Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both by Adam Galinsky, Maurice Schweitzer Page B
Authors: Adam Galinsky, Maurice Schweitzer
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knowledge. For us, the coordination required is often intellectual.
So when we say a task is human, we mean that it is cognitively complex. In these cases, the number of things that have to be attended to is so great that no one perspective can capture all of the necessary information. In complex tasks, from flying a plane to performing surgery to deciding whether a country should go to war, people need to process and integrate a vast amount of information while also imagining myriad possible future scenarios.
And the more complex the task, the more likely we are to make a mistake or miss something critical. The costs of hierarchy can exceed its benefits in tasks like these—tasks that go beyond instinct and physical coordination, and instead require intellectual integration. Why? Because to make the best complex decisions, we need to tap ideas from all rungs of the hierarchical ladder and learn from everyone who has relevant knowledge to share.
Often, the best insights come from the least powerful. But as we have seen with Father Pfleger and General McChrystal, strong hierarchies silence voices that upset the chain of command. When we need insights from disparate members of a group, hierarchy can be a barrier to success.
Steve Jobs understood the tension between voice and hierarchy. In 2010, he declared, “You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win.” In the companies he ran, Jobs tried to reduce hierarchy structurally. While at Pixar, he designed its headquarters to promote encounters across the rungs of the company; the front doors, stairs, corridors, all led to a central atrium that also contained the café and mailboxes. Contrast this with General Motors’ headquarters, the Renaissance Center, in which executives had a separate elevator that also connected to their own private parking garage.
No firm appreciates the importance of empowering everyone at all levels of the organization to speak up better than IDEO, a top design firm in Silicon Valley. IDEO is considered to be one of the most innovative companies in the world, and they have won more
Business Week
/International Design Excellence Awards than any other firm.
IDEO wants ideas and lots of them. To produce groundbreaking innovation, IDEO limits the role of hierarchy in their brainstorming sessions. Founder Dave Kelley even went so far as to declare, “At IDEO, there is no corporate hierarchy and no management structure.” Despite wide ranges in rank and pay, the title on every business card simply reads “Engineer.” In their brainstorming meetings, there are no titles, only ideas.
IDEO’s culture promotes something that Anita Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University identified as critical for a team’s ability to be collectively intelligent: equal opportunities for sharing ideas. Woolley’s research found that groups make more intelligent decisions when members participate equally in the conversation. Intelligent groups, in other words, benefit from the diversity of opinions of their members, whereas less intelligent groups are weighed down by a few individuals who dominate the conversation. When speaking time is concentrated in a few, a team becomes less intelligent.
There is a lot to be learned from cases in which hierarchy has silenced individual voices. Take the financial crisis of 2008. As we now know, the housing bubble that led to the economic meltdown in 2008 was fueled in part by a financial innovation called credit default swaps, financial instruments that function a lot like insurance. Investors could insure themselves against the risk of default by paying an annual premium that would protect them against the failure of their investment.
One company that offered this financial insurance was American International Group (AIG). AIG made unbelievable amounts of money insuring mortgage-based securities—as long as housing prices went up, they would get their premium checks and have to pay no claims. But as AIG
So when we say a task is human, we mean that it is cognitively complex. In these cases, the number of things that have to be attended to is so great that no one perspective can capture all of the necessary information. In complex tasks, from flying a plane to performing surgery to deciding whether a country should go to war, people need to process and integrate a vast amount of information while also imagining myriad possible future scenarios.
And the more complex the task, the more likely we are to make a mistake or miss something critical. The costs of hierarchy can exceed its benefits in tasks like these—tasks that go beyond instinct and physical coordination, and instead require intellectual integration. Why? Because to make the best complex decisions, we need to tap ideas from all rungs of the hierarchical ladder and learn from everyone who has relevant knowledge to share.
Often, the best insights come from the least powerful. But as we have seen with Father Pfleger and General McChrystal, strong hierarchies silence voices that upset the chain of command. When we need insights from disparate members of a group, hierarchy can be a barrier to success.
Steve Jobs understood the tension between voice and hierarchy. In 2010, he declared, “You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win.” In the companies he ran, Jobs tried to reduce hierarchy structurally. While at Pixar, he designed its headquarters to promote encounters across the rungs of the company; the front doors, stairs, corridors, all led to a central atrium that also contained the café and mailboxes. Contrast this with General Motors’ headquarters, the Renaissance Center, in which executives had a separate elevator that also connected to their own private parking garage.
No firm appreciates the importance of empowering everyone at all levels of the organization to speak up better than IDEO, a top design firm in Silicon Valley. IDEO is considered to be one of the most innovative companies in the world, and they have won more
Business Week
/International Design Excellence Awards than any other firm.
IDEO wants ideas and lots of them. To produce groundbreaking innovation, IDEO limits the role of hierarchy in their brainstorming sessions. Founder Dave Kelley even went so far as to declare, “At IDEO, there is no corporate hierarchy and no management structure.” Despite wide ranges in rank and pay, the title on every business card simply reads “Engineer.” In their brainstorming meetings, there are no titles, only ideas.
IDEO’s culture promotes something that Anita Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University identified as critical for a team’s ability to be collectively intelligent: equal opportunities for sharing ideas. Woolley’s research found that groups make more intelligent decisions when members participate equally in the conversation. Intelligent groups, in other words, benefit from the diversity of opinions of their members, whereas less intelligent groups are weighed down by a few individuals who dominate the conversation. When speaking time is concentrated in a few, a team becomes less intelligent.
There is a lot to be learned from cases in which hierarchy has silenced individual voices. Take the financial crisis of 2008. As we now know, the housing bubble that led to the economic meltdown in 2008 was fueled in part by a financial innovation called credit default swaps, financial instruments that function a lot like insurance. Investors could insure themselves against the risk of default by paying an annual premium that would protect them against the failure of their investment.
One company that offered this financial insurance was American International Group (AIG). AIG made unbelievable amounts of money insuring mortgage-based securities—as long as housing prices went up, they would get their premium checks and have to pay no claims. But as AIG
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