Companies that bet on enhancing their social brain will be better at interacting with customers and planning for the future.
This is the conclusion of Sandy Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT.
The researcher explains that even in an age of Twitter and texting, companies may improve their productivity if they give employees more time to talk face to face.
Pentland’s research group uses cutting-edge technology to study human interactions, developing “sociometers,” which could be worn around the neck or fastened to clothing.
By analyzing data from sociometers worn by hundreds of volunteers in dozens of settings, the researchers discovered patterns that represent the degree of engagement between conversing people.
For example, energy–lots of hand gestures–and variety of vocal inflection indicate enthusiasm;
mimicking the gestures of another person was a very reliable sign of careful attention and growing trust.
By looking for such patterns without assessing the content of the conversations, Pentland’s group could predict, with 70 to 80 percent accuracy, whether, say, people meeting at a speed-dating event would exchange phone numbers, or whether attendees at a business meeting would exchange cards.
The researcher explains that “to boost performance and innovation, we need to support the social brain’s talents for reading other people’s behavior and fine-tuning relationships, just as today’s computer tools extend our memories and computational skills”.
Instead of focusing on machines that might replace employees, the MIT team is more interested in developing machines and tools to make people more socially aware and effective.
As a result of their research and somewhat surprisingly, they found that a group’s success at meeting challenges was only weakly related to the IQs of its individual members. The most successful teams were those that were able to optimize communication within the group.
If every team member was engaged and making many contributions, then the group was very likely to be successful.
This also meant that members of racial and cultural minority groups, whose ideas and experience may be different from the majority, had the opportunity to contribute and be heard.
Sources : https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/deloitte-review/issue-15/sandy-pentland-mit-interview.html
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