Okay, so now you know a little bit about teams. A team, as you know, is a group of individuals with a common task. In order to accomplish that common task, they have to cooperate. And I've already suggested that cooperation in a task involves culture. Let's now take a closer look at what we mean by culture. For purposes of this course, we're going to use a very, very broad understanding of this term. Culture, as we will be using it here, is whatever people learn from other people, especially by interacting with them. And correspondingly, culture is whatever people transmit to other people, especially by interacting with them. Kids are not born with an understanding of how to play soccer. They typically learn by watching other kids play, maybe adults play, and they gradually acquire knowledge of the game. As they try to play themselves they get better, hopefully. And they may even join an organized soccer team with a coach. The coaches job is to teach them how to play. The coach is a kind of a transmitter of culture, that's one way to think about it. The kids are the learners. Some of the skills you acquire by doing them over and over and over again, like dribbling and passing and heading the ball. The kids become aware of what we are calling the preconceived routines of the game. Using a stud gun on an assembly line, well it's kind of like dribbling or heading in a soccer game, something that you have to learn and it becomes a part of the preconceived routines of your body. This kind of learning actually becomes part of your body so that we don't even need to think about it. We refer to it as, not surprisingly, embodied culture. When you grow up here in the United States and you attend public schools, you learn by heart words that connect you to culture into the country and particular, what we call the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. Now, those of you who aren't from this country, it's sometimes very shocking when you hear a crowd of people all a sudden chanting the Pledge in unison. That Pledge and the ability to recite it have become part of American culture. We'll generally be talking in this course about three kinds of things we learn from other people. First, ways of behaving and speaking. Think of using a stud gun on an assembly line, or dribbling a soccer ball, or for that matter the Pledge of Allegiance and the United States. We'll give many examples later. Second, and a little harder to understand, we learn how to think or reason about the world, and also even how to feel about it. A medical doctor might learn to recognize a patient's symptoms as the manifestation of a specific disease and, correspondingly, reason about the proper course of medical treatment. A child might learn to find a particular food disgusting, as in the case of horse meat in the U.S., even though horse meat is perfectly acceptable in many countries around the world. You'll see American kids say, My God, I can't eat that, it's horse meat. Lastly, third, we learn about values and goals, the values and goals that guide our actions. A company, for example, will set the goal for the group as a whole. If it's an automobile manufacturer, the goal might be producing and selling a certain number of cars. If it's a soccer team, the goal might be winning a certain number of games, maybe even clinching the title. Family might have as a goal to help their children get accepted into a top college. And the team culture might also emphasize certain other values. A company might stress, for example, finding the right work life balance for its employees. A team may try to cultivate in addition to winning, good sportsmanship. By this time, it may be obvious that teams could not function as teams, they couldn't function as teams at all without team culture. Teams need their preconceived routines. Their ways of reasoning about the world and their goals and values. A handy way to think of culture is in terms of cultivation. This was actually the source of the modern term back at the end of 18th century. Just as people can cultivate plants, so do we also cultivate one another. Culture, as cultivation, will actually turn out to be the focus of our next video.
