Organizations & Teams

The Organization (family, school, etc) which matters in terms of accelerating the development of the individual's key characteristics by providing the right kind of problems is a combo of the intensive, sustained, typically small, interpersonal, problem solving units of which the person is a part (teams), and the support structures surrounding them. Examples of such organizations which provided a perfect match between the characteristics of the individual that were later crucial to s success in a particular field (ie. key characteristics) and the problems which the organization needed to solve would include, eg,


* Norma Jeane's role as Aunt Grace's protégée accelerating the development of her ability to present herself as the next Jean Harlow while solving Aunt Grace's problem of finding outlet for her frustrated ambitions to become a Hollywood actress;

* Woody Guthrie's multiple roles as class clown, leader of a gang of rejects, and backdoor busker in his early teens in Okemah all accelerating the development of his street hustling and wordslinging skills, while simultaneously solving the problems of providing an outlet for the authority conflicts inherent in relationships between teens and high school teachers, support and leadership for low status, low esteem peers in his gang, and a means for various adults (eg banker's wife) in the community to feel engaged in helper roles; and

*The young Mozart’s obvious potential as a musical prodigy fitting perfectly with the needs of his 40 yr old father, sand-bagged in the musical backwater of Salzburg, ever working away at his symphonies, his concertos, his grande serenades, his oratorios -- Leopold ever frustrated, ever denied his “honour”, ever looking to escape. With Linz and Vienna just waiting, with Versailles and London and Munich ever ready, ever hungry, ever eager to see God’s next tiny “little miracle”, Wolferl with his perfect pitch was the ideal match for the needs of his father, who had already started intensively training his older sister, who was one of the finest music teachers in all of Europe.

'Organization' refers to larger, more formal organizational unit - eg family, school, athletic club, university, film studio - which ensures provision of resources and sufficient stability for the problem solving unit (‘team’) to operate effectively. Such larger organizational structures typically provide access to numerous, often related problem clusters for the individual, and sometimes the necessary resources, and teams to solve them. Needless to say, the organizations involved are not only formal/ institutional ones, but also informal/ community-based ones such as the Okemah of Woody Guthrie's childhood or the New Orleans of Louis Armstrong's (or the working class district of Paris where Pierre-Auguste Renoir grew up in the 1850s, the one that just happened to have the Louvre round the corner).

In early years of development the team and organization inevitably overlap greatly. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & his colleagues (1997), for instance, argue that "complex families" are crucial to the development of "talented teenagers". Such families provide both the resources (abundant materials/lessons, private work areas, freedom from chores, etc) and the intensive personal relationships with "high levels of support and challenge" which serve to "enhance children's investment of attentional energy in growth-producing activities". Likewise Benjamin Bloom's research team (1982) discovered that "the most striking finding in talent development is the very active role of the family, selected teachers, and sometimes peer group in supporting, encouraging, teaching, and training the individual at each of the major stages in his or her development". Robert Albert’s analysis of “Families as Ongoing Systems”, with particular reference to the Brontes... continues in Arrival

… Teams outside the family - in later childhood and beyond - are equally critical to the continued development of key characteristics. In their extensive study of talent development in teenagers, Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues (1997) devote almost an entire chapter to the crucial role of teachers in this process. Their focus is on the characteristics of "reciprocal relations between the practitioner master and the apprentice pupil", a relationship whose "ultimate success depends on the fit between two unique and often incompatible individuals" - ie., on how well the student and the teacher work together as a team. Examples of such master/apprentice teams are abundant in every field of human excellence.

In relation to art, for instance, Csikszentmihalyi et al note the transgenerational master/ apprentice links among five Renaissance artists from Donatello through to Raphael. Simonton's extensive study of interpersonal relationships of eminent artists (1984) makes this point even more powerfully. He found, for eg, that "the more masters and the more paragons" that the artist has relationships with, "the greater the artist's eminence", ie the more styles and teachers the artist has the opportunity to learn from (vs others who have less opportunity), the better s chance of developing s talents, confidence, visibility, etc. In short, not only the live master, but the long dead paragon can be part of the team… continues in Arrival

… Teams are equally essential to the problem solving involved in accelerating the development of intellectual and personality/self characteristics. Those associated with intellectual development are easily seen - eg above. Those associated with personality/ self are equally obvious but not so loudly broadcast. For example, there is little re the specifics of personality/self development in Bloom et al's classic book (1985). You can get a better sense of such development, though little systematic analysis of it, in McCurdy (1983) whose 'geniuses' are afterall long since safely departed.

With regard to historic 'greats', any thorough biography will have plenty of evidence of the role of teams in childhood and adolescence in promoting unique developments of personality and self. Storr's The Dynamics of Creation (1983) provides brief analytic frameworks and some short commentaries re understanding how parent/child teams operate with regard to such developments in the case of Newton, Einstein, Ibsen, Balzac, Stravinsky, and others.

To get a real feel for the role of teams in development of extreme variations of personality/self - and how such teams can be effectively restructured - have a look at the early family therapy literature, eg, Minuchin's (1979) account of Dede, the "superlabile diabetic", triangled into her parents conflicts to such an extent that fluctuations in their aggro could be "measured in her bloodstream"; or Haley's (1978) case study of a "Modern 'Little Hans'" who was "largely confined to home because of his fear of dogs". At a further extreme consider the famous case of… continues in Arrival

...Arrival provides many examples of the role of teams in the development of the extreme variations of personality and self associated with the ‘great’. One of these is summarized briefly on this website – the development of Norma Jeane’s perfect self doubt (see Continuous Matching)

Re the role of teams/ organizations in adult productions of the ‘great': It is worth noting that such productions, eg those which solve the key problems of a field, require access to not only the right kind of problem (ie one which engages the key characteristics of the particular individual in solving the key problem of the field) but also to the right kind of organization, and the right kind of team within it (ie, one which complements/ supports/ stimulates the person's sustained engagement in the problem solving process - eg Watson & Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory; Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and the Chicago Bulls)… continues in Arrival

In addition to the short bits above re Norma Jeane, Guthrie, Mozart and others, Arrival discusses numerous examples of the crucial role of organizations/teams in the development and achievements of the ‘great’, including Elvis, Louis Armstrong, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, Hitchcock, Einstein, Watson & Crick, Monet, and Picasso.

References cited above are available in Arrival. see Sources.