Team learning: More than group thinking

I found myself following up some ideas about Knowledge Management and Learning Organisations… and found this piece of pragmatic observation.

The “team coffee pot” is a catch-all term for setting up a space and practice of congregating informally in order to allow the team to work the kinks out of their relationships.

How you go about establishing this space will have a great deal to do with your personal style or the styles of your team leads and managers (if one of them will be taking the lead on setting this up).

It will also have to be tailored to fit into the shared vision of the company culture.

Thought for the day: How do senior management teams establish a coffee-pot environment for themselves?

On a slightly different tack, I know one Headmaster who swears by the coffee-machine he has in his own study; apparently it has enabled him to defuse numerous “difficult” encounters with parents…