According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Although collaboration among service providers has been a hallmark of special education almost since its inception, co-teaching, the sharing of instruction by a general education teacher and a special education teacher or another specialist in a general education class that includes students with disabilities, is a relatively recent application. As a result of recent federal legislation and related policy changes, co-teaching has evolved rapidly as a strategy for ensuring that these students have access to the same curriculum as other students while still receiving the specialized instruction to which they are entitled. Despite considerable enthusiasm expressed by those who write about co-teaching and those who implement it, co-teaching illustrates the complexity of conceptualizing and studying collaboration in special education. Most inquiry on co-teaching has emphasized co-teachers' roles and relationships or program logistics rather than demonstrating its impact on student achievement and other key out...

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Co-Teaching: An Illustration of the Complexity of Collaboration in Special Education.

This article reports a design experiment conducted over three successive school years, with the teacher's goal of having his Grade 4 students assume increasing levels of collective responsibility for advancing their knowledge of optics. Classroom practices conducive to sustained knowledge building were co-constructed by the teacher and students, with Knowledge Forum software supporting the production and refinement of the community's knowledge. Social network analysis and qualitative analyses were used to assess online participatory patterns and knowledge advances, focusing on indicators of collective cognitive responsibility. Data indicate increasingly effective procedures, mirrored in students' knowledge advances, corresponding to the following organizations: (a) Year 1—fixed small-groups; (b) Year 2—interacting small-groups with substantial cross-group knowledge sharing; and (c) Year 3—opportunistic collaboration, with small teams forming and disbanding under the volition of community members, based on...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10508400802581676

Designs for Collective Cognitive Responsibility in Knowledge-Building Communities

Co-creation is a rapidly emerging area of research. However, there is a lack of understanding as to how organizations use co-creation to build relationships and generate value. How does participation emerge and what outcomes does it deliver? To generate insight into the co-creation process, we created an online brand community. Our findings show that people participate in a community because it offers them the chance to find fulfillment, to express their creativity, and to socialize. The findings have significant implications for marketing, branding, and research professionals because the research shows that managers have to see participants as integral to the brand.

Building Brands Together: Emergence and Outcomes of Co-Creation:

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration; Keith Sawyer; Basic Books, NY, 2007; 274 pp., $26.95. If you're involved in a business that depends on sustained innovation (and which doesn't?)-especially if you're a manager who can influence decisions and resources-then add this to your reading list. Keith Sawyer's writing is direct, clear, even friendly, and the text is unencumbered by ponderous footnotes and thick quotations. An associate professor of psychology at Washington University, St. Louis, Sawyer's personal hobbies of jazz and improv theater appear again and again to support his thesis that innovation is a product of groups, and that the solitary genius is a myth. But the scope of the book is more than that: it covers the important and current thinking about fostering innovation in the Internet-enabled age. By my own reading and experience in a research-driven Fortune 500 corporation, the innovation literature is converging on a number of "best practices." Sawyer captures them well, and with his well-chosen supporting anecdotes these are reason enough to read the book and get to work applying these lessons in your organization: * Poorly structured, lazy brainstorming is practiced so frequently and is so wasteful, we can't have enough books that reveal its flaws and how to improve upon it. Sawyer's treatment is excellent. * Sustained innovation depends on having many irons in the fire, with the corollary that failure will be frequent and must be supported. * Myths about lone geniuses need bursting. Even those who work alone stand on the shoulders of giants, and implementation always needs teamwork and has its own continuing need for creative problem solving. The risk of propagating the solitary genius concept (to the exclusion of other possibilities) is that organizations will fail to support "messy" teams. * Innovation happens at the "edge of chaos"; either too much or too little structure is destructive. * Clusters are important. It may seem risky to have many firms in one location competing for a common pool of talent, but history shows that a crossfertilizing, dynamic environment is more innovative and sustainable. * The Internet and related communications standards are flattening the world at an unprecedented pace; the Web empowers enormous networks of individual innovators. Standing still is not an option. Group Genius also benefits from: * Annotated Notes: Sawyer has made a wise choice to keep the prose simple and fast-moving, but as a result, major ideas sometimes jump off the page as bald assertions (for example, ". . . the most effective . . . groups are self-managing. . . . without being directed by a leader."). The annotated notes at the end of the book provide good counterweight and credibility to the breezy style. * Frequent Checklists: The book is sprinkled with bulleted lists of do's and don'ts, which stitch the storytelling narrative together into practical advice. …

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

OVERVIEW:Forget Linux, Netflix, DARPA, and the X Prizes. Deliberate, managed open innovation goes back 300 years. At that time the determination of longitude at sea was both vitally important and apparently impossible; so having failed with a team of experts, Parliament sought solutions from a wider field via the Longitude Act of 1714, which offered a prize of £20,000 for a method of determining longitude to within 30 miles, to be proven on a voyage from Britain to the West Indies. The Act established a Board of Longitude to manage submissions, decide upon the prize, and, if necessary, grant additional money to support an inventor's progress. The process created for the administration of the Longitude prize remains as relevant today as any modern prize-based example.

