Blog address for all the posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551
14 minute read
What is the difference between a team and a group?
Listening to LBC, a radio talk station broadcast throughout Britain, I hear a woman voted ‘Britain’s strictest headteacher of the year’ stating that students in one form group are inwardly chanting ‘C’mon team, we are going to beat that team!’ That is a gang. A crowd of people are a group. A music band is a group. A group is a set of individual people with individual goals that have a shared interest in other individuals and their pursuits. A team is competitive and is trained to fight to beat other teams. A school classroom team was envisioned to help the slowest learner in the class by utilising the fastest learners’ abilities. In effect, this is handicapping the individualistic high achievers to bring the lower achievers up to, at best, a temporary level which falsely allows them to believe that they can achieve as much as naturally high achievers. When the high achievers are released from school, at age 18, they, mostly, go on to great things. However, the low achievers, in their mistaken belief that they are individually worthy of their school examination results, are floundering around suddenly searching for a team to help them in the real world, and they are using a fast diminishing shield of shared responsibility as a defence against real-world justified righteousness. What a shambles! Don't despair, I am not ridiculing people who are not high achievers.
Some years ago, the
UK government decided that boys and girls learn differently. The
educationalists went on to believe that there are different learning
styles, visual learning, role-playing, positive reinforcement, audio learning, and others.
There is a list of seven learning styles here:
Visual Learning; Auditory Learning; Reading and Writing; Kinesthetic; Verbal or linguistic learning; Social and interpersonal learning; Solitary or intrapersonal learning (The word intrapersonal is similar to introvert). An explanation of these seven is given here:
https://teachable.com/blog/types-of-learning-styles
What happened is that teachers were not taught how to effectively teach all these techniques simultaneously to a class of thirty children. There used to be girls schools and boys schools; these are all, now almost entirely privately run. These used to be forms for high-achievers, average learners; and students who could not grasp the teaching techniques well enough to keep up with the average student, so these pupils were regarded as un-salvageable and were segregated from the rest of the school society, though they were allowed in the playground and dinner hall.
Why don’t we segregate ALL the pupils or students? Visual learners to the right, role-players to the left…. Separate the boys from the girls or group the students together who learn best with a particular style of learning. ‘Oh no!’ we cry we would then have to partition the whole world into different segments more suited to one group or another. Heaven forbid! Yet, do we have divergent thinkers as accountants? The answer, I suspect lies in most of us believing that accountants are not financial speculators, just the same as it is engineers who build bridges and not scientists.
In Swedish, "lika barn leka bäst" ("children that are alike play the best [together]") - Wikipedia
We, after compulsory schooling, tend to flock together into our preferred groups of friends, and support each other by forming cross-functional teams: that means we do not all work in the same place and have different types of jobs. Unfortunately, though, teams are the norm in schools; they are encouraged; no, foisted upon small children. While at school, and especially when school-leavers suddenly discover that they have been given a false idea about their capabilities to be successful in both the work and social environments, they maintain their absolutely necessary need to belong to a gang; sorry, a team. Actually, I am fairly sure that most people never find out they have been given a useless set of values at school.
In a crowd, when two people are physically fighting, they may be allowed to get close to a finish until one of them is obviously losing and about to get seriously hurt, then the crowd; sorry, group of people, will intervene and separate the victor from the vanquished. Nobody attacks the winner. In a gang, sorry, team, when another team member is showing signs of losing, all the other gang-members attack the single fighter who is not in their gang. In sports event, referees and the threat of disqualification prevent mobbing and lynching.
In the real world, in the un-refereed streets, as soon as a fight breaks out the whole gang attacks the person who is arguing with their gang member, unless the gang member is winning. That is what a team, with team loyalty does. They are a baying pack of feral dogs, trained and indoctrinated to be so by modern UK schooling that hampers individual excellence at the expense of the whole of society, by falsely saving the children who simply could not understand a faulty teacher in their first years at primary school. ‘What is the square root of nine?’ ‘What has a shape got to do with a plant?’, the small confused child might inwardly ask? As adults, we know that the answer to the confused child's lamenting query is: nothing at all if we exclude matrices that have a square shape, filled with numbers. Here is a real-life example to ponder: If you missed the first year of Latin classes, such as I did, you would not do well in the second year of Latin classes. Because I did not do Latin in the first year of secondary education, I was not required to ever learn Latin; all I had to do, during those lessons was my other homework. Do you know why? Because I would have held the whole class back. What should the school have done? Put me in class of beginners and knocked my confidence with, no team support from team members to dissipate the effects of bullying.
