In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.) Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins. “One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
Phil Ridout on 11 May 09Collaboration is an essential element of doing business. and most companies spend their working day communicating with customers, suppliers, partners and colleagues. For many businesses this is still an efficient process. Stats show that each business loses an estimated £10k per year sitting in traffic en route to meetings. This doesn't take into account the time and cost of communicating across their companies or distributed workforces. In other words the things businesses are doing to ensure they run smoothly are actually costing them money. Internet based collaboration tools can replace face-to-face meetings, allowing you to work with a team in another office, another company, or even another time zone. And they are just as useful to help you stay on top of projects that involve people in the same office, because they bring together the information and resources you need to run your business on a daily basis.
