# The Magic of Aggregation By:: [[Ross Jackson]] 2023-02-27 When I was a relatively junior member of the workforce, I was invited to attend a strategic offsite consisting of junior and senior members of the organization. Midlevel managers were excluded from the meeting, as the senior members wanted to hear the uncensored perspective of the junior workforce. During the brainstorming, session members posted comments to a wall. Several of the notes conveyed that the junior members thought that the senior leaders lacked integrity. It was during this offsite that I observed the magic of aggregation. A wall filled with disparate comments is too unwieldy. It is essential to group the comments to make sense of them. When the senior members came across one of the comments that were critical of them, they did not reject them. They simply aggregated it with something else. During the day, I observed a slow transformation. By the end of the day, the critique that “senior leaders lacked integrity,” became “the junior workforce does not feel like they are recognized for their contribution.” To address this concern a quarterly award program was instituted. When done effectively, aggregation can add coherence to what would otherwise be chaos. When done politically, aggregation can obfuscate essential insights. The irony was that as the senior leaders used the magic of aggregation to obscure the critique of the junior workforce, their lack of integrity was on full display. #### Related Items [[Aggregation]] [[Organizational Analytics]] [[Chaos]] [[Organization]] [[Management]] [[Work]]