Read Online Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations by Rich Karlgaard, Michael S. Malone - Free Book Online Page B

inventors were also less effective than groups at culling out bad ideas. Finally, collaborations also increased combinatorial opportunities for novelty—that is, different ideas can be mixed and matched to come up with something truly innovative.
    In sum, the solitary inventor may come up with an earthshaking new idea or invention, but you are better off betting on a team to bring the idea to life.
    DIVERSITY: A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
    It would be nice if we could simply apply a standardized notion of diversity to the recruiting of group members and then get on to the task at hand. Unfortunately, while most researchers agree that diversity is a key contributor to team success, they can’t agree on precisely what constitutes that diversity. Indeed, some believe it to be very different from the “diversity” we refer to in everyday language or in government regulation.
    In two studies in 2010 involving nearly 700 people, Anita W. Woolley (whom we’ve already mentioned) and her colleagues examined teams of two to five members working on a wide variety of tasks. They identified a general factor relating to intelligence in groups that explained their performance more than anything else. Interestingly, this intelligence factor was strongly correlated with neither the average intelligence nor the maximum individual intelligence of the group’s members. Rather, and this proved especially surprising, they found that the intelligence factor in groups is correlated with:
    •        The equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking
    •        The average social sensitivity of group members
    •        The proportion of females in the group
    But not everybody agrees. Scott Page, a professor of complex systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan, is the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies . In it, and in comparison with Woolley, he identifies three causes of cognitive diversity:
    •        Training
    •        Experience
    •        Genes
    Page argues that team members’ training and experience are the dominant causes of cognitive diversity, while genes are a relatively minor factor. For Page, it is not apparent diversity (such as differences in gender, age, or race) that promotes better group performance, but rather diversity in people’s heuristics, perspectives, interpretations, and predictive models—all of which are derived from members’ cultural backgrounds, training, and experience. It is this diversity, he argues, that can enable diverse groups to perform better than individuals or homogenous groups. Thus, the role of female members in a team, so important to Woolley, is to Page just another example of different perspectives at work.
    Page’s conclusion? When managers and organizations build and promote teams with inner (and not necessarily apparent) diversity, they can reap the benefits of group diversity.
    So what are these inner factors mentioned above?
    •        Heuristics are quick and simple techniques used for finding solutions. For example, the rule of 72 (72 divided by percent of interest rate is the number of years required for an investment to double).
    •        Perspectives are representations of the set of possible solutions, and they can simplify problems. For example, certain problems are simplified using polar coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates.
    •        Interpretations are ideas drawn from our observations of events and people. In these observations certain aspects are highlighted and others ignored to draw causal inferences.
    •        Predictive models are models created from a combination of interpretation plus a prediction for each set or category created by an interpretation.
    These so-called inner factors are quite a bit different from what we think of as traditional diversity. Indeed, they may be just theopposite. If