12 ms·

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others

119 points by HillRat 12y ago

dang 12y ago
Url changed from http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/the-secret-to-smart-groups-isnt-smart-people/384625/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/the-secr..., which points to this.
cLeEOGPw 12y ago
Wonder how did they measure the individual skill of participants. Because as far as I am aware skill is what helps teams to succeed most. And if everyone was of the same skill, it's not that surprising if those with other advantages, like better emotion reading, performed better.
hnhg 12y ago
I might be wrong, but I had a look at the original paper's methods and the experimental process seems to be based around producing many p-values and then trawling looking for significance. They don't seem to correct for multiple-testing outcomes though. This resembles what's been described as p-hacking (http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-errors-1.14700 http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-err...) I could well be missing something though, so please correct me if I'm off the mark.
armed10 12y ago
People overvalue (democratic) teamwork. I'd like to argue that a good leader with a team of followers is more effective than a team where everyone is equal. For example: the pyramids, cannot be build by one man, but wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for central leadership. Take Steve Jobs, it was his vision that made Apple successful. Teams need skill, but they must also be undivided. Democracy in teams essentially divides the team, those opposed and forced to act according to the majority will not be cooperative. The best results are that of a single visionair with or without a team of followers.
- emerongi 12y ago
  I'd say that in very small teams (up to 6 people), it's better to not have a certain leader. Someone will become more dominant in the group anyways (usually a person whom everyone trusts and likes). In big teams, it's hard to get anything done without someone set to lead it.
  - armed10 12y ago
    I think you're right. In my personal experience I've found that in most small teams, there are few who want to lead. If you have mature members, this becomes less of a problem. However, I still find diffusion of responsibility a common theme in small teams, appointing a leader to absolve them from any personal responsibility. Combining a "more dominant someone" with atomic responsibility is probably the best way to go with small teams.
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  First, that assumes that the leadership role should be a fixed position, which isn't the case. Second, this statement assumes the only option for an egalitarian organisation is a form of consensus democracy. Neither of these things is true You can have a flat organisation in which different people are responsible for taking the lead, and the others hold him/her accountable for not doing so. If I am in a small team with a few engineers, a few designers, and a few marketing experts, and each of them has their own specialty too, then obviously each of them can and should take the "lead" in their respective specialty. There is no need for a consensus on the majority of topics if we trust each other to know what we are doing. Sure, for big-picture stuff a consensus is still required, and it might even be beneficial to have an inspiring leader whose vision we are realizing, but it's a pretty big leap from there to this: > Democracy in teams essentially divides the team Why would democracy do this more than a top-down view? People would still have opposing ideas, they would just not be heard. > those opposed and forced to act according to the majority will not be cooperative Again, do you have any reason to believe this is less likely to happen in an organisation where the direction is decided top-down? Because the only difference I see is whether or not the opposing views are visible - and having those opposing views hidden and unexplained actually sounds like a terrible situation to me.
blueskin_ 12y ago
De-paywalled: https://archive.today/BM7BT https://archive.today/BM7BT
stolio 12y ago
My guess is that what make a group successful in the short run, like if you throw a group of strangers together and tell them to do tasks together in a monitored environment for 5 hours, may not be the same things that make a group successful in the long run. The importance of emotional intelligence should decrease as roles are carved out and members define their niches, and the importance of individual ability should increase as the group optimizes itself.
- hvs 12y ago
  That sounds nice, but my experience is usually that people start to build fiefdoms that they don't want other people messing with, intraoffice politics gets involved, and groups become less and less about solving problems and more about individuals working for their own promotions.
  - stolio 12y ago
    That's a complex system of overlapping and competing subgroups hopefully functioning together as one large group. I would expect that to be more complicated.
- bobmagoo 12y ago
  That was my thought as well. I'd be really interested to see how these patterns are born out over time, given all the storming/forming/norming/etc stuff that goes on when teams are first put together or altered.
Hermel 12y ago
The inherent flaw of teamwork is that responsibility is actually atomic. As soon as you assign the same responsibility to a group of two or more persons, things will start to go wrong sooner or later. If you look more closely at successful teams of the past, you will notice that they succeeded because they actually worked as a well-coordinated group of individuals, with a clear separation of responsibilities. Ringo Starr never played the guitar, and John Lennon kept his hands from the drums. If a team is unable to assign responsibilities to its individual members, you don't get a team, you get a committee. And it is no accident that "design by committee" has a negative connotation. What you get out of a committee is not the greatest idea a single member had. What you get out of a committee is the lowest common denominator. And if that denominator happens to be low enough, you won't get any usable results at all.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  > a clear separation of responsibilities Tacking on: I'm sure everyone has an opinion on "power without responsibility" but the reverse--responsibility without power--is also damaging. Sometimes dysfunction is caused by giving different people different responsibilities, and giving them only "negative" power to veto or reject, or no real power at all. This is bad for several reasons. First, it sabotages motivation/fulfillment because people can't feel truly invested in creating and owning the work. Second, it puts the people involved into a "reject everything, cover my ass" mode, since that is their only way for their role to "add value". Lastly, people can (sometimes quite reasonably) conclude they are being kept around as emergency scapegoats for mistakes that aren't actually their own, which hurts morale and cooperation.
