Where Is Your Group Intelligence?
Rick Dove, Paradigm Shift International, www.parshift.com, 505-586-1536,
dove@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 natural social mechanisms
with procedures.
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.
Remove all but the worker bees or soldier ants from our insect
colonies and watch how effective they aren’t. The intelligence
of these communities is not manifested in the large numbers, but
rather in the interaction and diversity. In the interaction and
diversity - not in the individuals. The knowledge that drives
the behavior of these organizations cannot be put in a jar, it
can’t be captured, yet it clearly exists.
How can there be knowledge if nobody (or no thing) knows it? Maybe
the human brain can shed some light on this. It is composed of
billions of neurons, each interacting with a few or hundreds or
thousands of others. Each has its own individual behavior of reaction
and stimulus. Each of these behaviors was learned from prior interactions,
and continues to change and evolve. Though we may say a neuron
has memory, we don’t honor that stored information as knowledge,
nor attribute intelligence to the behavior of that neuron. The
intelligence of our human brain emerges at the highest level -
and the knowledge that drives our behavior remains illusive in
its precise physical location - other than as a large collection
of interacting neurons.
Now back to our business organization. Individuals in an organization
know things we can describe and categorize - this is evident to
us. After all, they are us - and we are ego-centric animals. Sort
of like one neuron recognizing another but failing to comprehend
the larger mind.
Rather than think about your own organization, think of another,
in a completely different area of endeavor. What personality and
behavior do you expect from a tobacco company, the state motor
vehicle department, the US Congress, MicroSoft...pick your own
evil empire - I won’t tell you which one in the list is mine.
You know them as an organization that exhibits expected behaviors.
But meet an employee socially and chances are you will find someone
you can relate to, someone who even agrees with your behavioral
assessment but denies any personal responsibility.
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.
