Communication gaps often lead to accidents, delays, missed opportunities, waste, and conflict in organizations. However, on occasion, they can also lead to beneficial outcomes, at least for one of the parties involved. Prior scholarship on productive misunderstandings and on strategic ambiguity...

We introduce the concept of a “code”- a fuzzy mapping between two distinct sets of cognitive constructs – as a fundamental construct to study culture. The concept of a code, and the distinction between using a code vs. expectations about the code others use, can be applied to study many...

Design thinking remains mired in controversy. Its proponents claim that it enhances not just confidence but also creativity, but its opponents question whether it does anything beyond building unfounded confidence. In order to bring rigorous evidence to this debate, we designed a randomized...

In organizations such as 'boss-less' firms, online communities, and common-pool resource communities, members collaborate with limited or no dependence on authority (superiors in a hierarchy). These and similar types of organizations can be viewed as examples of 'collaborative organizing' - an...

The core tenet of evolutionary psychology is that the human mind features multiple adaptations to ancestral environments that were social and involved living in groups. To be truly human-centric, the designers of modern organizations need to accept and incorporate this fact. Human-centric...

Ambiguity and semantic differences are each known to be independent sources of communication difficulty. However, we show using computational models that ambiguity can compensate for semantic differences across communicators. Given that the heterogeneity of humans with which artificial systems...

Explainability is at the core of several phenomena related to the integration of knowledge held by different actors (including the currently popular case involving machine intelligence and humans). We propose that there are inescapable limits to explainability that arise from the joint effects...

An “ensemble” approach to decision making involves aggregating the results from different decision makers solving the same problem (i.e., without specialization). We draw on the literature on ensemble decision making in machine learning-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) as well as among...

Coordinated action within and between organizations is easier when individuals share communication codes – mappings between stimuli and labels. Since codes are specific to the groups within which they arise as conventions, collaboration across organizational units that have developed their own...

The promise of collaboration between humans and algorithms in producing good decisions is stimulating much experimentation in the world of practice. Drawing on research in organization design can help us to approach this experimentation (and its analysis) systematically. I propose typologies for...