Back in the eighties, American businesses, large and small, were scared to death of Japan, Inc. I am not at all sure this fear was justified, but at the time, it was all too palpable. Consequently, business schools in the United States started studying the way business and industry worked in Japan, hoping to emulate some of their success.
Well it did not take a lot of work or intelligence to realize that Japan has a consensus culture. And their businesses are also run by consensus. And the only way to achieve consensus is to ask everyone for their input. And pre-internet, the best way to do this was to bring together all the key players and discuss the situation and come to the hoped-for consensus.
However long that might take. And however good or bad the resulting decision.
What our crack business academics saw were groups of Japanese managers coming together to achieve some desired outcome. And they said: Hey, we need to do that too.
To be fair, business schools were previously teaching group collaboration. But it was Japan, Inc. that supercharged the practice.
Now it just so happened that I was in business school in the late eighties. And we students were early test subjects for this new urgency. So the professors started assigning group projects. The idea, ostensibly, was for us to learn to work together to achieve the best result. Sounds great in theory.
And while the practice was new to me, at first I did not really mind it. Just another way of getting the work done. But it soon became clear, that in an academic setting, even at a top-tier school, as opposed to a real, profit-driven, operating business, some group members contributed more than others. This was always going to be the case. It is just human nature; some people are more motivated than others.
Yet I did have the opportunity to work with groups entirely comprised of smart, highly motivated individuals. And I certainly have over the course of my career. These groups prove the academics' theory is true if groups are in fact so comprised. But most often teachers assemble academic groups with a diverse mix of contributors. Here, and without apology, the academics fully expect the strong to carry the weak.
In a business, weak performers can be fired, or otherwise removed from a collaboration. And even if this is not done, say for political or nepotistic reasons, everyone knows. But in an academic setting this is never done because the academics do not really understand how things truly work. They seem to believe that one must learn to work with and appreciate weak performers. I never have.
Two immediate problems. One, and the professors readily acknowledged this, is that groups tend to produce results that are better than what the worst-performing members could produce on their own. But at the same time, inferior to what the best-performing members could produce on their own. In the aggregate, coming in slightly above average. This is just common sense. I guess academics believe that slightly above average is still above average and therefore worth pursuing.
But the outcome is an inferior result; certainly inferior to optimal or best.
The second immediate problem is the result takes longer than necessary because of all the time spent coming to the magical consensus. I mean the best group members have to spend time trying to convince the worst group members of the correct direction. And even then, because consensus is the driving force, the group will elect a suboptimal approach.
This is what happens when the real goal is not an optimal and timely result, but rather a consensus-driven result. So groups produce suboptimal and time consuming results.
Not to pick on Japan. Because it is really American academics who are to blame for this nonsense. But a great example of what I am talking about was the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, where indecision and delay led to more serious consequences. Delay caused while they were trying to reach the Japanese cultural imperative of consensus.
Nevertheless, the idea that group consensus should determine our management and business direction took off in academic quarters. Further, this idea infused other academic departments, most notably the notoriously less-than-rigorous education departments. Education professors just loved the idea and added it to their pedagogical methods.
Over the decades since, as businesses will do, they have adapted what works and what does not work, into useful and productive business practices. What I mean is that if a situation calls for group consensus that is what a business will do. But if a situation would be ill-served by such a practice, they are not about to impose it to merely fulfill some academic standard.
But no matter what, top performers hate any practice which limits their, well, performance. This is why you find the best people in entrepreneurial roles, not middle management. Leave the corporate bureaucracy and academic claptrap to Boeing and Disney.
Now I have no idea if business schools are still teaching groups and consensus-driven decision making. But they specialize in producing mediocre performers, so probably so. But you know who is absolutely still pushing this? Education departments. The education academics in their wisdom have decided that groups produce higher quality pedagogical results. It's nonsense of course because the same results happen in education that happen in business. That is, the results are only better than what the worst-performing members could produce on their own. But that seems to be perfectly okay for our educators.
So teachers, all kinds of teachers, have been taught to use groups. Where a couple of generations ago, the teacher would have made an assignment to all individual members of a class, today they're likely to divide the class into groups and make the assignment to each group.
So has academic excellence been drilled out of our current generation of educators? Do teachers even recognize the inherent problem of group suboptimal performance? Do they even care?
I do not believe they do.
Why? Because if a teacher has twenty-eight students in her class and divides them into seven groups of four students each, then the teacher has to read and grade only seven assignments instead of twenty-eight. Yes, it is just that simple.
So this is the why; my theory anyway. But there is one last problem. Who pays? Well the best, most motivated students of course. Because they end up doing all the work. This is not terrible; if assignments were made individually, they would be doing all of their own work anyway. But group assignments do tend to be larger (because supposedly all members are contributing). But naturally this is not what happens. The lazy, unmotivated students contribute little or nothing. And the bright, motivated students have to carry them along.
Strangely, this never seems to concern the teachers.
* Apologies to Hannah Arendt.