The screen and processor are obscurely intertwined, so it can be really puzzling to recognize the root cause. Which team made design choices which led to the failure? According to an article published by the business school INSEAD, innovation projects that have workers of different specialties collaborating contain the danger of drawing false conclusions based on the results of mingled output.
How can managers enable interdependent players to make the best possible choices?
Managers can also use incentives to prevent false negatives. When pay is too closely tied to performance, employees may lose a taste for trial-and-error (which is exactly how effective organizational learning is done). Rewarding persistence as well as performance can help your collaborative innovation projects avoid dead ends. In coupled learning, the same alternative that failed yesterday could succeed today. It just depends on whether the counterpart has solved the problem on their end.
In a recent paper, interacting agents were modeled to learn how initial assumptions can set the stage for a successful learning process. A commonly held initial plan, even if inaccurate, can beat no plan or a mix of good and bad plans held by the collaborators.
Managing coupled learning processes
There are several intriguing ways in which a manager can improve the efficacy of coupled learning processes. The manager doesn’t need to have more technical knowledge than his subordinates. By merely preparing a common plan, an initial shared belief, the overall process of the search can be improved. This applies even if the plan itself is wrong.
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