Open Innovation in the Eighteenth Century

As a very modern manager and reader of RTM , you know that your business teams would benefit from more diverse, timely, and expert knowledge than they could possibly have internally ( Spencer 2013 ). So you've tried using social media methods (either within the company or outside of it, or both), but frankly, not that many people seem to care. There's a flurry of activity after each announcement of a new challenge, but it dies out quickly. You've heard about gamification, a fast and easy way to get more involvement. But what is it? How can you use it? Should you?Gamification is the application of some of the attributes of video games (points, badges, and leaderboards) to a voluntary business process to encourage participation. When done thoughtfully and in moderation, it may be helpful. However, it is not a substitute for real, sustainable motivation-and in some cases, it may actually be demotivating. Done poorly or without thought, gamification can promote selfish and competitive behavior over cooperation and generate antipathy or perceptions of unfairness among the low-participating majority. And overdone, it may distract from the real business purpose of the project and drive unwanted behavior.The Immutable Pattern of Voluntary ParticipationBecause gamification is intended to increase participation, it's important to note the completely different signatures of mandatory versus voluntary participation. In a traditional, appointed business team, we generally expect everyone to contribute comparably, each according to his or her relevant knowledge: there should be no total slackers, and neither should one or two individuals dominate. Voluntary online forums have an entirely different signature-a long tail of participation, in which a few people contribute many times and a very large number contribute just once or twice or not at all. This holds true whenever participation is voluntary, in every industry, at every scale ( Spencer and Woods 2010 ; Spencer 2012 ).The important thing to note is that this long-tail pattern is normal and universal. About 75 percent of content in such a forum will come from those who contribute just one, two, or three times. There is nothing wrong with this pattern, and people are not being lazy; in fact they're exercising a choice over where to spend their limited time and attention. In other words, participation in voluntary forums can't be judged by the same standards applied to conscripted teams. The pattern is intrinsic, and it doesn't matter if the motivation is altruistic or tangible: participation in Innocentive, whose challenges have payouts in the thousands of dollars, has the same long-tail form as altruistic challenges ( Spencer 2012 ). This pattern will not be changed by gamification.Motivation, Demotivation, and EngagementIn the century since Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, and Alfred Sloan invented the modern corporation, there has been an active, research-driven literature about motivation at work; researchers have generated considerable consensus around what motivates us. Herzberg (1987) and the huge Gallup studies on engagement (see Buckingham and Coffman 1999 ; Coffman and Gonzales-Molina 2002 ) capture the key points:* Motivating factors and demotivating factors are different from each other. For knowledge workers, for instance, money is not a strong motivator but, if it is perceived to be given unfairly, it can be a strong demotivator.* Perceived unfairness in policies and procedures is strongly demotivating. Fairness (or its lack) is recognized as a powerful force that may override economics in decision making ( Kahneman 2011 , 308).* The strongest motivator for knowledge workers is the belief that one's contributions matter, that they make a difference and serve a useful purpose.Daniel Pink's (2009) comprehensive review of motivation reinforces these points, concluding that knowledge work is driven by the desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. …

Work Is Not a Game

Participation in online challenges and forums follows a predictable pattern across industries and public forums, at scales from dozens to millions of contributors. OVERVIEW: Thanks to Internet technology and social media, voluntary challenges and forums have become a widespread form of collaboration for business; examples include Wikipedia, Innocentive, and many internal corporate systems. Participation in these systems follows the same pattern across industries and public forums, at scales from dozens to millions of contributors. This pattern-a long tail of participation, with a few very active contributors and many occasional contributors- is very different from behavior in internal business teams. The universality of this model has important implications for mass collaboration initiatives; its parameters are easily known, which makes it straightforward to predict participation and project whether the content generated will represent a minority or majority opinion. The factors that affect these parameters are also known, although our ability to influence them is often limited. Networks and communities may be involved but are not necessary; it may be more accurate to say that input comes from an audience of individual contributors. Because these results are very different from what is expected of traditional business teams, managers considering social collaboration initiatives should take note. KEYWORDS: Participation , Collaboration , Social media , Long tail , Power law , Networks Internet technology and familiarity with social media make it easy to broadcast messages to hundreds and thousands of employees, suppliers, or customers; the optimistic visions of The Wisdom of Crowds ( Surowiecki 2004 ) and Open Innovation ( Chesbrough 2006 ) suggest that the ever-expanding reach of social media could be used to access mass intelligence to power innovation. It's the rare business leader who has not at least considered these new models for collaborative work. For that leader, it is tempting to imagine being freed from the limitations of physical meetings and scheduling problems to augment traditional business teams with the collective knowledge and experience of huge virtual teams. Yet participation in such virtual teams takes a very different form from traditional business teams, with major consequences for the business leader's expectations and project management. Our standard of comparison is the business leader's mental model for team members' performance, most likely a model in which there are a few low performers, a broad peak of "typical" performers, and a few high performers ( Figure 1a ). This expectation underlies a great deal of managers' behavior and is also the basis for most corporate incentive and promotion programs. But the distribution of contributions from people in a voluntary participation forum is dramatically different; with rare exceptions, a few people contribute a lot and a large majority contributes a little ( Figure 1b ). This pattern is seen in a wide diversity of companies and public forums and has a strong basis in theory, suggesting that it applies whenever (1) participation is not forced, and (2) there is some form of sustained positive feedback for participation. These different participation curves originate in the very different circumstances of the two venues. The bell curve of typical team participation is a consequence of constrained behavior when a defined team of people is set to work on a given project. People vary in their talent and knowledge, and when team members each work about the same amount of time, these variations add up to the bell curve. But large virtual forums are voluntary in practice. We know that in physical "town hall" meetings, only a few people will raise their hands and speak while the majority listen (or daydream). There is even less social pressure to respond to an electronic announcement when sitting at one's desk, so active participation becomes a personal, voluntary decision. …

