MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Dynamic Networks Improve Remote Decision-Making

Crisis events demand decision-making networks that are dynamic, not static, and respond to frequent feedback.

The idea of collective intelligence is not new. Research has long shown that in a wide range of settings, groups of people working together outperform individuals toiling alone. But how do drastic shifts in circumstances, such as people working mostly at a distance during the COVID-19 pandemic, affect the quality of collective decision-making? After all, public health decisions can be a matter of life and death, and business decisions in crisis periods can have lasting effects on the economy.

About the Author

Abdullah Almaatouq is an assistant professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Alex “Sandy” Pentland is the faculty director and founder of MIT Connection Science, which spans the MIT Media Lab; the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; and the Initiative on the Digital Economy. They are among the coauthors of “Adaptive Social Networks Promote the Wisdom of Crowds,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May 2020.

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