Shawn Achor

Evidently Achor's books frequently come packaged alongside corporate management seminars and conference keynote speeches; they came to me that way. Most such don't capture my interest except in the moment, and then primarily as a foil. ("The executive team are pushing a new initiative, here's the proposal. So what merits do I see? What weaknesses? How is this novel, and how merely new packaging?") Some few speakers and books, Achor's among them, hold my interest beyond this, are curious for possible utility with an aspect of my day job, and partially as social science with a corporate / commercial slant.

In this case, the question centered on building consensus among disparate colleagues for a task typically received as at best irrelevant to their roles and at worst, deleterious to them. Achor's keynote speech was typical in its delivery: humour, a barrage of eclectic examples illustrating common challenges, an appeal to demonstrated success with past clients. What wasn't typical was his original psychological and sociological research, and working within an academic frame of behavioral economics.

Achor never employed the metaphysical terminology I constantly used in considering his argument: universals, the ontological status of collectives versus individuals, distributed consciousness. Nevertheless I believe they are usefully applied to his various examples as well as to his concepts of Small and Big Potential.

It would be easy to assume that if you put a group of high-IQ people together, naturally they would exhibit a high collective intelligence. But that's not what happens. Indeed, research found that a team on which each person was merely average in their individual abilities but possessed a collective intelligence would continually exhibit higher success rates than a team of individual geniuses. [38]

This quote nicely illustrates both the superficial lure of typical management books (a weakness this book does not entirely avoid), and the more substantial insights grappled with despite that lure. No, despite the initial idea of thinking a group of smart-er people will perform better than a group of people less smart, a minute's pause makes almost everyone realise that isn't the case. We're all familiar with groups of high performers who for various reasons can't perform together: selfishness, lack of communication, lack of coordination, backstabbing, basic personality incompatibilities ... the list is endless. Similarly, so much is smuggled into that term, "success" -- by that is it meant simply that the group best meets management expectations? That the group makes more money for the company than other groups? Solves problems better, faster? Depending on the answer, that claim, too, dissolves pretty quickly. So this quote doesn't introduce any novel insights, though it's phrased as though it does.

What is interesting is the claim that social scientists are beginning to reliably measure collective intelligence separately from individual intelligence, and that it correlates strongly with various other reliable measures of success which are not simply increased efficiency or higher revenue, but happiness, job satisfaction, physical and mental health, learning new skills, with each considered individually and collectively.

Small potential is what people achieve (or could achieve) individually. Big potential is what they're capable of collectively. Achor's book and research outlines how it can be argued that both are quantifiable, in reasonably robust ways, such that the most accurate predictor of success for any one person is their social network.… (más)