What would you do? Imagine you are a well-trained nurse. You care about your patients and are especially concerned about a terminally ill patient who is scheduled for surgery. You know that the surgery will have consequences affecting the patient’s quality of life. In your opinion, the surgery is likely to increase the patient’s suffering…. Continue Reading
Category Archives: Dispersed Knowledge
America’s Diminishers
In her insightful book Multipliers, Liz Wiseman distinguishes between two types leaders—those who are able to tap into dispersed organizational knowledge and those who ignore the knowledge of anyone but themselves. Diminishers of organizational knowledge, she observes, are at their core “intellectual supremacists.” Wiseman writes: The Diminisher’s view of intelligence is based on elitism and… Continue Reading
Between Our Heads
Perhaps the most important essay written by a social scientist in the 20th century was Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek’s essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Hayek’s central idea that useful knowledge is dispersed is still almost universally disregarded by policymakers and politicians and is too often disregarded by those who lead our organizations. Hayek’s… Continue Reading