The Mindjet Blog

In the early morning hours of September 30, 1999, NASA’s Mars climate orbiter spacecraft, a $125 million marvel of engineering, that was designed to orbit Mars, suddenly disappeared from the screens of the ground control team and, seconds later, its signal vanished for good. An investigation of this incident revealed that the NASA engineers who wrote the navigation software for the orbiter had been working in separate groups and had apparently not approached the mission as a whole. In fact, one group had been programming its calculations using metric units – kilometers and kilograms – while the other had been relying on American style English units – miles and pounds. That led to the critical flaw in the orbiter’s navigation, and it inevitably burned to a crisp due to friction with the red planet’s atmosphere.

In his book “The Power of Minds at Work”, Karl Albrecht cites this case as an example for what he calls Albrecht’s law:

“Intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity.” 

Arguing that in organizations, the sum of all individual minds only rarely equals the level of organizational intelligence, he identifies several factors that may contribute to this dysfunction. Although his conclusion is less harsh than that of the documentary “The Corporation,” which diagnosed today’s enterprise psychopathic, it certainly attributes some severe neuroses to its subject. Based on his more than 25 years’ experience as a consultant, Albrecht contends that organizational “entropy” (that is, the energy of a system that remains unavailable for conversion to work), ineffective decision-making processes, and cultural clashes arise in every organization. With employees working in separate silos, each department protecting its turf and not knowing what the others are doing, “collective brain power gets wasted,” Albrecht says, thus compromising the mission of the enterprise. Collaboration and knowledge management, the two major buzzwords of today’s enterprise, may work on academic paper but are far from being effectively applied in practice.

One reason might be the dearth of sophisticated technology to support the generation and storage of organizational intelligence. Sure, there are dozens of Intranets and groupware applications out there, and there are numerous desk-top sharing and web conferencing tools such as Webex, Netviewer or Placeware, and now blogs and Wikis. It seems, though, that all of these systems fall short of the immense challenge to provide a platform that is broad enough for teams to both store and exchange knowledge on while also soliciting new one. Most of these tools either emphasize storing and presenting information or they focus on creating information, yet a combination of both is still lacking. Ambitious systems like Microsoft’s Sharepoint, one of the most common Intranet applications, suffer from the very intricacy of their architecture – cumbersome navigation, an overwhelming array of features, and limited storage capacity.

But that’s not all. Granted that technology manages to create a system that possesses the functionality and is easy to use at the same time, will it really cover all intelligence that is inherent in the corporate DNA?  It is interesting in this context to look at the distinction between the “conscious” and “unconscious mind” that Albrecht translates from the human to the organizational psyche. While the conscious mind, that is, an ongoing “multilogue,” a mindful and explicit conversation among the organizations’ members, documented in words and data, may be easier to capture by existing business intelligence software, the unconscious mind, that is, the tacit knowledge, the unspoken “culture” and sub-text of an organization, is a moving target that is much more difficult to harness. All business intelligence and collaborative tools are clearly biased towards explicit information.

Maybe Mindjet MindManager can help reconcile both parts of the organizational mind. MindManager maps enable holistic thinking of one individual mind. Do they also enable holistic thinking of the collective mind?  Do they facilitate collaboration within the enterprise?  Can MindManager remove interdepartmental feuds and instead empower organizations to capture, organize, and share all their existing intelligence? 

In other words: Is MindManager your personal "secret weapon" (that you don’t want to share with your peers…), or does your organization employ it across departments as an effective format for all its explicit and implicit conversations?  Does MindManager make your organization smarter? If not, do you really want it to? 

Tim Leberecht, Corporate Communications Manager