Self-organizing groups and work groups are groups of learners. Everyone in the group may be an expert at something, but nobody in the group is an expert at what the group is attempting to do. I\u2019ve seen\u00a0this have remarkable\u00a0impacts on learning. For example:<\/p>\n
As a trained educator, what I see in and around the self-organizing groups I study is so far beyond cool that we\u2019re going to have to invent a new word for it. Unbelievably cool <\/em>works for now. This type of learning\u2014from within, from\u00a0experience,\u00a0and for multiple people and groups\u2014is what many of us get advanced degrees to muster the courage and brain cells to do on our own. As an individual, though, it\u2019s tough to pull off learning such as this consistently and for extended periods of time. At least it is for me.<\/p>\n Today, more and more I\u2019m participating in and studying self-organizing groups that exist outside of formal organizations–some of the groups\u00a0aren’t centered around getting work done but around building community. This is scary territory for me as a person who has defined herself through work and through expertise in the past. I’m learning that\u00a0what is now easy for me within organization and across organizations\u00a0(fostering and sustaining self-org work groups) is still remarkably challenging for me outside the comfortable confines of organizational walls and shared work. But once again, I\u2019m in the lucky\u00a0position of getting to learn from learners\u2014as a learner. For example, today I learned that\u00a0in a newly forming self-organizing group\u2014outside of any organization\u2014I\u2019m learning faster and better as a 2-person group than I can on my own. <\/strong>Here’s how…<\/p>\n I\u2019m currently co-creating a monthly discussion group on the subject \u201cself-organizing systems\u201d here in Seattle. I need this group because the idea of further studying self-organizing systems\u2014across dozens of disciplines\u2014is\u00a0just too daunting to tackle on my own. It’s taking too much time.\u00a0I need to be learning from and with others. Eleven strangers, so far, have agreed to become part of this discussion group. We met for the firt time in late March, and I facilitated a discussion about what self-organizing work groups in organizations are and how to recognize them. Attendees asked me to continue the talk at the May meeting. This week, however, the amazing woman who agreed to co-facilitate the May meeting asked me the question \u201cWhat do you want to learn in this group?\u201d She reminded me that it\u2019s the group itself that I want\u2014a group to learn about self-organizing systems with and from\u2014and that I was risking setting myself up as an expert teaching a class, which\u00a0won’t give me what I want from the group. This is a woman who claims no expertise about self-organizing systems, like I do. She came to the group to learn. She reminded me of what mattered most to me about this group. I want it to be a place where I get to be a learner, not the expert, and where where I get to learn along with others. \u00a0So together we’re changing the May meeting to be a discussion about what supports success in self-organizing groups like the one we’re creating (outside of organizations and not focused directly on work). None of us, to my knowledge, is an expert on that.<\/p>\n Would an individual expert on self-organizing systems have pulled me to this understanding so quickly? Probably not.\u00a0Despite all my years of study and expertise, I didn’t. I needed a learner and to be a learner to remind me of what matters most to me–learning!<\/p>\n So, there\u2019s reason #2981 for creating\/joining self-organizing groups and work groups for yourself. You get to learn from learners as a learner (and teaching others can then become a non-stressful fringe benefit of simply being a self-organizing group member). No individual expert\u00a0on the planet, including me,\u00a0has more to teach me than self-organizing groups of learners. I know this. But on the days when I forget, thankfully,\u00a0my self-organizing group members show up to help remind me. Unbelievably cool!<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Self-organizing groups and work groups are groups of learners. Everyone in the group may be an expert at something, but nobody in the group is an expert at what the group is attempting to do. I\u2019ve seen\u00a0this have remarkable\u00a0impacts on learning. For example: People in the group learn from each other and about themselves If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[293],"tags":[28,87,109,33,6,41,53,58,59],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.collectiveself.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.collectiveself.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.collectiveself.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.collectiveself.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.collectiveself.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.collectiveself.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.collectiveself.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.collectiveself.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.collectiveself.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}