Massachusetts Institute of Technology

SENSIBLE ORGANIZATIONS

Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Peter A. Gloor, Robert Laubacher

Data mining of email has provided important insights into how organizations function and what management practices lead to greater productivity. But important communications are almost always face-to-face, so we are missing the greater part of the picture.

However, today people carry cell phones and wear badges with RFIDs. These body-worn sensor networks mean that we can potentially know who talks to whom, and even how they talk to each other. As a consequence, we can finally answer questions like: does the sales department talk to marketing? Are all these meetings really useful? Does the boss really talk all the time or does it just seem like it?

We might even be able to answer questions like: Do I have more of an introvert or an extrovert communication style? What personality types do I have to bring into a meeting to make it more productive? How can I change my personal communication behavior to be more efficient? What leadership styles are most effective for a certain situation?