Everyone involved seems to enter a state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has dubbed "flow." Time seems to stand still as everyone loses himself in the challenge of keeping up with the discussion. Everyone feels challenged to think in new ways and to pay attention to the issues at hand.

Ideas take center stage. If the participants brought individual agendas to the conversation, those seem to fade and give way to the excitement of following the flow of ideas. Social posturing drops out.

Many conversations, especially those at work, have subtexts of swagger. People try to establish dominance relationships, prove their superior intelligence or reinforce formal social hierarchies. But in these conversations, pretensions are temporarily put on hold.

And usually these conversations take place within or between groups of peers. I don't remember ever having this sort of experience during a lecture from some expert, whether that was a learned professor, a boss or a sage. Mind-blowing insights usually seem to come from interchanges among fellow explorers, not from the passive reception of information. Even the best personal feedback rarely reorders thinking in this way.

This is the experience of learning with peers -- not from them, but with them. And the opportunities for this are much too rare. Several obstacles seem to get in the way, especially when managers may have to expose weaknesses to learn from them.