Pros And Cons Of Distributed Mojo

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Pros And Cons Of Distributed Mojo

In an earlier post, I described the components of mojo. What if you can’t find a single individual who has them all? Don’t despair. You can use more than one person, each of whom has some of the components of mojo. I call this distributed mojo. That way, your group will have more mojo collectively. However there are pros and cons.

Pros
  • Easier to find - If you can find only some of the components of mojo in each of a few people who participate in your group, that is much easier and more likely than finding all of them in a single individual. For example, if you have a specialist who is only responsible for acting in the clutch while another person has all of the other components of mojo, that is better than not having them. Of course, any component of mojo is rare, even without requiring a combination in a single person. What if the highest mojo individual you can find doesn’t have very good support? Or is lazy, despite his expertise and experience? Or is too young to have much experience, but is excellent otherwise? In any of these situations it might be better to use the distributed mojo model
  • Reduced effect of unavailability due to injury or retirement, etc. If mojo components are found in numerous people and you lose one of them, the others can take up some of the slack. Think of only having to replace you go-to clutch performer instead of your best everything performer.
Cons
  • Performer isn’t as good - If all of the components of mojo are present in a single person, than the skill level and performance potential of that person are as high as can be. So high, in fact, that that person might make a difference between excellence and also-ran status. The potential is higher if a single person is able to carry a group. There are rare circumstances were a single person isn’t as good as a few good people, but those circumstances are rare. You may also have second and third best mojo performers that can take up the slack.
  • No benefit of synergy - If a single person has all of the components of mojo, there is the possibility of synergy between the components. For example, if the same person has both experience and a willingness to act, that person will make better divisions about when to act or how to act or even if to act because of the combination of willingness and experience
  • No single point of decision based on human brain - This is similar to synergy. We don’t understand everything about the human brain, but we know it is good at making decisions with incomplete information. In fact, it may be the best decision making machine there is. A person with high mojo has to do this with all of the components, expertise, experience, and willingness to act especially.


So with these pros and cons in mind, consider how difficult it might be for you to wrap all of the components into one person. Use whoever you can to maximize your groups’s performance. If you can’t find everything in a single individual, use the distributed mojomodel and good luck!

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