- xorcist 12y ago
  The example would work just as well in reverse: Because Lennon could play the drums, they made great music. There is a risk in divided responsibilities: If you don't understand the other person's perspective or area of expertise, the group stops working as a coherent whole.
  - ar_turnbull 12y ago
    Divided responsibilities among team members, but each individual with the ability to understand the other — which actually returns us to the "theory of mind" that the article refers to.
doczoidberg 12y ago
Emotional intelligence is also intelligence. I.Q. tests doesn't bear that. So smart teams are better than less smart. But it's not about the I.Q. score but about the whole intelligence (emotional and logical) of the team members.
gogeek 12y ago
I am surprised that they say that more women lead to a better performance. There is no single female-dominated team that comes to my mind that achieved exceptional performance. All the great achievements and inventions of humanity, top notch startups, product teams etc. - all consisting of few or no women. Am I missing here something?
- corin_ 12y ago
  Without being an expert in the field, and to simplify it both in terms of the nature of the issue I'm talking about and in terms of suggesting there is a single reason for your question: if women don't get the same opportunities as men, it doesn't matter if they're a bit better or 10x as good, they still won't be part of the achievements. Inventions of humanity: for much of history in many societies women wouldn't even be considered in consideration for working together with men. Start-ups, etc.: In the 21st century we have a lot more gender equality, so that many (most?) of the men in the world wouldn't be shocked to work with a woman and consider them equals, but we still have a lot of subtle sexism; the glass ceiling hasn't disappeared. Here's a good example with some recent data from 538 about gender inequality in movie directing: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/directing-is-even-more-of-a-boys-club-than-you-may-realize/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/directing-is-even-more-of...
- tonyedgecombe 12y ago
  Women's contributions tend to get airbrushed out of history, look at Rosalind Franklin's contribution to the discovery of DNA for instance.
- k__ 12y ago
  Well, to say women didn't achieve anything is a bit far fetched... But I had Bad impressions of female dominated teams too. Most of the time they were paralized by discussions about stuff that just didn't matter.
- nl 12y ago
  Note that they don't claim that a female dominated team improves performance, but that adding women to a male team improves its performance. All the great achievements and inventions of humanity, top notch startups, product teams etc. - all consisting of few or no women That's a pretty bold claim. Maria Goeppert-Mayer. Chien Shiung Wu. Anne McKusick. Lilli Hornig. Colleen Black. Leona Woods Marshall. Look them up. Consider the possibility that the fact that they aren't famous just as instructive as the fact that they exist.
simula67 12y ago
Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men. I wonder how this article would have been received if it stated : 'Teams with more men performed better. This can be explained by the fact that men, on average, are better at solving certain problems than women'. I almost never hear about a scientific study where they discover that men are better than women at something.
- solve 12y ago
  Having highly-skilled women is a status symbol for companies in some cities, particularly in NYC. They're simply harder and more expensive to attract - e.g. women without children get paid 30% more than men with the same education in NYC. In other words: More success -> able to attract and afford more of the expensive status symbols like high-skilled women. Not too sure about a cause and effect in the other direction though.
  - nl 12y ago
    women without children get paid 30% more than men with the same education in NYC. I've never heard that before, and some quick research doesn't seem to back it up. US wide, recent female graduates with the same education as men earn 82% of their salary.[1] [1] http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap-the-earnings-of-women-and-men-one-year-after-college-graduation.pdf http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap-th...
    - toolz 12y ago
      That study doesn't take into account children, which are a huge factor, I would imagine. In households with children it is common for the woman to assume the role as the primary caregiver while the man assumes the role of the provider. As such, I imagine the woman likely feels less pressure and has less time to pursue a higher pay, while inversely the man feels pressure to increase his pay to fulfill his assumed role in the family.
lisa_henderson 12y ago
This part: "Online and off, some teams consistently worked smarter than others. More surprisingly, the most important ingredients for a smart team remained constant regardless of its mode of interaction: members who communicated a lot, participated equally and possessed good emotion-reading skills." can be read as a variation on John Boyd's OODA loop. Boyd made the point, repeatedly, that in war and sometimes in business, victory typically goes to whoever can iterate through ideas more quickly, as new information comes in. The winners are not necessarily smarter, they simply iterate faster based on the information they have. And the same seems to be true of the teams being described here.
- 10dpd 12y ago
  More information on OODA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
shasta 12y ago
I'm not sure that calling this measure "collective intelligence" is fair. If you look at the paper, this is measuring the ability for a team to move quickly without stepping on each others feet. I'd expect "collective intelligence" to measure the ability of a group to come up with the right answer to a difficult problem without so much time pressure and in that case I bet you'd find a much greater impact from intelligent individuals.
xutopia 12y ago
I think this is yet another reason why we should be more sensitive to others and allow for more diversity in our field.

