Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: teamwork

  • Why Collective Intelligence Beats Individual Intelligence

    As long-term readers likely know I am a big fan of the idea of collective intelligence and big proponent of optimizing teams toward high collective intelligence.

    First, what is collective intelligence? The easiest way of explaining that is through the comparison to individual intelligence (IQ). While IQ tests differ in type the pattern is similar: we ask an individual to solve a set of complex problems; the better they perform the higher their IQ is.

    By the same token, we can measure intelligence of teams through measuring how well a group solves a series of complex problems.

    There are a few very interesting findings in the original research on collective intelligence. It all starts with an observation that collective intelligence beats the crap out of individual intelligence. In highly collectively intelligent teams’ solutions provided by a group were systematically significantly better than solutions offered by any individual, including the smartest person in the room. However, even in teams with low collective intelligence the group solutions were on par with the best option provided by an individual.

    It totally makes sense when we think of it. No matter how smart the solution provided by an individual is it most likely can be improved through clues and suggestions provided by others. Either directly or indirectly. And it doesn’t matter whether the others are even smarter. The thing that matters is that they think differently.

    This theme is portrayed well in some pop-cultural productions. In Sherlock series the protagonist surprisingly frequently refers to his sidekick—John Watson—as not too clever or even dumb. On even more occasions Sherlock stresses that he needs Dr. Watson to inspire his superior mind. It’s not that Watson is smarter than Holmes. It’s that together they are smarter than Holmes alone, even given his prodigious mind.

    The same pattern has been exploited in House M.D. series, where the team’s effort was consistently beating individual effort. It was so even if the final solution was facilitated mostly through the brilliance of the main character.

    As a matter of fact, collective intelligence in play is one of those things that you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. Like the other day, when I was sharing the idea of a workshop with one of my colleagues and I mentioned one feature I’d love to add to the app I was going to use during the workshop. The problem was that we explored an idea to add that feature before and, because of some old architectural decisions, adding the feature was no easy feat. Thus, we gave up. My colleague listened to my complaints and asked why we wouldn’t just add a simple and dirty hack just for the sake of the workshop. I was so immersed with the whole context of how hard it was to do it properly that the idea wouldn’t even cross my mind, no matter how obvious it might sound in retrospect.

    And it wasn’t even a context of a persistent team; merely an ad-hoc discussion in a random group. Think, how much more we contribute in a more permanent setup—in a team which shares the same context on a daily basis.

    The interesting follow-up to the observation that collective intelligence is supreme is that collective intelligence doesn’t depend on individual intelligence. As a matter of fact, there’s no correlation between the two. In other words, hiring all the smartasses doesn’t mean they’d constitute a team of high collective intelligence.

    It is likely better to support a brilliant mind with folks who aren’t nearly as eloquent but provide another, diverse, point of view that to get more of the brilliance. What’s more a team built out of people of average intelligence can be better off than a bunch of smart folks gathered together.

    It is because collective intelligence—the brilliance of a group—isn’t fueled by smarts but by collaboration. Two critical factors for high collective intelligence is social perceptiveness and evenness of communication. The former is awareness of others, empathy, and unselfish willingness to act for the good of others. The latter is creating a space for everyone to speak up and facilitating the discussions so that all are involved roughly equally. Neither of these attributes directly taps into individual intelligence.

    That’s, by the way, where pop-cultural references fall short. Neither Holmes nor House care about the collaborative aspect of work of their teams and both make a virtue out their utter lack of empathy. It means that their teams are of low collective intelligence. I can’t help but thinking how much they could have achieved had they been optimized more toward collective intelligence.

    Most of our industry fall in the very same trap when hiring. Tremendous part of our recruitment processes is optimized toward validating individual skills following a subconscious belief that this is what’s going to make teams successful.

    As Dan Kahneman observes in his classic Thinking Fast and Slow, if our brain can’t easily answer to a difficult question it subconsciously substitutes the question with a similar one which is easy to and treats the answer to the latter as if it was the answer to the former. In this context we may be substituting a difficult question about how a candidate would perform in a team with much simpler one about how they would perform individually. The problem is that the assessment of a candidate may be very different depending on which question we answered.

    If we truly want to optimize our teams for good collaboration we need to focus on the aspects that drive collective intelligence. We need to focus on character traits that are not that easy to observe, and yet they prove to be critical for teams’ long-term success, such as perceptiveness, awareness, empathy, compassion and respect. Ironically, such a team will outsmart one built around smarts and wits.

  • Don’t Mess with Culture

    When I’m writing these words I’m on my way home from Lean Agile Scotland. While summarizing the event Chris McDermott mentioned a few themes, two of them being organizational culture and experimentation.

    Experimentation is definitely my thing. I am into organizational culture too. I should be happy when Chris righteously pointed both as the themes of the event. At the same at that very moment time alarm lights went off in my head.

    We refer a lot to safe to fail experiments. We talk about antifragile or resilient environments. And then we quickly turn into organizational culture.

    The term culture hacking pops up frequently.

    And I’m scared.

    The reason is that in most cases there is no safe to fail experiment when we talk about an organizational culture. The culture is an outcome of everyone’s behaviors. It is ultimately about people. In other words an experiment on the culture, or a culture hack if you will, means changing people behaviors.

    If you mess it up, more often than not, there’s no coming back. We may introduce a new factor that would influence how people behave. However, removing that factor does not bring the old behaviors back. Not only that though. Often there’s no simple way to introduce another factor that would bring back the old status quo.

    There’s a study which showed that introducing a fine for popping up late at a daycare to pick up a child resulted in in more parents being late, as they felt excused for their behavior. This was quite an unexpected outcome of the experiment. However, even more interesting part is that removing the fine did not affect parents’ behaviors at all – they kept popping up late more frequently than before the experiment.

    It’s natural. Our behaviors are outcome of the constraints of the environment and our experience, knowledge and wisdom.

    We will affect behaviors by changing the constraints. The change is not mechanistic though. We can’t exactly predict what’s going to happen. At the same time the change affects our experience, knowledge and wisdom and thus irreversibly changes the bottom line.

    I can give you a simple example. When we decided to go transparent with salaries at Lunar Logic it was a huge cultural experiment. What I knew from the very beginning though was there was no coming back. Ultimately, we can make salaries “non-transparent” again. Would that change what people learned about everyone’s salary? No. Would that change that they do look at each other through the perspective of that knowledge?

    It might have affect the way they look at the company in a negative way, as suddenly some of the authority that they’d had was taken away. In other words, even from that perspective they’d have been better if such an experiment hadn’t been run at all than if it was tried and rolled back.

    I’m all for experimentation. I definitely do prefer safe to fail experiments. I am however aware that there are whole areas where such experiments are impossible most of the time, if not all of the time.

    The culture is one such area. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be experimenting with the culture. It’s just that we should be aware of the stakes. If you’re just flailing around with your culture hacks there will be casualties. Having experimentation mindset is a lousy excuse.

    I guess the part of my pet peeve with understanding the tools and the methods is exactly this. When we introduce a new constraint, and a method or a tool is a constraint, we invariably change the environment and thus influence the culture. Sometimes irreversibly.

    It get even trickier when the direct goal of the experiment is to change the culture. Without understanding what we’re doing it’s highly likely that such a culture hack will backfire. Each time I run an experiment on a culture I like to think that the change will be irreversible and then I ask myself once again: do I really want to run it?

    If not I simply don’t mess with the culture.