A Pervasive Model for Participation in Voluntary Forums

In his 2006 book Science Business, Gary Pisano defined three elements of the business environment that a science- or technology-based business must master to survive: speed of change, complexity, and uncertainty. We've dealt with the first two, speed of change and complexity, in previous col- umns (Spencer 2013, 2014). Uncertainty is perhaps an inevi- table outcome of the other two. In defining uncertainty, we aren't talking about a simple lack of knowledge or probabilis- tic risk. Instead, business uncertainty emerges from inacces- sible data or an unknowable future. Speed of change means that failing to act in the face of uncertainty is not an option; just cutting costs and saving time may optimize the present but it won't create the future. Uncertainty notwithstanding, the business leader must lead.Business uncertainty is the sum of all the unknowns sur- rounding a decision: unknowns about competitors, suppliers, and partners and their intentions; about consumer trends and political and financial shifts; about coming technical changes. There is a rich literature on the topic; Courtney, Kirkland, and Viguere (1997) offer a methodical approach befitting their McKinsey heritage, and of course an entire industry-insurance-is built on one method of managing against an uncertain future.In an uncertain world, the wise manager will envision modes of failure and put plans in place to avert, minimize, or recover from them. Insurance is one form of planning-for- failure. NASA takes this power of negative thinking to an extreme for the sake of astronaut and mission survival in its what-else-can-go-wrong planning (Hadfield 2013). Unless you have a monopoly in a static market, "plan for success" may be one of the most dangerous mantras in business. But failure mitigation alone is insufficient, and the management of innovation, where uncertainties abound, takes more radi- cal thinking.Strategies Against UncertaintyThere are a host of approaches to managing uncertainty, but they can all be grouped into three general strategies, illus- trated by a personal approach to wet weather:* Buffer: Always keep a raincoat and umbrella in the trunk of the car.* Plan: Listen to the weather forecast and bring a raincoat if the prediction warrants.* Adapt: Do nothing now. If it rains, find an umbrella somewhere, run, or get wet.Which strategy you adopt may depend on elements that are outside your control. If you have slack resources (a car with a big trunk), then you can buffer; this is the approach on which the insurance industry is built (cash today against bad news tomorrow). If you have a reliable model of the future (a weather forecast), then you can plan. If you have neither, then you must adapt because you have no alternative.But it's important to be honest about your capabilities. Science and engineering managers love to build quantitative models to guide planning. The danger is that modeling can take on a life of its own, restrict itself to knowable but minor factors, and mask the ugly reality that a lot of what happens isn't very predictable. In pharmaceuticals, despite years of in- vitro and animal testing and sophisticated computer model- ing, about 90 percent of new drugs fail when they reach human testing (Kola and Landis 2004). The lesson is to be very honest, and if slack resources or good predictive models are lacking (which is common), then accept that your strat- egy must be adaptation.At the strategic level, adaptation means moving from push to pull as defined by Hagel and Brown (Brown and Hagel 2005; Hagel and Brown 2008). Push is intrinsic to the corpo- rate design Alfred Sloan gave us a century ago: do annual data gathering and analysis, make big decisions, then push re- sources at the corporate goals, all nicely managed by individ- ual goals and performance reviews. It's top-down, centralized, and highly structured, and, when you think about it, assumes that the world is predictable on annual timescales. …

Robin W. Spencer

Papers

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

Open Innovation in the Eighteenth Century

Work Is Not a Game

A Pervasive Model for Participation in Voluntary Forums

Managing Under Uncertainty