughts your way.

Martin