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DAVID PERKINS is a senior professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a founding member of Harvard’s Project Zero, a research outfit focused on cognitive-symbolic capacities and their implications for learning in all settings, and for many years codirected the project with renowned education specialist Howard Gardner. He is also the author of The Eureka Effect: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking, Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence, and Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child.

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One of the most familiar stories of Arthurian legend involves King Arthur’s Round Table. Arthur’s table was a significant innovation: Rather than issue proclamations from the end of a long table, a round shape brought him closer to his court and facilitated collaboration. Arthur’s table also allowed him to easily call on his knights’ particular expertise at the precise moment he wanted it.

The Round Table can teach us much about effective communication, collaboration, and organizational structure. By reducing hierarchy and making interactions easier, Arthur discovered an important source of power–organizational collaboration. This new collaboration was much more powerful than the old hierarchy and allowed Arthur to fulfill his dream of a united England. The simple innovation of the Round Table became perhaps Arthur’s greatest asset.

In King Arthur’s Round Table, renowned Harvard professor David Perkins uses the metaphor of the Round Table to uncover the importance of effective collaboration and communication in today’s intelligent organizations. Traditional steep hierarchies and departmental silos are insufficient for dealing with the complexities of modern business, since leaders must rely on the input and expertise of those around them. Like Arthur, today’s successful business and government leaders understand that communication and collaboration must be fostered and that the decision-making process must be opened to anyone who can offer insight and wisdom.

Managers today know that they must embrace collaboration to succeed, but they often don’t know how to do it. Using examples from the past, the modern world of corporations, nonprofits, and governments, and everyday life, Perkins shows how the Round Table metaphor serves the needs of modern organizations. He offers a practical methodology that maximizes the intelligence level of a group while ensuring good group communication. It’s an invaluable tool for companies struggling to stay ahead of the competition and for any organization wherein efficiency and group morale are imperative to success.

In King Arthur’s Round Table, Perkins shows how applying the cooperative ethic to your business, government, or nonprofit organization can be its greatest strength.

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One of the most familiar stories of Arthurian legend involves King Arthur's Round Table. Arthur's table was a significant innovation: Rather than issue proclamations from the end of a long table, a round shape brought him closer to his court and facilitated collaboration. Arthur's table also allowed him to easily call on his knights' particular expertise at the precise moment he wanted it.

The Round Table can teach us much about effective communication, collaboration, and organizational structure. By reducing hierarchy and making interactions easier, Arthur discovered an important source of power-organizational collaboration. This new collaboration was much more powerful than the old hierarchy and allowed Arthur to fulfill his dream of a united England. The simple innovation of the Round Table became perhaps Arthur's greatest asset.

In King Arthur's Round Table, renowned Harvard professor David Perkins uses the metaphor of the Round Table to uncover the importance of effective collaboration and communication in today's intelligent organizations. Traditional steep hierarchies and departmental silos are insufficient for dealing with the complexities of modern business, since leaders must rely on the input and expertise of those around them. Like Arthur, today's successful business and government leaders understand that communication and collaboration must be fostered and that the decision-making process must be opened to anyone who can offer insight and wisdom.

Managers today know that they must embrace collaboration to succeed, but they often don't know how to do it. Using examples from the past, the modern world of corporations, nonprofits, and governments, and everyday life, Perkins shows how the Round Table metaphor serves the needs of modern organizations. He offers a practical methodology that maximizes the intelligence level of a group while ensuring good group communication. It's an invaluable tool for companies struggling to stay ahead of the competition and for any organization wherein efficiency and group morale are imperative to success.

In King Arthur's Round Table, Perkins shows how applying the cooperative ethic to your business, government, or nonprofit organization can be its greatest strength.

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King Arthur's Round Table

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

A SMARTER TABLE

It's probably the last thing you'd think of, recalling the glories of Camelot, the magic of Merlin, and the attractions of Guinevere. It's probably not very romantic compared with the legend of Excalibur. But there it is: King Arthur was a social theorist.

Maybe he wasn't up there with Aristotle or Thomas Paine or Karl Marx, but he was in there trying. King Arthur wanted a lot more than a Camelot of dreams, soaring out of the morning mist with a banner on every spire. He wanted a smart Camelot, a collective enterprise that functioned intelligently.

Central to the legendary Arthur's agenda of unifying England and fostering peace and prosperity were the Knights of the Round Table. And that round table was anything but the aesthetic whim of a monarch oh so deeply into interior decor. The traditional kingly table swept down the length of a grand reception hall, the king seated in his divine position at the head. After all, the king was the king, and that ought to be worth a place at the head of the table. But who would sit at his right hand, who on his left, who nearby, who so far down the table you'd have to shout to be heard by the king? (And you don't shout at kings.) And what would those well down the table say about the privileged up-table positions that they would have preferred for themselves? More to the point, what would they do about it? What they did do about it in other courts was plot, form coalitions, seed dissension, and fight duels over status.

