An important feature of working together on a diagram is the way in which members of the group relate to or give comments to each other for the purpose of constructing the diagram. The normal responses we give and receive, verbal and non-verbal, conscious and unconscious, are fairly limited and incomplete. You may misinterpret or fail to notice a signal of dissent, or you may not know why people have reacted in a particular way. The social constraints that restrict comment on other people’s behaviour exist for very good reasons (the comments can be very destructive) but they also have their price: we lose out on information that might enable us to conduct ourselves more effectively.
When individuals or members of a group make comments on each other’s behaviour (either explicitly or tangentially) it’s a sign that things are going either very well or very badly. The basic condition for the giving and receiving of personal feedback to be constructive is that it should occur within relationships of trust and mutual respect. This teasing out of accommodations through these collective and collaborative processes is very much at the heart of soft systems methodology, a systems approach you will learn more about in Week 7.
Allow approximately 15 minutes for this activity.
Note down how you normally work with others and whether your thoughts on this have changed following your study of this week. Also, look back at the metaphor of the juggler in the video introduction to Week 1 and note down how you relate what you have studied so far with what this metaphor is trying to represent.