Posted by Prashant Hegde on May 31, 2007
Transactive Memory
The
term coined by Daniel Wegner simply means – individuals can act as
extended memory to one another. That simply means that you need not
know something that you know that your wife or father knows. This is
described in detail in Malcom Gladwell’s “The tipping point”. A closely
knit team is more efficient in remembering things than individual team
members. This has a positive effect on how the team performs. May be
this explains the efficiency of Agile teams who rely heavily on communication among the team members. Gladwell also talks about effect
the magic number 150 has on organizations. He cites the case of
Gore Associates and their high efficiency. He also talks about how “peer
pressure” ( rather than dead-line pressures or pressure from
supervisors) pushes people perform better.
This also brings
forth the Japanese working style. Kenichi Ohmae describes in his book -
“The mind of the strategist”, about how the Japanese organizations are
structured. He talks about the how people work closely within/across
teams. According to him, in Japan, children are taught how to mix with others
and work in a group at school. This is the first lesson they learn at
school before anything else!. Does this explain Japanese efficiency?
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Aravind said
This is a nice line of thought.
Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work in our society, A society where a child is taught, right from birth, to compete.
Our education system, through out, is based on how you perform compared to the rest of your classmates.
Then comes our jobs and the system of pay based on the individual’s performance.
As a result,perhaps the basic animal instinct of survival kinda comes out prominenet owing the pressures ( both internal and external) due to the sense of competition , leading people to break/ bypass the ethical framework of society, thus disturbing other individuals cumuliatively resulting in chaos.