Posted by In previous posts, I showed how to build a managerial tool that is also a measurement tool that records the managerial activities undertaken by a human manager. Why should this be done? To find out what the manager actually does and then reproduce his activities – to create the first version of the artificial manager.
Now I will summarize the article in which I described the results of 3 experiments involving students who solved a project planning task with the help of TransistorsHead.com http://transistorshead.com/ managerial tools. In the experiments I recorded the work of all members of the project teams, but the most characteristic were the workflows of the managers of these projects.
Here are the situations in which these experiments were conducted.
Situation 1
In 2017, 41 management students at the University of Economics in Katowice participated in the study. They were divided into teams of 5-6 people in the course of Human Resource Management. Each team had a manager who led the team during the experiment. The task of the observed teams was to prepare a training project containing three training programs on three different subjects for administrative employees of the University of Economics in Katowice. The team’s work was to result in a pdf file containing a description of the training project.
Situation 2
In 2018, business students from one of the Universities of Helsinki took part in an experiment were divided into seven teams, each consisting of five members and a manager. The expected outcome of the participants was a report that had to include two parts: the training program and the teamwork processes.
Situation 3
In 2019, students at the Department of Psychology at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, took part in an experiment. They were tasked with carrying out a given project from idea to final presentation, which concerned organizational solutions at Polish universities aimed at in the academic achievements of academics. The students worked in teams of 4-5 people, each with a manager to guide them. Students were evaluated on the basis of, first, the content of their solution (its relevance and innovativeness), and second, the intensity of their teamwork.
The results of the experiments
It turned out that each of these team managers had completely different sequences of work on a given project. The team managers differed not only in these individual projects, but within the tasks assigned to them. In other words, regardless of the topic of the project, the size of the team and other conditions under which the experiment took place, the managers behaved quite differently. I must add that the participants in these experiments worked in TransistorsHead.com with 10 managerial tools with different purposes, so we were able to record as many as 10 managerial activities with multiple parameters – the time of their use, the content entered into the tools, the interaction through the tool with other team members, etc.
You can read more about these results in this article:
O. Flak, System of Organizational Terms as a Theoretical Foundation for Team Management Automation
As you can see from comparing the work of managers in these experiments, with the help of online managerial tools we can easily record what a manager actually does. And then it’s just a step away from creating a double of these managers, and then an artificial manager.
I’ve blogged about creating a manager double before, take a peek here: