Speaker 1: Hello, I'm Alan Varstow, I'm the Director of Organizational Dynamics Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and I'm here to introduce you to our course on culture-driven team building. This particular section is about creating a team culture of continuous learning. The work on teams that I've done in the past has to do with work teams and production teams in factories and in healthcare, and I'm going to bring that experience to you, but you're going to also hear from other team members, other members of our team, talking about teams. So let me have one of my colleagues introduce themselves.

Speaker 2: Thanks, Alan. Hi, I'm Ramya Kumar, I'm an HR Practitioner and an Organizational Development Consultant. I'm also currently a Master's student in the Organizational Dynamics Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the last 12 years, I've had the opportunity to work with high-growth and fast-paced organizations with heavily matrixed, complex, and multicultural work environments, and these have provided me with many exciting ways to collaborate extensively with teams across functions, across geographies, and across cultures. So I find these topics of group and team dynamics and organizational culture to be very relevant and very intriguing. I'm excited to be here with you today as your co-traveler in this journey, and let's explore continuous learning in teams together. And now I invite Amrita to share her story.

Speaker 3: Thank you, Ramya. Well, hello, and welcome to this brilliant course of ours. My name is Amrita Subramanian, and I've had the tremendous delight and work pleasure with Alan and Ramya and Dr. Dana Kamenstein, that you're going to meet next. So my story might be familiar a little bit with yours, or you might have heard of it. So the first 15 years of my work experience, I was in the corporate corridors, rising through the ranks, you know, individual contributor, a team member, a team manager, a leader. And I've got fair amount of scars on my knuckles and bumps on my head because I've been bashing the problems and, you know, getting frustrated with the puzzles and the paradoxes. And that's what led to my education. I just graduated with master's in this program in organizational dynamics, and in this moment as I speak to you, I'm an executive coach and consultant to numerous teams and leaders of such teams who are battling, surprise, surprise, the same problems. But now with this program, I have tremendous confidence, and I have simple little rules that I've formed. For instance, when you walk into a situation, there is always this matter of a frame. I'm not going to reveal all the secrets now, but you will know. Two, how do you use theories? How do you put them on as lens? And three, how do you constantly know what is the larger whole context in which you are standing in front of? These are puzzles to be solved. But for now, delighted that I'm a part of your journey, and I'm so glad that you are present with us on our table. You have to meet Dr. Dana Kamenstein. It's in his class that I first learned about framing and reframing.

Speaker 4: And Rita, thank you for that kind introduction. My name is Dana Kamenstein. I'm an affiliated faculty member in organizational dynamics here at the University of Pennsylvania. This is the program that Alan leads. I've been working with groups and teams for over 40 years, and I'm very much looking forward to sharing some of those stories and experiences with you as we learn together. Just a few words about our course, which has a little bit different format than some. As you probably are aware, it's very hard to learn about groups and teams without experiencing them. So we thought long and hard about how we could convey to you some of the real life actual moments of working in a team. What we decided to do was to work as a team ourselves with the three, me and the three people you've just met. We wanted to do that so that you would be understanding some of the dynamics of teams as we actually live them and play them out. We hope to model in a positive way, although I'm sure we'll make mistakes, we hope to model in a positive way some of the team issues about continuous learning that we want to convey. In addition to our working as a team, we're going to be using stories and experiential exercises, some mini cases, and also some scenarios with actors, scenarios that we've constructed to illustrate some of the main points of the course.