Honest Signals by Alex Pentland

Author:Alex Pentland [Pentland, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262261043
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2009-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

DISTRIBUTED CIRCUITS

Insights from these experiments offer some hope for teams that are distributed around the globe. It is widely thought that there are two critical problems for groups that primarily use electronic communications rather than face-to-face meetings.18 The first is that such groups seem to lack the ability to harvest information that is distributed across the team rather than concentrated entirely in one or another team member. The second problem is that members of distance teams often experience a lack of both social integration and connection to the decision-making process.

Both of these problems may stem from a reliance on the centralized, language-based communications tools that are in use now. In today’s systems, signaling between people is frequently minimized, and is usually confined to one person signaling at a time. But because social signaling is inherently a two-way process, memos and email simply don’t work the same way that face-to-face communications work. When you send an email or issue a memo, the receiver is more likely to feel isolated from the decision making because they are missing the two-way engagement of social signaling.19 They want to have their reaction carried back to the issuer; face-to-face communication accomplishes this because it is two-way, changing both the messenger as well as the receiver.

As a result of an overreliance on these language-based communication tools, the sort of dense network of social circuits needed to both support an idea market and enable people to read the group’s network intelligence simply doesn’t exist. These same limitations mean that people can’t participate in the group’s social circuitry, and as a result they feel that they have little influence on the group decision process.

One approach to curing these ills is to provide continuous signaling channels between all the participants, just as happens in faceto-face groups. Today there are many research laboratories exploring this possibility, using everything from high-end computer graphics avatars to low-end animated computer sprites. Only time will tell which, if any, of these approaches will be successful.

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