I would like to share with you a quote related to team learning:
“Life needs to link with other life, to form relationships where all individuals are better supported by the system they have created. It is impossible to look at the natural world and find an individual…Everywhere we look, we see complex, tangled, messy webs of relationships. From these relationships, life creates systems that offer greater stability and support than life lived alone. Organisms shape themselves in response to their neighbors and their environments. All respond to one another, coevolving and co-creating the complex systems of organization that we see in nature. Life is systems-seeking. It seeks organization. Organization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Self-organization is a powerful force that creates systems we observe and that testifies to a world that knows how to organize from the inside out. (Quoted in Spears, 1997, Insights on Leadership: Service, Stewardship, Spirit, and Servant-Leadership. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 346-47)
This emphasis on relationships and interdependence in the natural world relates to the arena of adult education since it focuses on processes that empower people and bring us together in positive relationship. Educating is not about ‘lording it over’ others, seeking greatness or power. Rather it is about developing others to be the best they can be, relating to them as individuals with dignity, caring enough to prepare and deliver competently according to need and without discrimination.