Bruce, a trainer and user of GroupSystems, mentions two major benefits of
anonymity. One of these is that "each idea that is put forward in a
meeting is judged on its own merits and not by who said it."
As constant readers are aware, I try to make a distinction between
ordinary and complex situations. My work deals only with the latter.
As a general finding, it is almost certainly true that what works with
ordinary situations does not work in complex situations. If I could
interest more people in making this distinction, it is likely that more
understanding of the distinction could be attained, and that would help
people determine the nature of what is being faced.
In complex situations, we have abundant evidence (note that I am not
making a pronouncement from above--I am telling you about evidence, and I
can tell you how you can develop your own) that ideas that are produced
are not even understood--frequently not even by the person that offered
the ideas.
Consequently it is void of meaning to say that each idea is judged on its
own merits. While it may be true, it is largely irrelevant, for the
following reasons: (1) If the idea is judged on its merit, you can be
virtually certain that its merit has not been understood, so what is
happening is that a mistake is piled on top of a misunderstanding.
Multiply this event by tens or hundreds, and you can see that the use of
GroupSystems in complex situations is dysfunctional (2) With complex
situations (and this is a pronouncement, uncorrupted by demonstrable
evidence) it is very often true that whatever effective communication
occurs from the initial reception of an idea is at least partly due to
what others have experienced in communicating with the author of the idea,
because they have some understanding of how that author applies the
English language in conversations.
Nothing I have said is intended to deny Bruce's point if he meant only to
apply it to ordinary situations. It is reasonably evident, for example,
that we both mean the same thing when we talk about how many dollars or
how many computers are involved.
-- JOHN WARFIELD Jwarfiel@gmu.edu