King Arthur knew that such a restless and fuming group could not help keep a kingdom in order, so he exercised a very simple idea: His table would be round. His knights would sit around a round table. No position would be greater than any other.

But Arthur had more in mind than avoiding the downside of a bickering mob of knights. He wanted the upside of a thoughtful community. His knights would converse as equals-proposing, challenging, debating, reaching accords, and solving the problems of the kingdom. The round table not only symbolized this collaborative commitment but made it easier: At a round table, each knight sat within reasonable speaking distance of all the others. Of course, Arthur himself would have to sit somewhere at the table. But who happened to sit closer to him on that occasion would not be important.

It was a beautiful and practical thought. It still is. The symbolism of place at the table is something we all feel, whether we're sitting in a boardroom, jury room, ready room, team room, or an ad hoc let's-solve-this-problem meeting in the corner of the corporate cafeteria. We may not be ready to challenge our colleagues to duels, but long tables with the boss at one end still and inevitably provoke uneasy thoughts about status, as well as posing practical problems of shouting in order to be heard. Round tables-or, if not round, then square or squarish-still and inevitably serve people well, symbolically and functionally, when they gather together in a mutual spirit to puzzle out a problem or construct a vision.

PUTTING OUR HEADS TOGETHER

I take my hands from the keyboard, pull my eyes from the monitor, and look down from my second-story home office on the June lawn. After a rainy weekend, it needs mowing. But I'd rather think about lawn mowing than mow the lawn, so I think about lawn mowing and King Arthur.

What if we had King Arthur's estate, with a veritable Camelot of a lawn? It would take days and days to mow that lawn. But get 10 of the Knights of the Round Table out there with power mowers, and together they'd have the Camelot lawn done 10 times as fast as one. Well, maybe not quite 10 times as fast. Social scientists have identified a phenomenon called social loafing: In many circumstances, when you add more people to a team, each individual works a little less hard. Okay, so eight times as fast.

Fine for the lawn. Now imagine those 10 knights of industry putting their heads together to design a new power mower. You can be sure that they wouldn't get that job done 10 or 8 times as fast. It might even take them longer than a concentrated effort by a single person. It's so much easier to mow the lawn together than to design a lawn mower together. Call this:

* The lawnmower paradox: Pooling physical effort is usually rather easy. Pooling mental effort is usually rather hard.

It's not difficult to understand why the Lawnmower Paradox occurs. We can usually divide up physical tasks by assigning people to different physical parts of the task-different sectors of the Camelot lawn for instance. For mental tasks, it's typically harder to find conceptual parts that make for an efficient division of labor. Moreover, often we do not so much want to divide up a mental task as to bring the power of multiple minds to bear on the core problem. Even with the best will in the world, pooling mental effort is not so easy.

King Arthur's idea about the round table is a small step toward dealing with the lawnmower paradox. A round table makes it a little easier to pool mental effort. A round table makes a group a little more intelligent. Given all the brain power in a product development lab, a policy team, a programming team, a marketing task force, a planning committee, or any similar gathering in corporations, governments, or universities, the potential intellectual power would seem to be enormous. But how do we realize that power? Not easily, as Arthur recognized.

I've spent most of my professional life as a cognitive scientist and educator interested in learning, understanding, thinking, and intelligence. Much of my work has concerned the individual thinker and learner, child or adult. In Outsmarting IQ (New York: Free Press, 1995) and other places I've written about the nature of intelligence-how intelligence is more than a matter of neurological efficiency; how intelligence involves not just the ability to think well but the sensitivity to read situations; how people can learn to be more intelligent. But individual intelligence is only one part of a more complex cognitive system. We are a social species. We almost always do what we do together. Much of what we do requires pooling not just physical effort but intelligence, especially in the modern world. In many ways, this interactive, collective, group, or organizational intelligence (the term I'll usually use) is much more important than individual intelligence. That's why it has captured a portion of my attention in recent years.

Cognitive science and related disciplines speak to the intelligence of groups, teams, communities, and organizations as they do to individual intelligence. They can help us to untangle the lawnmower paradox. Information processing is a concept that applies to groups as well as to individual minds. Basic demands of problem solving and decision making identified by researchers figure in group as well as individual thinking. Scholars have identified important elements of organizational intelligence, for instance, facilitative leadership styles that foster thoughtful collaboration. Notions from the business world such as communities of practice and knowledge management illuminate how information can flow well within organizations face-to-face and digitally,...