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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 2000 Tapping into the company brains DURING a recent overseas trip I noticed these words emblazoned on the wall of a company entrance lobby: "None of us is smarter than all of us". The implication was clear: teamworking transcends the individual and no one person can be as knowledgeable or have anything like the networking capability of the group. While I broadly concurred with the sentiment and purpose of this message, and I am also a believer in effective teams, a corollary immediately sprang to mind. "Some of us can certainly be smarter than all of us." I'm not sure exactly how this happens, but I do observe the universal outcome of mysterious dumbing-down mechanisms that spontaneously erupt in large organisations. In healthcare, government, military, media, industries and other large organisations worldwide it seems to be the case that assembling a team of around 10 or so really good people sees the group IQ amplified very rapidly to be way above that of any individual. But it only takes one or two uncommitted or disruptive members, or an increase in the total numbers to well above 10, and the team will tend to split into smaller groups, with the overall IQ continuing to grow, but not quite so fast or effectively. At some point, that is really ill-defined, there comes an IQ inversion as really smart people start to do really dumb things. Suddenly the common sense applied at home, the local scout group, football club, and the experience of years, evaporates as individuals start acting in a strange and nonsensical manner. Purchasing goods, organising food, costing a contract, arranging a travel itinerary and booking tickets become a mind-boggling and over-elaborate process. How all this happens, I am not sure. Curiously, and counter-intuitively, physically separating people and connecting them electronically seems to negate the memes that seed this degenerative behaviour. As far as I can tell, the worst offenders taken from a broad international cast, have operations vested in a paper past where it is impossible to extract true costs, and worse, where it is possible to hide for years inside the corporate structure without being detected. It is difficult to make any general statements, but virtual organisations just don't seem to do any of this: they manage to amplify the IQ of individuals, while at the same time exploiting their innate commonsense. How come? I suspect it is all down to the availability of information, the empowerment of the individual, and the visibility of waste and bad decisions. So, what of the future? With the flattening of organisations through the use of computers, my prediction is that there will be no hiding place, everyone will be increasingly visible and ultimately held responsible. Currently there are only a very few companies employing these new distributed organisation technologies to good effect, and they already have some very clear advantage in the market. What will be really interesting with the rapid advance of artificial intelligence systems will be to see how long it takes for them to advance to the point where they ape us and start acting with equal corporate dumbness. Will they continue to be simple-minded, and as a result really smart, or will their sophistication see them hiding too? Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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