I have often been confronted by colleagues with the argument that social network analysis is only a method. Over time I became more annoyed with that point. Social network analysis goes beyond this. Yes, it is a method, but it is also a perspective, a framework, with which the world can be analyzed. To underline…
Benchmarking is comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies (Wikipedia) The goal is to measure how well one is doing compared to the industry’s best, to discover why they are the best, and to copy. But in here lies the problem. When you copy a competitors…
Are you dreading to go to work every morning looking forward to your weekend, maybe secretly looking for other jobs? Or do you have the opposite feelings for your work: Looking forward to the daily work challenges, mundane tasks, and colleagues? Most of us are somewhere in the middle, as different tasks need to be…
Most individuals chose to attend higher education institutes to set the foundation for becoming an expert. Educational institutions are set up to help individuals achieve this aim. Much expertise development literature focuses on the development of ‘pattern recognition’ as the main path towards expertise. Individuals can make use of various extensively researched activities to achieve…
Multidisciplinary teams are a common sight in many work settings such as hospitals, business, and universities. a common problem is that team members exchange information with each other, but don’t distribute their information exchange evenly among team members. Information exchange can be asking for information, but also without a request giving new information to others. This research found that adaptive experts, team members who are flexible and can deal effectively with unfamiliar situation, develop more information exchange relationship. Managers can stimulate adaptive expertise by allowing employees to work on a variety of tasks and master diverse skills.
Tools that crunch numbers and provide fast, accurate, and correct decisions are now omnipresent. Amazon’s algorithm recommends products to users, Netflix makes it easier for us to decide what to watch. Data analyst has become a sexy career. Algorithms do not only simplify our free time and buying decision, but they are also helping companies…
If you look for help on how to be more creative, the standard advise is to combine existing knowledge, tools, programs – you name it – in a new way. That’s what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in The Second Machine Age. But the same message is taught by Frans Johnsson in The Medici…
Have you heard about the theory of “strength of weak ties” ? Weak ties are those people with whom you interact rarely. Your acquaintances and colleagues you only talk once a while. Their strengths come from exactly this limited interaction. As you don’t interact often with them, chances are high that they know things you…
The news by Google on how to create a dream team stimulated some conversation in my academic circles. Especially the point that Google was not able to replicate the importance of team composition created some stir. For me, this was obvious. I never considered team composition to be an important factor predicting team performance. Of…
The New York Times described Google’s finding about what makes teams effective as “surprising” . The article tells the story of how members of Project Aristotle analyzed huge amount of data, looking for patterns that explain why certain teams are more effective than others. Their first culprit, team composition, turned out to not explain anything.…
Featured image from Humans of SBE. It shows Wim Gijselaers, Full Professor in Education & Chair of the Department of Educational Research & Development It happened as an accident, one of those side-effects of doing research on teams. A colleague was researching teams and needed to select the best task for it. She already settled on…
When you are in the social science funding is always an issue. Let me correct this: When you do research funding is always an issue (who doesn’t want to have more money, regardless of your discipline or industry). But less funding is given to the social science as governments consider these fields to be less…
Sometimes when I seek distraction I scroll through the tweets mentioning #overlyhonestmethods . It is a hashtag used by scientists to admit their methods. It’s amusing, but it’s openness reveals to the reader the less well-known “dark” side of academia (@beckieport made a collection of those tweets). Not everything we do in the name of…
Archimedes Eureka moment, finding out how to measure the volume of irregular objects, is well-known for two reasons: (1) He apparently ran naked through the streets and (2) he connected a personal experience (seeing the water swap over the edges) to the problem of how to assess the purity of the irregular gold crown of…
In 2014 I went to a conference and saw a number of very interesting presentation in my field. They work was right down my alley. I decided to check out their department and asked the professor if I could visit. After some planning, a lot of logistics, and even more paper work, I began my…
Changing Learning and Working 