Collaborate on complex problems, but only intermittently

Wednesday, August 29, 2018 - 17:00 in Psychology & Sociology

More than a decade after the introduction of the first smartphone, we are awash in always-on technologies — email, instant messaging, social media, Slack, Yammer, and so on. All that connectivity means we are constantly sharing ideas, knowledge, thinking, and answers. Surely that “wisdom of the crowd” is good for problem-solving at work, right? Not so fast. New research by Harvard Business School (HBS) Associate Professor Ethan Bernstein and colleagues, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on Aug. 13, suggests that “always on” may not always be effective. Instead, “intermittently on” might be better for complex problem-solving. Bernstein, Assistant Professor Jesse Shore of the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, and Professor David Lazer of Northeastern University put together and studied a number of three-person groups performing a complex problem-solving task. The members of one set of groups never interacted with each other, solving the problem in complete...

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