119 points by HillRat 12y ago

dang 12y ago

Url changed from http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/the-secret-to-smart-groups-isnt-smart-people/384625/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/the-secr..., which points to this.

cLeEOGPw 12y ago

Wonder how did they measure the individual skill of participants. Because as far as I am aware skill is what helps teams to succeed most. And if everyone was of the same skill, it's not that surprising if those with other advantages, like better emotion reading, performed better.

hnhg 12y ago

I might be wrong, but I had a look at the original paper's methods and the experimental process seems to be based around producing many p-values and then trawling looking for significance. They don't seem to correct for multiple-testing outcomes though. This resembles what's been described as p-hacking (http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-errors-1.14700 http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-err...) I could well be missing something though, so please correct me if I'm off the mark.

armed10 12y ago

People overvalue (democratic) teamwork. I'd like to argue that a good leader with a team of followers is more effective than a team where everyone is equal. For example: the pyramids, cannot be build by one man, but wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for central leadership. Take Steve Jobs, it was his vision that made Apple successful. Teams need skill, but they must also be undivided. Democracy in teams essentially divides the team, those opposed and forced to act according to the majority will not be cooperative. The best results are that of a single visionair with or without a team of followers.

emerongi 12y ago
I'd say that in very small teams (up to 6 people), it's better to not have a certain leader. Someone will become more dominant in the group anyways (usually a person whom everyone trusts and likes). In big teams, it's hard to get anything done without someone set to lead it.
- armed10 12y ago
  I think you're right. In my personal experience I've found that in most small teams, there are few who want to lead. If you have mature members, this becomes less of a problem. However, I still find diffusion of responsibility a common theme in small teams, appointing a leader to absolve them from any personal responsibility. Combining a "more dominant someone" with atomic responsibility is probably the best way to go with small teams.
vanderZwan 12y ago
First, that assumes that the leadership role should be a fixed position, which isn't the case. Second, this statement assumes the only option for an egalitarian organisation is a form of consensus democracy. Neither of these things is true You can have a flat organisation in which different people are responsible for taking the lead, and the others hold him/her accountable for not doing so. If I am in a small team with a few engineers, a few designers, and a few marketing experts, and each of them has their own specialty too, then obviously each of them can and should take the "lead" in their respective specialty. There is no need for a consensus on the majority of topics if we trust each other to know what we are doing. Sure, for big-picture stuff a consensus is still required, and it might even be beneficial to have an inspiring leader whose vision we are realizing, but it's a pretty big leap from there to this: > Democracy in teams essentially divides the team Why would democracy do this more than a top-down view? People would still have opposing ideas, they would just not be heard. > those opposed and forced to act according to the majority will not be cooperative Again, do you have any reason to believe this is less likely to happen in an organisation where the direction is decided top-down? Because the only difference I see is whether or not the opposing views are visible - and having those opposing views hidden and unexplained actually sounds like a terrible situation to me.

blueskin_ 12y ago

De-paywalled: https://archive.today/BM7BT https://archive.today/BM7BT