What is the difference between a group and a team? A group is like a shoal of individual friendly fish all with a common purpose and all conforming to a swim pattern to confuse predators. That shoaling is herd behaviour, just like apes grooming each other, but a bit less altruistic. A team is a pod of dolphins all acting together to destroy a group by picking off the individuals, one by one. Yes, I know, the dolphins are hungry. Friendly-looking dolphins they may seem, and they are certainly portrayed as such, but predatory, atavistic, wolves of the seas, dolphins really are.
The definition of ‘atavistic’ given by Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org › dictionary › english › atavistic
‘Atavistic means happening because of a very old habit from a long time ago in human history, not because of a conscious decision or because it is necessary now.’
That is what a team, such as you might find in schools, is; predators trained towards forming a pack-like existence that historically served to jointly hunt for food and overwhelm others to achieve supremacy (which necessitated the conquering of another group). When a young person finds themselves alone ‘in the wild’ they, instead of recognising their irresponsibility and mistakes, and learning from it, they are trained to shrug it off in the belief that their team will save them, and like herd immunity and herd behaviour, if there are enough team members around, they can attack all and every form of complaint towards them, imagined or otherwise. Later, the gang, sorry, team, will disseminate and analyse any attack by any individual gang-member using Smartphone videos, messages, and chat. Even, when the gang-members, sorry team-members are absent they are still silently and invisibly watching from within the heads of savages with no idea of what individual responsibility is.
We all make mistakes. Please don’t ask your team to dissipate your guilt.
Are immigrants in your team? Are women in your team? Are men in your team? Are they in their own teams?
A cross-functional team is a group of people who have their own set of abilities and skills, and in meeting with one another rely on each other to contribute towards a common goal that furthers the aims of the group. A film or movie has producers, actors, directors, camera-operators, editors, and a myriad of other people, highly skilled and otherwise, all working together to achieve a common goal of making a good film / movie. If they were simply a team, they would be industrial spies and saboteurs, armed with knives and poison, spoiling the efforts of other rival film-makers.
(Just so you know, obviously defaming a legal entity, person or business, in the UK is usually punished by significantly large fines and financial restitution awarded to the aggrieved; and ‘tit for tat’ strategy inevitably fails in any game because it results in mutual destruction. That is why we can’t say any shop sells poor quality products, because it is really expensive to prove it and the onus is firmly on the accuser).
For this to fully register, imagine a trained boxer or MMA fighter entering into an area where muggers frequent. Do you think this person will reach for a team? Do you think this capable person will expect backup with a much later phone call? Depending on whether a mugger or two have knives and guns on their team will determine this high-achiever’s immediate response to a direct threat. That is the difference between an individual in a cross-functional team (boxing trainers, spar partners, club members, sponsors, etc.) and a person ill-equipped to deal with the harsh realities of life because they were told to belong to a team of similar people who WILL be absent when they grow up. No, wait! They are prevented from growing up because there are no ‘real’ people to save and teach them, only team members of the same ilk and sentiment.
Birds of a feather flock together
I have just learnt the word for only speaking a portion of a saying and the rest being implied – ‘anapodoton’, as in, ‘Birds of a feather….’ I think 'pot kettle black' also qualifies as an anapodoton. The rub is that the recipient needs to know the full saying. 'That is like the pot calling the kettle black'. Ooh er! We might need to live before the Industrial Revolution in european times to get the meaning of that. For everyone under the age of 250 or so, that last alludes to a pot and a kettle both having black marks from which the fire they are heated - if the pot calls the kettle black, then the kettle can also call the pot black. 'We came from the same fire'.
Plato may have said in ‘Republic’, that men of his age flock together. There is an idea that truth resides with those who practice the same thinking or beliefs. This is similar to a Christian saying, the saying I once heard that goes something like this: ‘A horse and an ox cannot pull a cart together’; which was said to me to warn of the danger of a Christian and a non-believer marrying. This expression does not necessarily need to remain in the bailiwick of religion; if any man or woman needs a team outside of their romantic partnership, and their partner does not, I suggest that a lawyer or solicitor is about to make some money from both of them, or there may be a psychological discord in the relationship for a long time, albeit suppressed.
