Honest signals

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —February 26, 2009
Filed in Collaboration

Alex Pentland is a Professor at MIT. He’s a pioneer in computational social science and Newsweek named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.

When I saw this video I was reminded of the conversation I witnessed between two engineers and the honest signals (Pentland’s term for all those things we do that we do to show we are interested, care, are speaking expertly, etc.) It’s 8 minutes and well worth watching, particularly the concept of honest signals. The reality mining ideas, however, gave me the heebie-jeebies. All I could think of was marketers trying to find out more about my buying patterns. But his last idea about how high performing teams oscillate between discovery tasks that are mostly individual and integration tasks that are social and face to face is an important finding for developing collaboration initiatives. This oscillation ideas is described some more here. I need to find out some more.

Thanks to Stephen Bounds on the ActKM list for the pointers to Alex’s work.

About  Shawn Callahan

Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:

Comments

  1. John Caddell says:

    Shawn,
    To “reality mining,” the public is being more open with its information than ever before. Twitter is an example.
    The New York Times did an experiment during the Super Bowl football game here, where they mapped the use of certain keywords in Twitter over the course of the game, along with the location of the Tweeter. The result is a fascinating map of crowd-based emotion, thought and momentum. The link is here: http://bit.ly/IySq

  2. That was a fascinating visualisation John. Thanks for the pointer.

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