Shrodinger’s Cat and Good Management

At Google, we had mountains of recruiting data and we were able to use to use it to demonstrate the unreliability of any single interviewer’s judgement. We made a clear case that every hiring decision had to equally weigh inputs from 4+ independent decision makers with no knowledge of each other’s impressions until each had weighed in. This is the foundation of many companies’ interviewing practices and the core of the training we conduct with our clients at Gray Scalable.   

The same science applies to good management.   For any project, the more inputs the better, and any manager’s ideas are not going to be greater than the sum of ideas of his entire team. James Everingham at Instagram makes a fantastic case for how “...if you simply outline the problem and what success looks like—let’s say it’s increasing revenue by 100%—all paths to success are still possible, including those you haven’t thought of yourself. It’s very likely that someone on your team will think of a better solution, but as soon as you say what you think, everyone gets a whole lot less creative.”

So empower your people, and keep the cat alive.   It’s not just “good for them”, it makes you all successful.

Great article!   And thanks for sharing it, First Round Review!