Here is why I think interpersonal skills are even more important than I used to think. First, I think it’s becoming increasingly important to think about business and organizations not just in terms of how efficient or how productive they are, but also in terms of how intelligent they are.
Now, if you want to create intelligent organizations, one thing that would certainly be helpful would be a way of measuring the intelligence of a group.
So I’m going to tell you today about some research we’ve done at MIT to do exactly that. We used the same statistical techniques that are used to measure individual intelligence, but we applied them to measuring the intelligence of groups.
Now it turns out with individuals, if you give a bunch of people a bunch of different tasks—math, reading, et cetera—and you look at how well they do on that, there’s a single statistical factor that explains—not perfectly, but significantly—how well a given individual will do on a very wide range of different kinds of tasks. One word for that factor is “intelligence,” and it’s basically this factor that individual intelligence tests measure.
Now as far as we can tell, nobody had ever asked the question about whether there was a similar factor for groups.