Teams can give individuals more power, but they can discourage work that is novel. Often dense or clever things are seen as irrelevant because the context of applicability is not obvious. Sure I can have more power, but I'm not learning anything more about the world or really getting any better -- the exercise of that power is confined to an arena that is closed and not significantly mutable nor redefinable by me. And sure, skills are honed, but at the end of the day it is still selling out. Meanwhile, there may be great insights to be made on the camel journey to Astana even though there is no general social reason to do it. Defining everything in terms of its social value draws many if not most people into similar kinds of thinking and valuing similar kinds of work. The units of cost implied by the term `productivity' are even defined socially, esp. the cost of labor. And come on, your neighbors have expectations of you, and not all of those expectations are reasonable or fair. For a long time I've had the hypothesis kind of along the lines of what Steve said. The first purpose of teaching people how to cope with compliance is survival, the second is to create enough rage to do something different.
-----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen ? Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2016 2:44 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute OK. But by making that argument, you've ceded the necessary assumption within your original argument. At this point, we're agreeing on the gist and disagreeing on minor embellishments. Teams, in the overwhelming majority of cases, increase the individual agency/power of the team members. As Steve said, the article didn't really teach us anything new. But one wonders at the persistent false attribution of success and failure to individuals alone, or further, the false dichotomy between the collective and the individual. On 10/27/2016 12:40 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > All roads leading to Rome does not imply sufficiency of transportation in > general. At some point someone might propose, "I'd like to visit my family > in Astana and would like a road so that I don’t have to take a camel from > Casablanca", and then they'd look at the map and see that Pisa lacked a road > to Rome. Pisa being closer to Rome, that road gets built instead. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
