More Evidence that Early-Stage Collaboration Erodes Innovation

Having spent a lot of time working for consumer product companies, I find this subject fascinating. And since the design process on all levels is very close to my heart, I wanted to share further evidence for the potentially distructive (at least disruptive) power of early-stage collaboration.

To be clear, I see no problem with seeking out a few people to use as sounding boards when faced with critical decisions. In fact, I'd say that doing so is necessary quite often is business. It's important to surround yourself with people who are knowledgable in different areas and to form an "inner circle" where you can go with ideas, questions, etc.

My point here relates to the process of innovation—i.e., clean-sheet design. Of course, innovation isn't limited to consumer product companies. We deal with innovation (and sometimes the lack thereof) in marketing and corporate communications everyday. If you have five minutes for an interesting read, check out what Behavioral Neuroscientist and Ph.D student Jake Young has written on Bounded Awareness.

For those without five minutes, I've excerpted a short sectionof the article, along with his citation, below:

...this gives rise to the so-called "focusing illusion", in which individuals make decisions based on only an overweighted subset of available information, underweighting and ignoring other information.

The earlier version of the paper has a section on bounded awareness in groups which is quite interesting, and which I think fits nicely here. Basically they say that, when a group of individuals gets together with some shared information and some unique (to individuals) information, they tend to focus on the shared information when making decisions. That is, they leave out information that is unique to individuals when deciding things, which can result in even worse decisions made by the group than by any given individual acting alone. This, of course, defeats the whole point of group decision-making, which is to get as much information as possible together to inform the decision!

—Chugh & Bazerman, Bounded Awareness: What You Fail to See Can Hurt You, 2005