Effective Collaboration

During season one of the HBO hit television series “The Sopranos,” crime boss Jackie Aprile becomes sick and dies — causing a vacuum at the top of the hierarchy. 

All of Aprile’s underbosses then hold a meeting, eating lobster with bibs as they hash out a plan for who should take charge. Larry “Boy” Barase suggests that they should run their organization like a committee, become more collaborative, leading another character to say:

“Larry, the old guys set this up as a paramilitary organization. We need a supreme commander at the top, not the f---ing Dave Clark Five!” 

Collaboration is the new buzz word in business and in the NFL. 

It’s dominating the landscape as organizations attempt to get their employees involved and vested in the future of critical decisions.

The belief is sound in theory. Place a group of smart people in a room to work on a hard problem, and the potential to achieve a desired result seems increasingly likely. In behavioral science, this is known as a Group Attribution. 

The fallacy of this collaborative attempt, though, is known as Group Attribution Error (GAE), a cognitive bias that occurs when people over-attribute the behaviors or beliefs of individuals to the characteristics of the group they belong to, instead of considering individual factors.

In other words, GAE is a tendency to generalize or stereotype based on group membership, overlooking individual variances. 

Everyone has a different viewpoint or different belief as they look over the larger problem. And not everyone is equally educated on what that problem is. 

Daniel Tammet, an English writer and savant, challenged this with his book “The Wisdom of the Crowds,” which supports the collaborative model. Tammet believes there’s potential for problems in systems that have poorly defined means of pooling knowledge. 

Tammet suggest experts can be overruled and ignored by less knowledgable people in the system, which supports the GAE.  

In fairness, the lone star model of one person making all the decisions without input almost never works. It creates dissension and infighting. 

The best model to create for any successful leader is to make everyone understand his/her roles and that their data is vital to the greater cause. 

The most effective collaborative organizations operate as a pyramid — the information flowing upward through layers until it reaches the decision maker, who is fully engaged in listening to all options. 

The leader must emphasis that if the information flowing upward is correct and reliable, then the chances for reaching the best decision increase. And, if the decision fails, the ability to understand “why” it failed is easily traceable.  

Any effective supreme commander listens, collects information, and makes the best decision based on the current situation. 

That’s exactly how the old guys wanted to act.

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