Read Online Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations by Rich Karlgaard, Michael S. Malone - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Rich Karlgaard, Michael S. Malone
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abrasion is exactly what it sounds like. It involves eliciting engagement from everyone on a team by having team members’ diverse approaches “rub” against each other in productive ways. To foster this creative abrasion, leaders need to:
• Know their own preferences, weaknesses, and strengths, and understand how their own style can stifle creativity.
• Help team members learn and acknowledge their intellectual preferences and differences.
• Keep project goals front and center, and schedule time for divergent thinking (generating multiple options) and convergent thinking (focusing on a single option and its implementation).
• Devise guidelines in advance for working together. For example, establish a rule (and get team members’ agreement) up front that any conflicts on the team will not get personal and that any reasons for disagreements will always be stated. 13
Creative abrasion can be a challenge, but the payoff is well worth the effort.
For example, Nest Labs—purchased in January 2014 by Google for $3.2 billion—uses creative abrasion to refine the design of its “smart” home products, including its Learning Thermostat and others in the Nest pipeline. When faced with a particularly tricky problem or tough decision, Nest Labs’ founder and CEO, Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive, gathers a diverse group of user-experience experts, product managers, software engineers, algorithm analysts, and marketing executives. Some are women, and some are men; their skills differ; and the skin tones and cultural backgrounds vary as well. But it’s not about gender, job, or racial representation. Instead, it’s about combining so many viewpoints that ideas are bound to collide, resulting in a product that better serves a diverse and demanding customer base.
Teams versus Lone Wolves
In our earlier discussion (and rejection) of the “lone wolf” theory of leadership, we noted that the very human desire to create a simple narrative tends to reinforce the idea of a single actor defining events rather than the idea of more complicated teams. Now here are the scientific underpinnings of that desire.
It all focuses on leaders as the locus of attention. Psychologists have found that the human tendency to attribute success and failure to leaders is so strong that they have even coined a term for it: leader attribution error . It is the inclination to assign to the leadercredit or blame for the team’s success or failure. And it is not just observers, or bosses, who overattribute responsibility to leaders. Team members do it too. 14 The reality, however, proved over and again in studies, is that teams, per member, consistently outperform individuals.
Ben Jones, a professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, and his colleagues studied the largest repository of scientific research available—an astonishing 17.9 million research articles across five decades spanning all scientific fields. There they found a nearly universal pattern: highly influential scientific papers (that is, the ones that are the most frequently cited) exhibit novel combinations of interdisciplinary information, at a level of complexity almost impossible for a single individual to achieve. The latest research on the subject has found that teams are 37.7 percent more likely than solo authors to introduce novel combinations into familiar knowledge domains. 15 Put simply: teams are more likely to come up with really great new ideas.
In 2010, Lee Fleming, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleague Jasjit Singh directly tested the myth of lone inventors. Their analysis of more than half a million patented inventions showed that people working alone, in particular those without affiliations with organizations, were more likely to devise relatively low-impact inventions—and thus were less likely to achieve real breakthroughs. Solitary
• Know their own preferences, weaknesses, and strengths, and understand how their own style can stifle creativity.
• Help team members learn and acknowledge their intellectual preferences and differences.
• Keep project goals front and center, and schedule time for divergent thinking (generating multiple options) and convergent thinking (focusing on a single option and its implementation).
• Devise guidelines in advance for working together. For example, establish a rule (and get team members’ agreement) up front that any conflicts on the team will not get personal and that any reasons for disagreements will always be stated. 13
Creative abrasion can be a challenge, but the payoff is well worth the effort.
For example, Nest Labs—purchased in January 2014 by Google for $3.2 billion—uses creative abrasion to refine the design of its “smart” home products, including its Learning Thermostat and others in the Nest pipeline. When faced with a particularly tricky problem or tough decision, Nest Labs’ founder and CEO, Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive, gathers a diverse group of user-experience experts, product managers, software engineers, algorithm analysts, and marketing executives. Some are women, and some are men; their skills differ; and the skin tones and cultural backgrounds vary as well. But it’s not about gender, job, or racial representation. Instead, it’s about combining so many viewpoints that ideas are bound to collide, resulting in a product that better serves a diverse and demanding customer base.
Teams versus Lone Wolves
In our earlier discussion (and rejection) of the “lone wolf” theory of leadership, we noted that the very human desire to create a simple narrative tends to reinforce the idea of a single actor defining events rather than the idea of more complicated teams. Now here are the scientific underpinnings of that desire.
It all focuses on leaders as the locus of attention. Psychologists have found that the human tendency to attribute success and failure to leaders is so strong that they have even coined a term for it: leader attribution error . It is the inclination to assign to the leadercredit or blame for the team’s success or failure. And it is not just observers, or bosses, who overattribute responsibility to leaders. Team members do it too. 14 The reality, however, proved over and again in studies, is that teams, per member, consistently outperform individuals.
Ben Jones, a professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, and his colleagues studied the largest repository of scientific research available—an astonishing 17.9 million research articles across five decades spanning all scientific fields. There they found a nearly universal pattern: highly influential scientific papers (that is, the ones that are the most frequently cited) exhibit novel combinations of interdisciplinary information, at a level of complexity almost impossible for a single individual to achieve. The latest research on the subject has found that teams are 37.7 percent more likely than solo authors to introduce novel combinations into familiar knowledge domains. 15 Put simply: teams are more likely to come up with really great new ideas.
In 2010, Lee Fleming, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleague Jasjit Singh directly tested the myth of lone inventors. Their analysis of more than half a million patented inventions showed that people working alone, in particular those without affiliations with organizations, were more likely to devise relatively low-impact inventions—and thus were less likely to achieve real breakthroughs. Solitary
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