(download zipped Word 6.0 version)
Rick Dove, Paradigm Shift
International, www.parshift.com, 
| Where Is Your
Group Intelligence? (download zipped Word 6.0 version) Rick Dove, Paradigm Shift
International, www.parshift.com, |
| Where does the competency of your organization reside? How about the
culture of your organization - where is that located exactly? Does the answer change if
your organization is a 150,000 person global company, a 15,000 person division, a 150
person plant, or a 15-person team? How does your group, however you want to define
it, know what to do and how to behave? I’m going to suggest an answer that might be uncomfortable at first, but one that just might solve an important corporate identity crises and help us deal with some of the burning decisions of the day. Bear with me as we look at what we know and at what is developing around us - then we’ll look at the implications. Look at mobs - not the criminal type - the lynching type or the Fort Lauderdale spring break type. They’re groups, and generally defined by some specific reactive behavior. What we know is that mobs behave differently than you would expect from knowing any of the individuals. Nice people for the most part, but there they went and did that unimaginable thing. Maybe from afar you can imagine it, but only because you’ve seen it so many times and only because it wasn’t your boy or your mother involved in the incident. Whatever they reacted to, we know they didn’t get their response from a procedures manual. How about an impromptu jazz ensemble jamming on a magical Saturday. Competent musicians for sure, but something happens when they get together and it isn’t in the sheet music - there isn’t any. We know ant colonies as collections of many dumb insects that exhibit effective intelligence as a cooperative group. Hive intelligence is a phrase we use to describe seemingly intelligent behavior from a group of bees. At some early stage in life we all learned that their queens are not telling them what to do, yet some coherent and effective higher-order behavior emerges from this swarm interaction. My point about this emergent behavior in groups is not that nobody is in control yet coherent things happen anyway; but rather that the "knowledge" driving the group action is not evident anywhere. How do these groups know how to do what they do? Answering this question might help us understand what organizational learning really is. It might help us get a focus on knowledge management. It might unlock the secret of highly effective teams. Popular management
theory often distorts Let’s get something out of the way first. What ever you think about
the popular management interest in organizational learning, knowledge management, and
teaming, these concepts exist in all groups independent of any attempts to understand or
control them. They happen - for better or for worse. Hands down, when they happen for the
better, a healthier and stronger organization exists. Popular management theory, however,
often distorts natural social mechanisms with attempts to control and predict behavior
with linear procedures. |
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| When Exon had its Alaska spill problem it wasn’t just the
ship’s Captain’s doing. We all know this down deep inside, so do the Exon
employees - else we would all be satisfied with the Captain’s firing as a sufficient
response. We all know that the catastrophe was caused by many interacting events and
procedures and behaviors within a complex system, and that no one individual or procedure
was solely responsible. And that no Exon employee wished for this to happen, or was a
conscious part of the cause. If you were an Exon employee then, no matter in what department, this was a poignant event for you, one that burned itself into your memory - probably even altered the way you thought and behaved in your job function thereafter. But not with consistency throughout the organization: Some departments justifiably felt like victims, some like they could do something to help preclude such events in the future, while others learned how to deal with these things. Sort of like the brain again - it has departments in charge of vision and emotion and language and muscles and reasoning and so on - and it is now known that each of these areas in the brain all learn something from most all events we are subjected to - input comes through on all channels simultaneously. How you react when asked to go to aunt Matilda’s house will depend on your recollections of how it smells, what it looks like, how comfortable its seating arrangements are, what you feel about her emotionally, and of course what you reason your duty to be. And the result is usually not what we call an objective, conscious decision - anymore than IBM’s or GM’s failures to respond optimally to strategic direction suggestions. Sometimes by shear force of will your reasoning powers can override your true emotional feelings about what you ought to do; but if you don’t have the physical skills or, say, the hand-eye coordination you may not be able to accomplish the task anyway. Just like stodgy legal and purchasing departments can hamstring a good product acquisition or development strategy. There’s also the emotional/logical conflicts that might be compared to the marketing/engineering conflicts - and truth is not owned exclusively by either. Learning happens everywhere in the brain and everywhere in the organization - and it results in high level behavior with no one area responsible. Dysfunction occurs when the interaction of these different views and knowledges is too slow, too one sided, or catastrophically non existent. "We have met the enemy and he is us". We know what that means; and we give up trying to do anything about it because it defies localized identification and responsibility. Organizations are hard to change because nobody is really in charge - titles, authorities, and egos notwithstanding. You have to reprogram the neurons before a different behavior emerges. Auto companies are notoriously paranoid and secretive about what they are doing and how they do things, yet workers and executives switch employers within the auto industry regularly. The really important knowledge doesn’t leave because it’s not in people’s heads - its in the greater group and how it behaves. Hitachi is known to take traveling seminars to their competitors to present and discuss early stage concepts and technology - because they know that they learn more from the interaction and diversity than their close-to-the-chest competitors. Knee-jerk thought about what constitutes intellectual property needs revisited. So just what is this thing called the learning organization? Without increasing the interaction among the people more training, more schooling, and more experts don’t really do much for the organization. And if what everybody must know is determined and regulated and identical, interaction doesn’t matter much anyway, there’s little diversity of thought. So how can you increase the interaction and diversity of thought within your organization/group/team? Moving your operating culture toward collaboration is an important start, toward collaborative learning even better. Actually you can’t have collaboration without learning, otherwise it’s just accommodation, not collaboration - a distinction learned by many the hard way in the recent round of project partnerships sponsored by industrial consortia and government. What about speed of interaction? Are your people plugged in to the greater collaborative environment? Can they tap a community of practice for advice and learning? Can you bring together the right minds to advance the organizational knowledge right now? Do they have collaborative access as well as a collaborative skill set and culture...or are you saving money by keeping them away from computers and intranet-wasting time? When knowledge management, organizational learning, teaming, and collaborative strategies recognize the greater group intelligence, a formidable enterprise emerges. |
 ©1998 RKDove - Attributed Copies PermittedEssay #048 - Originally Published 12/98 in Automotive Manufacturing & Production, Gardner Publications |
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| ========= Reply ========================= From: compton@midusa.net (Bob Compton), Date: 12 Dec 1998 This writing supports my belief and the work that I've been doing to help organizations develop collaborative relations with all workers. I am very happy to see more work and studies evolve in the area of group intelligence. =========
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