“Great companies build and share their mental model internally in ways that enable managers and employees to independently make critical decisions day in and day out that are aligned with the [company’s] strategy.”
Jason Green in this article on the Harvard Business Review
In yesterday’s entry on mining for nuggets, we introduced the concept of changing your mining techniques as the discoverable gold went from nuggets to grains/dust to microscopic particles. Data mining in OSS is analogous.
As the information yield diminishes (via rapid increases in total data), the effort in producing valuable information increases. This equates to the need for collaborative effort.
Jason Green also indicates
“A simple, but powerful exercise for building a shared mental model brought the cross-functional teams together. Using this approach, each function separately answered a series of key questions, including:
Which customers are the most profitable?
How well aligned is our value proposition to their demands?
What differentiates our value proposition from competition?
How will we compete and win?”
How many operational teams ask these types of questions of their OSS? How many OSS are designed around being able to collect, analyse and resoundingly answer these questions?
How many members of your OSS team are working from a beneficial Shared Mental Model?
As Albert Einstein stated, “to break a mental model is harder than splitting the atom.”