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Dynamic Teaming Handbook

Starting in the late 1980s at Digital Equipment Corp., as I was working on the first edition of my book, Fifth Generation Management, I invited others to join in discussions about some of the themes in the book. I wanted our meetings to allow those participating to get to know one another personally, and to discover one another’s capabilities and aspirations, two key elements I was developing in the book.

This lead us to discover a format where people would site at tables for four people, dialogue with one another, and then two people would move to the next two tables to continue the dialoguing. With just four at the table, everyone got air time, and found the opportunity to explore what was important.

Too often, you and I have sat in large meetings where everyone is fighting for air time, or putting the other down, because they did not take the ideas expressed by the other seriously. Our traditional meeting culture is terribly inefficient and often times down right destructive.

In the early 1990s, while attending a meeting of the Intellectual Capital Pioneers, a group brought together by Leif Edvinsson together with Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, we were looking for another way to arrange the room. At the suggestion of using small tables, Juanita said, “wonderful, we will put checkered table clothes on them and have a World Café.” Juanita has gone on to do her doctorate on the topic of “The World Café, Living Knowledge through Conversations that Matter,” and out of this has been born the World Café movement. See: http://www.theworldcafe.com/index.html

I liked the name “World Café” and started using it with the “Dynamic Teaming” process that I had been developing at Digital, although the Dynamic Teaming process here is a little different from the World Café model. The World Café makes it possible for groups of any size, sitting at well prepared small round tables, to discuss “questions that matter.”

In the Dynamic Teaming process, our focus is also on discovering the unique talents of one another, our capabilities that we bring from the past. In addition, we want to discover what drives us, our aspirations. When we know and respect the others capabilities and aspirations, then we can more easily release the energy of co-creativity.

Enclosed is a fourteen page description of the Dynamic Teaming process. If you would like to discuss ways it might be used, please let me know and I can send you the work material for the sessions.

I’d certainly welcome any comments and suggestions regarding this Dynamic Teaming process, and I’d also value ways it might contribute to the growing World Café community.

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Dynamic Teaming Handbook

Download it here (156 kb, pdf )

If you’d like to join in a discussion of how to use the Dynamic Teaming Handbook, how to set up Executive Discovershops and explore their relationship to the World Café, please join us on www.keenet.com. If you let me know, I will register you.

Please send me an email at: charles.savage@kee-inc.com

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