Does the Inclusion of Women in Team Decision Making Actually Increase a Group’s Intelligence?

Queen Elizabeth I

Here is a brief article featured by Executive Women’s Networking Blog, sponsored by EpsteinBeckerGreen, in which Frances M. Green discusses someespecially interesting revelations provided in a recent MIT study. I also located a link the study. Please click here. To check out all the EWN resources and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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Some new and interesting research by Anita Woolley (awoolley@cmu.edu) and Thomas Malone (malone@mit.edu) has been cited in June’s Harvard Business Review. Woolley is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University, and Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

Their research of team behavior and problem solving makes an interesting business case for gender diversity, concluding that “there’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.” Thus, where strategic business decisions are being made at a group or team level, the inclusion of women spikes the quotient of intelligence, making a positive difference in decision-making outcomes. As Malone states, “The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better.” Indeed, research shows teams with more women tended to fall above the average of the collective intelligence scores of the teams studied by Malone and Woolley; the teams populated by men were below average in the same regard.

It’s a no-brainer! If you want smarter boards of directors, corporate committees, or strategic business teams, Woolley and Malone’s research supports increasing the participation of women.

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Frances M. Green is a Member of the Firm in the Labor and Employment practice in the firm’s New York office, and is co-head of the firm’s nationwide Women’s Initiative.  Fran’s experience includes advising management of multinational and domestic corporations on all aspects of employment law, and litigating on behalf of multinational corporations in federal and state courts and before the New York and various regional securities exchanges in all aspects of employment related litigation, including employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and wrongful discharge. She also lectures frequently to corporate executives throughout the United States and overseas. Please click  here for Fran’s full biography.

What to do if you found yourself riding a dead horse?

According to the tribal wisdom of the Lakota Indians, the best strategy is to dismount.

But what do they know?

Few (if any) graduated from Yale, Harvard, or Princeton.

Few (if any) then earned an MBA degree.

What do they know about strategy?

If a major consulting firm were retained to conduct a comprehensive study of the situation, for a substantial fee, what would its recommendations be?

1. Buy a stronger whip.
2. Change riders.
3. Threaten the horse with termination.
4. Appoint a committee to study the horse.
5. Arrange to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Appoint an intervention team to reanimate (incent?) the horse.
8. Create a training session to increase the rider’s load share.
9. Reclassify the horse as “living impaired.”
10. Change the form so that it reads, “This horse is not dead.”
11. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harness several dead horses together to increase speed.
13. Donate the dead horse to a prominent charity, thereby deducting its full original cost.
14. Provide additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
15. Conduct a time management study to see if lighter riders would improve productivity.
16. Purchase an after-market product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declare that a dead horse has lower overhead and therefore greater ROI.
18. Form a quality focus group to find profitable uses for dead horses.
19. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for horses.
20. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

The Experts Can’t Figure It Out – Now What Do We Do? (We Still Don’t Know What Caused the Financial Crisis of 2008)

What do we do when the experts simply can’t figure it out?

Here’s a simple question:  are there failing companies?  Yes.  Are there less-than-excellent organizations?  Yes.  Do you do everything you could do, should do, as well as you possibly could – as well as it needs to be done?  The answer, I’m pretty sure, is no.

So, “less-than-excellent” is all around us.  As we reflect on failures and deficiencies, we ask the next question:  why are we not better?  Why are our companies, our organizations, our own lives, not better?

Atul Gawande hinted at it when he wrote:

We have just two reasons that we may fail. 
The first is ignorance – we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works.  There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop. The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude – because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. 
(Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto:  How to Get Things Right).

Or, to put it in simple terms:  we don’t know; or, when/if we do know, we don’t do.  Back, yet again, to the “knowing-doing gap.”

Now, on the “we don’t know” part of this equation….  Sometimes, we have not yet learned.  On the news last night, there was a report on an amazing breakthrough drug for lung cancer.  It looks like it might actually work, and they profiled a woman (with two young children still at home) who was on her death bed, and she is practically back from the dead.  We now know something we did not know, and she is alive, maybe for quite a while longer.  Wonderful.

And there are, we suspect, so many more such wonderful discoveries around the corner.

But, as much as we have come to rely on the breakthrough discoveries and insights of “experts” – they simply don’t yet know everything.

Which brings me to the paragraph of the day.  This came in on my AtlanticWire Five Best Columns e-mail this morning.  The article referenced is:  What Caused the Financial Crisis? Don’t Ask An Economist.  I end this post with the paragraph summary of the article from the AtlanticWire.  And I remind you that there are some questions for which we simply do not know the answers — yet.  And the more complex the question, the bigger the problem this presents.  It really is quite a paragraph on lack of consensus, the limits of experts and their expertise, and a little on the drawbacks of this contentious age we live in.

