Collaboration and community
Here’s another gem from David Tranter’s book Nature & Society:
Communities are not stamp collections, a name for things that are found together, they are the result of countless interactions between one species and another, interactions which generate laws that govern their collective lives.
Some people assert that groups do not create things per se: really it is just the set of individuals. I disagree completely.
In a workshop situation, for example, yes it’s the individuals who articulate the ideas. And yes, it’s the individuals who work with those ideas: clarifying, questioning, generating new ideas in response.
But here’s the thing: all that work happens in a common language (or two, or three). It happens because those individuals have come together for a common purpose.
August 27th, 2007 at 9:55 am
David, one of the themes that I have been pursuing on my own blog Personal Reflections- http://belshaw.blogspot.com/ - is the distinction between individual and organisational creativity, linking this back to the thinking that you and Tom have been doing about facilitation and community development.
This also links to the traditional distinction made in management discussions between groups and teams. In simplest terms, a team is a group with objectives.