Problem Solving: Is Team Thinking Best?

Let’s say you’ve got a problem. And of course, because you work in modern office, you’ve got a team to solve it. Is that really the best way to go? Now comes a business professor at Boston University who, working with a small team, came up with this answer: it depends. Mainly, the researchers found, it depends on which part of the problem-solving process people are engaged in—the search for information or using the information to come up with solutions. A Boston University news story reports that researchers at the school adapted a US Department of Defense (DOD) tool for conducting experiments on collaboration and information gathering and customized a 25-minute whodunit game: figuring out the who, what, when, and where of a pending terrorist attack. Some 400 undergraduate participants were divided into 16-person groups. Each group was organized into one of four networks, which ranged from highly clustered to minimally clustered. Ready? The envelope please….Those in the highly clustered communications networks were five percent more efficient in searching for unique facts or clues. But those who were not densely clustered came up with 17.5 percent more unique theories or solutions.