stolio 12y ago

My guess is that what make a group successful in the short run, like if you throw a group of strangers together and tell them to do tasks together in a monitored environment for 5 hours, may not be the same things that make a group successful in the long run. The importance of emotional intelligence should decrease as roles are carved out and members define their niches, and the importance of individual ability should increase as the group optimizes itself.

hvs 12y ago
That sounds nice, but my experience is usually that people start to build fiefdoms that they don't want other people messing with, intraoffice politics gets involved, and groups become less and less about solving problems and more about individuals working for their own promotions.
- stolio 12y ago
  That's a complex system of overlapping and competing subgroups hopefully functioning together as one large group. I would expect that to be more complicated.
bobmagoo 12y ago
That was my thought as well. I'd be really interested to see how these patterns are born out over time, given all the storming/forming/norming/etc stuff that goes on when teams are first put together or altered.

Hermel 12y ago

The inherent flaw of teamwork is that responsibility is actually atomic. As soon as you assign the same responsibility to a group of two or more persons, things will start to go wrong sooner or later. If you look more closely at successful teams of the past, you will notice that they succeeded because they actually worked as a well-coordinated group of individuals, with a clear separation of responsibilities. Ringo Starr never played the guitar, and John Lennon kept his hands from the drums. If a team is unable to assign responsibilities to its individual members, you don't get a team, you get a committee. And it is no accident that "design by committee" has a negative connotation. What you get out of a committee is not the greatest idea a single member had. What you get out of a committee is the lowest common denominator. And if that denominator happens to be low enough, you won't get any usable results at all.

Terr_ 12y ago
> a clear separation of responsibilities Tacking on: I'm sure everyone has an opinion on "power without responsibility" but the reverse--responsibility without power--is also damaging. Sometimes dysfunction is caused by giving different people different responsibilities, and giving them only "negative" power to veto or reject, or no real power at all. This is bad for several reasons. First, it sabotages motivation/fulfillment because people can't feel truly invested in creating and owning the work. Second, it puts the people involved into a "reject everything, cover my ass" mode, since that is their only way for their role to "add value". Lastly, people can (sometimes quite reasonably) conclude they are being kept around as emergency scapegoats for mistakes that aren't actually their own, which hurts morale and cooperation.
xorcist 12y ago
The example would work just as well in reverse: Because Lennon could play the drums, they made great music. There is a risk in divided responsibilities: If you don't understand the other person's perspective or area of expertise, the group stops working as a coherent whole.
- ar_turnbull 12y ago
  Divided responsibilities among team members, but each individual with the ability to understand the other — which actually returns us to the "theory of mind" that the article refers to.

doczoidberg 12y ago

Emotional intelligence is also intelligence. I.Q. tests doesn't bear that. So smart teams are better than less smart. But it's not about the I.Q. score but about the whole intelligence (emotional and logical) of the team members.

gogeek 12y ago

I am surprised that they say that more women lead to a better performance. There is no single female-dominated team that comes to my mind that achieved exceptional performance. All the great achievements and inventions of humanity, top notch startups, product teams etc. - all consisting of few or no women. Am I missing here something?

