The discipline of Artificial Intelligence, an important branch of Computing Sciences, existed as a branch of philosophical studies long before there were modern computers. Starting in the 1950s, there have been numerous researchers in Artificial Intelligence studies who have offered promises of sweeping benefits to society as their specialty teaches computers to, in essence, use common sense. Modern implementations of Artificial intelligence have done a marvelous job of emulating common sense in significant subsets of human ventures, as demonstrated dramatically by IBM’s Watson computer on the television program Jeopardy. However, Watson’s answer “Toronto” to a Final Jeopardy answer about a U.S. airport was an important glimpse behind the “wizard’s curtain” that showed us that Watson was computing at a prodigious rate, but not really “thinking.”
Until this fundamental computational breakthrough happens that imparts common sense to artificial intelligence engines, you need the common sense of your team members.
No matter how elegantly you implement your continuous improvement process, you will not succeed without engaging the common sense of your organization’s workers.
No matter how brilliantly your R&D group provides new products, no matter how effectively your Marketing and Sales groups move product, no matter how efficiently your back office performs, you still need the common sense each of your workers bring with them to work to catch the oddities that the real world introduces to our best-laid plans.
You want the people in each role to understand both how to do their role and how their role contributes to the organization. In doing so, you provide the groundwork for them to ponder the situation when something out of the ordinary happens, and to communicate effectively when something doesn’t feel right. Of course there are limits to how much each person can know–for example, your accounts receivable team probably would not benefit from knowing how the manufacturing line is reconfigured for different products. At the same time, the A/R team probably needs an understanding of how products are shipped to the customer, assuming that the customer will refuse to pay for a product that is not received.
I believe there are serious organizational, operational, or leadership issues in most cases where leaders do not want their teams to use common sense. Leaders cannot sustain an acceptable level of morale in a team whose members are threatened when they think, generating higher direct and indirect costs of employee turnover. Processes that rely on “mindless” human labor are likely to be surprised by how high the error rate becomes with a staff that does not feel their humanity is valued. Furthermore, computers are far superior to humans in repetitive tasks executed with extreme precision… so why wouldn’t we deploy computers for what computers do best, and people for what people do best?