Here’s the paragraph (AtlanticWire here; the article linked to from the FiscalTimes here):

Mark Thoma on the disabling divide in macroeconomics  “What caused the financial crisis that is still reverberating through the global economy?” asks Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times. “Last week’s 4th Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany–a meeting that brings Nobel laureates in economics together with several hundred young economists from all over the world–illustrates how little agreement there is on the answer to this important question.” Economists offered all sorts of conflicting answers like “the banks, the Fed, too much regulation, too little regulation, Fannie and Freddie, moral hazard from too-big-to-fail banks, bad and intentionally misleading accounting, irrational exuberance, faulty models, and the ratings agencies.” This lack of consensus among the world’s most renowned economists is troubling, Thoma writes, because we cannot find a solution to a problem we do not agree on. Perhaps we could try to fix all the potential problems cited. “But that unnecessarily constrains a whole range of activities in the hope that we limit the particular behaviors at the root of the crisis. That’s an inefficient way to fix the problem. And in any case, how do you proceed when some of the causes cited by economists are at odds with each other?” The truth is, macroeconomists have not yet agreed on a single model for the economy. Because economic theories are applied to historical, not experimental, data, economists can come up with multiple theories that explain the past equally well. “This problem is not just of concern to macroeconomists; it has contributed to the dysfunction we are seeing in Washington as well. When Republicans need to find support for policies such as deregulation, they can enlist prominent economists–Nobel laureates perhaps–to back them up. Similarly, when Democrats need support for proposals to increase regulation, they can also count noted economists in their camp.” Thoma says he hoped that a cycle-interrupting cataclysm like the 2008 crisis would provide enough new macroeconomic data to support one theory over another–he thinks it supports demand side over supply side. In fact, economists have just used it to back up their previously held positions and “dig in their heels,” making our debates “larger and more contentious than ever.”

A Kick in the Seat of the Pants: A book review by Bob Morris

A Kick in the Seat of the Pants:
Using Your Explorer, Artist, Judge & Warrior to Be More Creative
Roger von Oech
Harper Paperbacks (1988)

This book should be read in combination with A Whack on the Side of the Head…preferably after you have read that book. At least that’s my suggestion. In Kick, first published in 1986, von Oech introduces four stereotypes: The Explorer, The Artist, The Judge, and The Warrior.

Von Oech devotes a separate chapter to each. Also, he assigns to each quite different values, priorities, mindsets, predispositions, and parameters relative to creative thinking. This is a brilliant conceit. In varying proportions, each of us is (simultaneously) an Explorer, an Artist, a Judge, and a Warrior. Each plays an important role in the creative process. Von Oech explains how and why.

As in A Whack on the Side of the Head, he provides various exercises in combination with a rigorous analysis of each of the four stereotypes. As is true of Whack, Kick will be immensely valuable to executives in any organization that needs a culture within which to generate and then nourish fresh ideas and new perspectives. The same is true of all self-employed people (especially independent consultants) whose customers or clients expect them to address the same need. Finally, I think that school, college, and university classroom teachers can devise all manner of appropriate applications of von Oech’s ideas.

I strongly recommend both Whack and Kick. Also von Oech’s Creative Whack Pack card deck and the more recently published Expect the Unexpected (or You Won’t Find It): A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus. Read and then re-read all three. Absorb and digest the material. Let the ideas percolate for a while. (The material in all three is remarkably cohesive…and intellectually combustible.) Then try this experiment the next time you and others in your organization get together to brainstorm. Whoever chairs the discussion is designated the Judge. Depending on the size of the group, designate one or two others to be (respectively) the Explorer, the Artist, and the Warrior. Require everyone to think and comment ONLY within the strict limits of each assigned role. After about 15-20 minutes of brainstorming, re-assign all roles. Same requirement: each must think and comment only within the strict limits of her or his role. No exceptions.(Once you read Kick, you’ll know exactly what I am suggesting…also why.) I’ll bet you a beverage of your choice that the results will surprise and delight everyone involved. Also, and more to the point, it will prove to be the most productive brainstorm session that anyone in the group had as yet participated in. Just think (creatively, of course) how much more will be accomplished at the next session!

In addition to von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head, there are other excellent books also worthy of your consideration. They include those written by Edward De Bono, Guy Claxton, Michael Michalko, and Joey Reiman.

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Roger von Oech is the founder and president of Creative Think, a California-based consulting firm that specializes in stimulating creativity and innovation. He has given seminars and presentations to corporations worldwide, including Coca-Cola, GE, Disney, Intel, MTV, Microsoft, NASA, Apple, Citigroup, and the United States Olympic Committee. He is the author of two previous creative-thinking books, A Whack on the Side of the Head and A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, as well as the popular Creative Whack Pack card deck. He lives with his wife and children in Atherton, California.

 

Turn Stress into an Asset

 

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

 Stress is unavoidable, but it doesn’t have to be damaging.

When managed correctly, strain can positively impact productivity and performance.

Here are three things you can do to make stress work for you:

1. Recognize worry for what it is. Stress is a feeling, not a sign of dysfunction. When you start to worry, realize it’s an indication that you care about something, not a cause for panic.

2. Focus on what you can control. Too many people feel bad about things they simply can’t change. Remember what you can affect and what you can’t.

3. Create a supportive network. Knowing you have somebody to turn to can help a lot. Build relationships so that you have people to rely on in times of stress.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Turning Stress into an Asset” by Amy Gallo.

To read that article and join the discussion, please click here.