Google is generally trying to use data to drive its performance. But it has found itself unable to predict the performance of teams based on data only. Actually it was more about emotional interactions. This research – the Aristotle project – is explained in a very interesting NYT article, ‘What Google Learned from Its Quest for the Perfect Team‘.
“Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.”
As Hugh MacLeod (Gapingvoid) puts it, “Why is business so hard? Simply put, we think it is due to a lack of humanity. Our obsession with data is conflated with a belief that emotion in business is bad: Data and emotion are incompatible, so we have a bias against connecting emotion to business and we work in sterile workplaces that do not value our humanity.
But what happens, when the data support the paradox that it is our emotional connections that create better, more efficient, smarter work?”
Let’s develop emotional connection to create more efficient work.
