What Should We Be Worried About?

WORKING WITH OTHERS

STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN

Psychologist; director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; coauthor (with William Thompson & Giorgio Ganis), The Case for Mental Imagery

ROBIN S. ROSENBERG

Clinical psychologist; author, Superhero Origins: What Makes Superheroes Tick and Why We Care

As the 21st century proceeds, tasks facing our species will become increasingly complex. Many problems that in an earlier era might have been easily addressed by one person will now require a sophisticated set of abilities contributed by different people. The individual contributions must be complementary; the whole must be more than the sum of its parts.

This much seems obvious. But no part of contemporary formal education—at any point from kindergarten through postgraduate work—is designed to teach people how to interact effectively with other people in goal-oriented groups. When such a group functions well, it synergizes the talents and abilities of its members. But at present such synergy occurs because of a lucky combination of people who happen to have complementary skills and abilities relevant to the task at hand, and who happen to be able to interact effectively. It’s not obvious how best to compose a group to facilitate such synergy. But most people don’t seem aware that there’s a problem here.

For example: Many people who interview job applicants think they’re good at picking the “right” applicant—that they know how to pick appropriate employees based not just the content of an applicant’s answers but also on his or her nonverbal behavior. But it has been repeatedly shown that interviewers who rely on intuition and “feeling” generally are not good at picking job applicants.

So, too, with selecting people to work together in goal-oriented groups. People have intuitions about how to assign individuals to groups and how to organize them, but decisions based on such intuitions are not necessarily any better than chance. Relying on the luck of the draw won’t be very effective as task-oriented groups face increasingly complex challenges. We must overcome such intuitions. We need to realize that understanding how best to select the right people for the right group is a hard problem—and so is understanding how they should interact most effectively.

To compose a group that can effectively tackle a complex problem, we need to know (1) how to analyze the nature of tasks, in order to identify the necessary skills and abilities; (2) how to identify such skills and abilities in individuals; and (3) how different sorts of people can interact most effectively when working on a particular sort of task. Much research will be required to crack these problems (and such research is already under way), but the results will not be widely applied as long as people don’t recognize the nature of the problems and why they are important.

Science can do better than intuition—but we first must understand that intuition isn’t good enough. And this isn’t intuitively obvious.