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Principle behind MAT Catching On
Steven Pearlstein has written an excellent column in the Washington Post about how people receiving foreign aid might be the best people to provide input on where it should go. This is the MAT, writ large. Gee -- do you think that people actually can make decisions for themselves?
There are two types of people in the world -- those that think that people are basically smart, and those that think they are basically dumb. I know that in large groups, you're always going to find the outliers, so for the "people are dumb" crowd; there is never a lack of material.
Personally, I'm with the "people are smart" crowd. There are a couple of good books that explain that perception: Blink (by Malcolm Gladwell) is about the role intuition plays in human decision-making, and The Wisdom of Crowds (by James Surowiecki) is about how large groups of people, with incomplete information, consistently make better decisions that a small number of experts.
My invention, the Markham Assessment Tool, is about just that -- it lets people at an organization decide what skills and processes need improving. As the western countries move out of manufacturing and into services and knowledge work, the tangible nature of the product is lost. Using the MAT will become even more critical in the future if these economies want to thrive.
Because the tool puts power into the hands of the many instead of the few, it is a disruptive technology. Therefore, there is a lot of resistance to getting started. A lot of "experts" wonder what their role will be once things change! That's a good thing, though. We've done as much as we can with the pointy-hat people helping organizations. They mean well, and they have great value, but we desperately need input from the field, from the trenches, from the people who just might have the best insight to make those decisions.
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