We have never done it that way. We want to give them the facts, and we do, but we want them to explore their own individual solutions based on those facts. Because ultimately, that's going to get the field of study further along—and get them further along—over the course of time. So that's how we teach. But it's just not the way we've designed organizations, historically." Q1: Organizations spend a lot of money enabling employees to solve problems collectively. But inducing more collaboration may actually hinder the most important part of problem-solving: actually solving the problem. Should the organizations let their employees do work individually?
Case Study
It's a common strategy among today's managers: Organizations spend a lot of money on technology that enables employees to tackle problems collectively. Hence, the market is rife with connectivity tools and services such as Salesforce.com's Chatter, Microsoft's Yammer, and Jive Software's suite of namesake products. The global enterprise social software market is
A High-stakes Whodunit Game
Previous academic research generally has focused separately on two aspects of problem-solving—either gathering facts or figuring out solutions. And the findings often have contradicted each other. "Substantial recent research implies that clustering—the degree to which people with whom a person is connected are themselves connected to each other—can improve problem-solving performance by increasing coordination," the authors write in the "Facts and Figuring" paper. "By contrast, equally powerful research suggests that clustering can undermine performance by fostering an unproductive imbalance between exploration and exploitation, even for simple tasks." Thus, Bernstein, Shore, and Lazer set out to figure out how collaborating could both help and hurt the problem-solving process. To pursue the efficacy of collaboration the research team developed a straightforward experiment that mirrored real-world problem-solving work. Rather than start from scratch, they customized a platform called ELICIT (Experimental Laboratory for Investigating Collaboration, Information-sharing, and Trust), developed by the US Department of Defense's Command and Control Research Program. In the DoD's high-stakes "whodunit" game, players try to solve several aspects of an imaginary pending terrorist attack: the identity of the terrorists, the target of the attack, and where and when the attack would happen.
Even without the separation of facts and figuring, the results of this study are likely to be especially relevant for computer-mediated problem-solving because of the ease of manipulating the structure in which participants communicate." For managers, the findings highlight the need to determine from the get-go whether a problem-solving task requires a search for facts or a search for answers, and then, if possible, tackle the problem accordingly—enforcing collaboration only where it makes sense. "That also means that their collaboration tools, and the policies that others set around them, need to have an off switch—to be used very selectively, but at the discretion of those at the front line of problem-solving," Bernstein says.
And for academics, the research provides a good jumping-off point for future studies about physical and virtual networking. In their next stage of research, the team plans to conduct several field studies in real-world office environments as well as further experimental studies on digital collaboration. In the meantime, "Facts and Figuring" helps to explain how knowledge works, both in the workplace and in the classroom.
"Students sometimes want you just to tell them the answer—like 'just give me the answer to leadership!'" says Bernstein, who co-teaches the required Leadership and Organizational Behavior course to first-year MBA students at HBS. "We have never done it that way. We want to give them the facts, and we do, but we want them to explore their own individual solutions based on those facts. Because ultimately, that's going to get the field of study further along—and get them further along—over the course of time. So that's how we teach. But it's just not the way we've designed organizations, historically."
Q1: Organizations spend a lot of money enabling employees to solve problems collectively. But inducing more collaboration may actually hinder the most important part of problem-solving: actually solving the problem. Should the organizations let their employees do work individually?
Q2: Discuss the implications for the workplace. In your opinion what do you think?
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