PicoBlog

Although Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Bomber Mafia, is about a deeply uncomfortable type of innovation, there was a wonderful phrase he introduced me to, which (as he so often does) perfectly captured something kind of obvious that I'd previously not been able to describe. Here's his paragraph:

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies—that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.

The idea of 'external storage' - not needing to know directions to the Tate London because you know Apple Maps does, for example - is one we're all extremely comfortable with. The thing that's relevant to pharma teams, perhaps, lies in the time you have together - both to build that collective memory and to make it work for you.

There's an additional challenge, of course, in that memories depend on perspective. We started running a Delphi approach at advisory meetings, because here's what happens if you don't: a week later, you ask your colleagues what the meeting concluded, and not only do you find disagreement on what was said (no surprise that it often supports the observers' priors), but it depends on who the person listening was. A regulatory observer may hear the same opinion differently than a commercial colleague - not because they heard different words, but because they meant different things to them individually. If you are basing a decision on what that advisory meeting 'said' then it is unreliable to rely on transactive memory - to assume that your colleague will remember it the way that you'd wish.

Thus, the power of transactive memory in teams comes in establishing either objective things to remember among the team (not subjective opinion - this is where Delphi aids things so much, in forcing the advisors to be specific), or establishing a priori a shared goal among the team. As I've written before, it seems obvious that a team would have a shared goal, but in practice the 'micro goals' win - to avoid censure internally, to avoid getting a 'no from a regulator', to maximise the differentiation from a competitor...

The value of an Asymmetric Learning approach comes in that it fixes a target against which to gain knowledge - uncertainty is embraced and knowledge collected against future decisions, not prior decisions. With that approach, the team can be 'trusted' to store memories together. Changing the mindset from 'I know that' to 'I know that you're the best person to find out' already changes the role of the team... If you share goals, it is easier to share memories.

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