5 ms·

Teams, seriously ingenious teams.

pmcp 4y ago
- effingwewt 4y ago
  Diversity has nothing to do with anything here, the team could very well be entirely homogeneous. In this context, I'd say intelligence of said team matters, not their gender or race.
  - interroboink 4y ago
    I can't speak for the person you replied to, but my interpretation was "diversity of minds" (or "viewpoints", etc), not gender or race. Perhaps you'd agree that the diversity of opinions and points of view on a team is crucial, even if they're all X race Y gender.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    That’s the whole point of diversity being a blind spot, because intelligence isn’t some integer value.
  - inopinatus 4y ago
    There is a good case for holding diverse hiring practices in high esteem: * Heterogeneity of ideas is moderately correlated to diversity of backgrounds * Diverse teams are less prone to groupthink, more ready to acknowledge and correct for their biases, and they more readily challenge one another on a factual basis * Hiring practices that try to offset structural biases and personal tendencies towards uniformity can access talent pools that others do not To sum up, disregarding any political or social viewpoint, diversity is a strong value driver. As for "intelligence", whatever that is; insofar as it can even be qualified, let alone quantified, this remains a minimal contributor to performance beyond the second sigma. Genius is contextual. Source: me, have joined/managed high performance tech-sector teams, including extraordinary individuals from unusual/outlier backgrounds.
elzbardico 4y ago
Ideas never come from teams but from individuals. Teams implement, help to refine, other team members improve upon the idea with their own ideas. But the act of creation, is something done by an individual. Teams are not good at innovation, design by committee can only give us mediocrity
- FridgeSeal 4y ago
  I think this is a bit reductive. I’ve definitely been a part of teams where we came up with ideas as a team. Individuals contributed, but the actual innovation came from the collective bouncing back-and-forth of ideas. We could get pedantic and say “it was still individuals coming up with the ideas” but that’s needlessly splitting hairs and in my experience it’s the team environment/cohesion that facilitates people coming up with said ideas.
- atty 4y ago
  I work in nuclear physics and no one of our experiments could be designed by a single person. They’re far too large and complicated, and even relatively simple sub-parts are multi-year, multi-million dollar undertakings. Furthermore, even the ideas of “let’s use X to measure Y” are VERY rarely completely new and unheard of ideas from a single individual. Far more common that those ideas come from long term collaboration/discussions between multiple field experts.
- groby_b 4y ago
  When people call teamwork "design by committee", it's time to move on - you know you've accumulated a prima donna or three when that happens. Ideas on large projects are almost always collaborative. There's never just one spark of insight - you've talked about the problem for a long time, and the whole team slowly chipped away at "but we can't do that because X, Y, Z". The idea of a single genius motivating it belies pretty much every large project in existence. (Based on personal experience, the threshold where it's not just a single person having the crucial breakthroughs seems to be at projects requiring teams of ~20+ persons) You solve problems via "Yes, and", not via "behold the genius".
  - 4y ago

pmcp 4y ago

effingwewt 4y ago
Diversity has nothing to do with anything here, the team could very well be entirely homogeneous. In this context, I'd say intelligence of said team matters, not their gender or race.
- interroboink 4y ago
  I can't speak for the person you replied to, but my interpretation was "diversity of minds" (or "viewpoints", etc), not gender or race. Perhaps you'd agree that the diversity of opinions and points of view on a team is crucial, even if they're all X race Y gender.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  That’s the whole point of diversity being a blind spot, because intelligence isn’t some integer value.
- inopinatus 4y ago
  There is a good case for holding diverse hiring practices in high esteem: * Heterogeneity of ideas is moderately correlated to diversity of backgrounds * Diverse teams are less prone to groupthink, more ready to acknowledge and correct for their biases, and they more readily challenge one another on a factual basis * Hiring practices that try to offset structural biases and personal tendencies towards uniformity can access talent pools that others do not To sum up, disregarding any political or social viewpoint, diversity is a strong value driver. As for "intelligence", whatever that is; insofar as it can even be qualified, let alone quantified, this remains a minimal contributor to performance beyond the second sigma. Genius is contextual. Source: me, have joined/managed high performance tech-sector teams, including extraordinary individuals from unusual/outlier backgrounds.

Ideas never come from teams but from individuals. Teams implement, help to refine, other team members improve upon the idea with their own ideas. But the act of creation, is something done by an individual. Teams are not good at innovation, design by committee can only give us mediocrity

FridgeSeal 4y ago
I think this is a bit reductive. I’ve definitely been a part of teams where we came up with ideas as a team. Individuals contributed, but the actual innovation came from the collective bouncing back-and-forth of ideas. We could get pedantic and say “it was still individuals coming up with the ideas” but that’s needlessly splitting hairs and in my experience it’s the team environment/cohesion that facilitates people coming up with said ideas.
atty 4y ago
I work in nuclear physics and no one of our experiments could be designed by a single person. They’re far too large and complicated, and even relatively simple sub-parts are multi-year, multi-million dollar undertakings. Furthermore, even the ideas of “let’s use X to measure Y” are VERY rarely completely new and unheard of ideas from a single individual. Far more common that those ideas come from long term collaboration/discussions between multiple field experts.
groby_b 4y ago
When people call teamwork "design by committee", it's time to move on - you know you've accumulated a prima donna or three when that happens. Ideas on large projects are almost always collaborative. There's never just one spark of insight - you've talked about the problem for a long time, and the whole team slowly chipped away at "but we can't do that because X, Y, Z". The idea of a single genius motivating it belies pretty much every large project in existence. (Based on personal experience, the threshold where it's not just a single person having the crucial breakthroughs seems to be at projects requiring teams of ~20+ persons) You solve problems via "Yes, and", not via "behold the genius".
- 4y ago