A642.5.3.RB_BorutyAlan_Making Smart Groups

Making Smart Groups

Can these concepts help promote innovation within an organization?

The Sunstein and Hastie article for the Harvard Business Review, Making Dumb Groups Smarter, offers seven suggestions to mitigate or eliminate the effects of heuristics and bias on individuals in group situations.   Specifically, the suggestions are as follows:

Silence the leader
“Prime” critical thinking
Reward group success
Assign roles
Appoint a devil’s advocate
Establish contrarian teams
The Delphi Method

Organizations are generally made up of groups that work together.  Even if those teams work together on a daily basis, applying these scientifically proven methods at worst will do no harm. At best they will eliminate bias affected decisions.  Ultimately, I believe they will significantly reduce the number of heuristic and bias decisions.

Innovation is a group process that potentially involves people from all over the organization sharing ideas and collaborating together.  It is a real possibility that self-silencing would occur in group discussions on how to best make an idea useful or during any collaboration.  I believe utilizing the concepts would promote innovation, but it would certainly improve innovation by virtue of more information provided by more people.

How do they compare and contrast with the other readings from this module?

I have read nothing in this module that is contrary to the suggestions offered by Sunstein and Hastie (2014).  However, the readings do describe a several situations that would benefit from groups where individuals share information freely and provide opinions according their own conscious, unaffected by group dynamics.  Canfield and Smith (2011) introduce creative thinking skills.  Creativity breeds creativity.  Creative thinking skills are structured group processes that are designed to generate new ideas.  The results of a Booz Allen study of the Global Innovation 1000 concluded that successful innovations are a function of the quality of an organizations innovation process, not the amount of money spent on innovation.  Further, the report concluded that processes that took advantage of collaboration were most successful (2005 Resilience Report from Booz Allen Hamilton as cited by Canfield and Smith, 2011).  If processes that utilize collaboration throughout the organization provide the best innovation results, then ensuring that the people collaborating are doing so without the ill-effects of heuristics or bias just makes good sense.  Canfield and Smith (2011) built their process to accommodate collaboration and group activities.  “Creative teams can benefit from doing much of their work together for all to hear and build on each other’s ideas.  Room set up is the same, using Post-Its and working on the wall is the same” (p. 125). 

Mckeown (2014) describes similar activities that would be affected by heuristics and bias.  Selecting ideas to make useful, determining the most effective strategy for the innovation process, making the innovation popular, and selling new ideas are all collaborative group activities that would be affected (part four).  The company would probably not recognize there was a problem until seemingly sure-win innovations started failing to produce.  The innovation process is complex and difficult to predict with any accuracy; adding complication to the process could make it unmanageable.

Can they be combined into a process that can be used to promote innovation across the entire organization?

My short answer is yes, absolutely.  The concepts suggested by Sunstein and Hastie (2014) apply to any group activity.  They are team development rules of engagement, if you will.  They are inserted into the groups rules of engagement by the leader, invisible to the remaining members.  Organizations that incorporate these concepts into every team or group it assembles can worry less about the effects of heuristics and bias on group decisions, recommendations, and outcomes.  Indeed, this would have positive impact innovation groups and would likely promote more and successful innovations.  Processes that benefit from the wisdom of groups can only realize that benefit if every member of the group contributes to that process.  The concepts described by Sunstein and Hastie (2014) are not comprehensive; they cannot eliminate all the effects of heuristics and bias, but they do minimize those effects to a negligible level.  The concepts are supported by tomes of empirical data and have been proven effective by numerous studies in numerous countries over the last decade or so (Sunstein and Hastie, 2014, p. 98).  Understanding the implication of employing these concepts, why would an organization not choose to incorporate them into all of its group activities? 

~Pete

References:

Canfield, J., & Smith, G. (2011). Imagine: Ideation skills for improvement and innovation today. Holland, Michigan: Black Lake Press.

Mckeown, M. (2014). The innovation book: How to manage ideas and execution for outstanding results. Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, United Kingdom. Pearson Education Limited.

Sunstein, C. R., & Hastie, R. (2014). Making dumb groups smarter. Harvard Business Review, 92(12), 90-98.