Huddle Up! Team Learning In the Workplace
Humans learn through social interaction. In the workplace, huddles–informal meetings of two or more people gathered to discuss work-related issues–play a critical role in the learning process that contributes to the success of the organization. Ryan W. Quinn of Brigham Young University and J. Stuart Bunderson of Washington University in St. Louis explored this concept in the context of newspaper newsrooms in “Could We Huddle on This Project? Participant Learning in Newsroom Conversations,” forthcoming in the Journal of Management and now available in the journal’s OnlineFirst section:
The theory and results of this study offer important advances to the study of learning in social interaction. If the organic capabilities of an organization are created in the informal interactions in which its members participate (Morand, 1995), then learning how to huddle in ways that generate quality learning can contribute to the effectiveness and the adaptiveness of the organization as a whole. As cited earlier, “[H]uman learning in the context of an organization is very much influenced by the organization, has consequences for the organization and produces phenomena at the organizational level” (Simon, 1991: 126). A better understanding of huddles gives us new ways to understand and improve this learning.
Click here to continue reading “Could We Huddle on This Project? Participant Learning in Newsroom Conversations,” forthcoming in the Journal of Management.
