Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (9 page)

Brain Differences

The notion of left- and right-brain thinking entered everyday language a couple of decades ago. Even though recent research suggests that there may not be any measurable physiological differences in the two brain hemispheres, most of us do recognize the personality differences between logical and creative types.
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So-called left-brain thinkers typically engage in more logical and analytical approaches to problem solving. In contrast, right-brain thinkers are more nonlinear and intuitive in their approaches.

This difference (which has obvious connections to the socially contextual and independent thinking we just described) also turns out to be very important in the composition of teams. The goal,
whenever possible, is to create, if you will,
whole-brain teams
in which the two brain types are in relative balance.

Whole-brain teams carry with them a wide variety of problem solving and critical thinking approaches that are vital to innovating in dynamic environments. That’s why some organizations already make it a practice to create whole-brain teams.

For example, Jerry Hirshberg at Nissan Design ensured intellectual diversity by pairing free-form thinkers with analytical designers.
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Hirshberg realized that “sometimes the right person for the job is two people.” Therefore, when hiring new employees, he worked to create divergent pairs by bringing in two people and coupling them because of their cognitive differences. Hirshberg found that the continuous tension within the pairs, as well as their opposing views, created a more innovative environment, one that led to some of Nissan’s most successful vehicles, including the Pathfinder and the Infiniti series of automobiles.

But bolting together left- and right-brained team members is rarely enough. Rather, leaders need to do more than just assemble whole-brain teams; they also need to harness the diversity in those whole-brain teams. They can do this through what is called
creative abrasion
.

Creative 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.
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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 leader
credit 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.
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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.
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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 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

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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 the
opposite. If Page is right, then the standard (and often government-required) “diversity” practice of hiring graduates from a similar set of top universities while ticking off the boxes for race, gender, ethnicity, and so forth may be a misdirected effort. As externally diverse as these new hires may be, their socialization, training, and education may render them very similar to other new hires in terms of the heuristics, perspectives, interpretations, and predictive models they use to solve problems and achieve their goals. In other words, they aren’t diverse at all—and filling a team with them will likely prove to be suboptimal.

So just hiring more women as per Woolley works for Page only if those women come from sufficiently unusual backgrounds to
think
differently from their new teammates. Otherwise, if they are merely cut from the same cloth as the male members of the team, they will have only a minor impact (that is, there will be a comparatively small cognitive difference between the sexes). What matters most are differences in culture, class, and aptitudes.

To help explain his model, Page has introduced what he calls the
diversity prediction theorem
:

The squared error of the collective prediction = (average squared error − predictive diversity)

Yeah, that’s pretty complicated. But it boils down to this: Teams err when they lack accuracy and diversity. So,
when group diversity is large, the error in the team is small
.

Page goes so far as to warn against using traditional stereotyping in selecting for diversity because it may lead to team members’ living down to the expectations imposed on them.

In one classic study, Asian women were judged differently on their mathematical skills based on whether they were primarily described by their gender or their ethnicity.
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When the participants were described by their gender, they were rated lower (“women
are bad at math”) than when they were described by their ethnicity (“Asians are good at math”). Even more troubling, the women themselves, when given a math test, performed to those judgments.

The lesson is that diversity is powerful in teams, but only if it is
real
diversity.

That’s just the beginning. Even when we can all agree that diversity is critical to team performance, it’s still a real-world challenge to figure out how to blend all those ingredients into a high-performing team—much less make all those different personalities get along.

As the research suggests, there’s no point in adding new members to a team just because they fit your diversity requirements. If they cannot influence or improve the team’s collective decision-making, they have little value. Indeed, being placeholders, they may actually reduce the total intellectual capital of the team.
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More than forty years of research on diversity has been conducted by psychologists, sociologists, economists, and organizational scholars. A review of this literature in 1999 by Katherine Y. Williams and Charles A. O’Reilly of Stanford Graduate School of Business underscored that diversity is a double-edged sword.
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The good news is that group diversity can enhance performance, because group members bring to bear varied ideas, knowledge, and skills to accomplish tasks. However, in a diverse group, members may view each other through a biased lens of stereotypes based on social categories (the same differences in race, gender, and so forth that are supposed to help). This bias invariably reduces the effectiveness of the group’s interaction as group members fail to identify with the group.
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Williams and O’Reilly’s key insight is that team members maintain their self-esteem by making comparisons with other team members and then classifying themselves using those same salient characteristics of race, gender, and so forth. And when a particular characteristic allows members to assume a positive self-identity,
they then look upon those who lack that characteristic as being out-group members—and thus less trustworthy. And it can get ugly: those individuals, now considered out-group members, can face exclusion from intragroup information networks and decision-making processes.
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