corin_ 12y ago
Without being an expert in the field, and to simplify it both in terms of the nature of the issue I'm talking about and in terms of suggesting there is a single reason for your question: if women don't get the same opportunities as men, it doesn't matter if they're a bit better or 10x as good, they still won't be part of the achievements. Inventions of humanity: for much of history in many societies women wouldn't even be considered in consideration for working together with men. Start-ups, etc.: In the 21st century we have a lot more gender equality, so that many (most?) of the men in the world wouldn't be shocked to work with a woman and consider them equals, but we still have a lot of subtle sexism; the glass ceiling hasn't disappeared. Here's a good example with some recent data from 538 about gender inequality in movie directing: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/directing-is-even-more-of-a-boys-club-than-you-may-realize/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/directing-is-even-more-of...
tonyedgecombe 12y ago
Women's contributions tend to get airbrushed out of history, look at Rosalind Franklin's contribution to the discovery of DNA for instance.
k__ 12y ago
Well, to say women didn't achieve anything is a bit far fetched... But I had Bad impressions of female dominated teams too. Most of the time they were paralized by discussions about stuff that just didn't matter.
nl 12y ago
Note that they don't claim that a female dominated team improves performance, but that adding women to a male team improves its performance. All the great achievements and inventions of humanity, top notch startups, product teams etc. - all consisting of few or no women That's a pretty bold claim. Maria Goeppert-Mayer. Chien Shiung Wu. Anne McKusick. Lilli Hornig. Colleen Black. Leona Woods Marshall. Look them up. Consider the possibility that the fact that they aren't famous just as instructive as the fact that they exist.

simula67 12y ago

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men. I wonder how this article would have been received if it stated : 'Teams with more men performed better. This can be explained by the fact that men, on average, are better at solving certain problems than women'. I almost never hear about a scientific study where they discover that men are better than women at something.

solve 12y ago
Having highly-skilled women is a status symbol for companies in some cities, particularly in NYC. They're simply harder and more expensive to attract - e.g. women without children get paid 30% more than men with the same education in NYC. In other words: More success -> able to attract and afford more of the expensive status symbols like high-skilled women. Not too sure about a cause and effect in the other direction though.
- nl 12y ago
  women without children get paid 30% more than men with the same education in NYC. I've never heard that before, and some quick research doesn't seem to back it up. US wide, recent female graduates with the same education as men earn 82% of their salary.[1] [1] http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap-the-earnings-of-women-and-men-one-year-after-college-graduation.pdf http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap-th...
  - toolz 12y ago
    That study doesn't take into account children, which are a huge factor, I would imagine. In households with children it is common for the woman to assume the role as the primary caregiver while the man assumes the role of the provider. As such, I imagine the woman likely feels less pressure and has less time to pursue a higher pay, while inversely the man feels pressure to increase his pay to fulfill his assumed role in the family.

lisa_henderson 12y ago

This part: "Online and off, some teams consistently worked smarter than others. More surprisingly, the most important ingredients for a smart team remained constant regardless of its mode of interaction: members who communicated a lot, participated equally and possessed good emotion-reading skills." can be read as a variation on John Boyd's OODA loop. Boyd made the point, repeatedly, that in war and sometimes in business, victory typically goes to whoever can iterate through ideas more quickly, as new information comes in. The winners are not necessarily smarter, they simply iterate faster based on the information they have. And the same seems to be true of the teams being described here.

10dpd 12y ago
More information on OODA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

shasta 12y ago

I'm not sure that calling this measure "collective intelligence" is fair. If you look at the paper, this is measuring the ability for a team to move quickly without stepping on each others feet. I'd expect "collective intelligence" to measure the ability of a group to come up with the right answer to a difficult problem without so much time pressure and in that case I bet you'd find a much greater impact from intelligent individuals.

xutopia 12y ago

I think this is yet another reason why we should be more sensitive to others and allow for more diversity in our field.