On CNN’s GPS (Global Public Square), Fareed Zakaria recently hosted a segment, “How to Build the Perfect Team”. The lessons offered by the segment’s two contributors are applicable far beyond the business context they focused on. Moreover, I believe they also showed the value of old ideas being melded with, and not always replaced by, new ideas.

 

The topics of management and leadership have, for many years, been very much in vogue. As Zakaria noted, the volume of management books on the market would fill many shelves. I agree.

 

For the last two years, I have been part of a book club called The L School, which focuses on leadership. I was recruited by a former subordinate whose career has since soared through a combination of study (undergraduate and Masters degrees), working on special projects on innovation, and participating in leadership conferences such as one run by Canada’s Governor General; none of that success is due to me. I joined the group to support her yet I also benefit from that participation.

 

A trend I’ve noticed in that club and elsewhere is that some readers tend to focus on the last book they read, to the exclusion of previous ones, and then view the world through whatever lens that book promotes. For instance, if the last book you read was about how a person’s hair colour determines their political leanings, you might view everyone through that lens whether applicable or not. You might notice instances where red heads were conservative and ignore instances where they were not. Never trust a ginger (I’m kidding, cousin Loretta).

 

In part, this is how confirmation bias emerges, when events and people are viewed through particular lens or viewpoint instead of more broadly. Yet multiple viewpoints, lenses, and books may offer value long after we have moved on.

 

A case in point: the second book the leadership book club read was Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, which I enjoyed and which dovetails with lots of other principles I’ve learned, through reading about neuroplasticity, for instance. One member of The L School seemed to forget its contents in later discussions. When I tried to bring attention back to a point from that book, she suggested that we had moved on and I should too. That’s unfortunate but common.

 

A more public example of my point, that older ideas and the people who venture them may still have merit, was illustrated in the GPS segment. One of the two contributors was Julia Rozovsky, People Analytics Manager for Google. She spoke of Google’s efforts to empirically determine what makes a perfect team. That mammoth effort by a mammoth corporate player in innovation was dubbed Project Aristotle.

 

Why, you might wonder, would a global leader in innovation name their project after man whose life predated the modern world, computers, cars, can openers and, well, cans? As Rozovsky explained, Aristotle is credited with observing that “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” (I believe it was actually Euclid who wrote “The whole is greater than the part” in Elements around 300 BCE, but I’m a big fan of Aristotle’s work too).

 

We often see teams become champions despite not having the most superstars, or sometimes any superstars. Quite often, the most entertaining bands are not the ones with the top guitarist, drummer and so on but the ones that collectively work best together. Ditto for governments, companies, and so on.

 

Sure, the Steph Curry is a basketball phenomenon and the other players on his Golden State Warriors are talented too, but the achievements of that team thus far have transcended the sum of its parts. The same goes for the Foo Fighters today or Earth, Wind & Fire in years past. They have (or had) some famous and very skilled musicians and some who were less-well known although still talented, but collectively they rock, literally in the Foo Fighters’ case.

 

Perhaps, and I’m only speculating here, other reasons for Google’s shout out to Aristotle were these: Although Google’s existence depends on technology it depends much more on people, who develop and find new ways to use it. And, software design is ultimately rooted in logic, which equally applies to numbers and ideas. Aristotle is one of three men in ancient Greece largely credited with bringing logic to ideas.

 

As Rozovsky explained, the best team is not always the one with the most brain power or the one that is most earnest and disciplined in their work ethic. It’s the one wherein everyone feels they can bring an idea to the table, wherein everyone can contribute how they best can, wherein everyone has some fun and feels safe, and wherein the focus of everyone in the team is on the process and results, not on what one or two people can gain from the team.

 

Enter Pulitzer-prize winning author Charles Duhigg, the other contributor to Zakaria’s CNN discussion. In Smarter, Faster, Better, Duhigg examined what makes people more productive and effective. He won a Pulitzer for the above-mentioned The Power of Habit. At the core of both books is the human mind and how it can make a person better in many ways. Those principles transfer seamlessly to groups of people if they are arrayed in a way that promotes or enables the best collective thinking and, by extension, the best actions.

 

On GPS, Duhigg offered as an example the cast and writers of Saturday Night Live (SNL), which has been entertaining audiences since 1975 with an ever-evolving cast. As Duhigg explained, creator (and executive producer) Lorne Michaels requires every member to contribute no matter how silly or odd or off-base they might believe their idea is. That doesn’t mean every idea someone spits out makes it to the stage. Still, many do in one form or another, or they morph into other ideas, or they are truly awful and discarded after open, critical discussion. Consider this clip from SNL:

 

Whoever thought that skit up, I doubt that person was afraid of ridicule or bullying or being criticized for stepping outside perceived boundaries. Not every cast or season in the vast SNL catalogue is equally funny. Nonetheless, the process of how they do what they do seems to go far beyond any one person or cast. The process seems to be what makes the SNL teams generally great.

 

My point, arguably Arstotle’s and Rozovsky’s and Duhigg’s point, is that the process of how we think, individually and collectively, may be the greatest determining factor in how well we do what we do. If you’ve read my book on BS or some of my posts, you will know I am focused above all on thought processes. With that in mind, consider the description of Duhigg’s Smarter, Faster, Better, in part, as provided on Amazon: “…explores the science of productivity, and why, in today’s world, managing how you think – rather than what you think – can transform your life (emphasis in original).”

 

How to think has always mattered. In Aristotle’s world and throughout history, how people thought determined what they thought as well as what happened as a result of that.

 

Consider er these beliefs: “Black people are inferior to white people”; “a large zeppelin filled with highly-flammable hydrogen gas flying through the air, which is filled with static electricity, will work out fine”; and “this new AIDS thing is just a scourge on gay men, so the rest of us will be fine with no precautions required”. These all turned out to be very bad ideas. A few hundred people suffered in the case of the (hydrogen-filled) Hindenburg igniting in mid air. Millions suffered (and some do now) with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, gay and straight alike. Millions, arguably hundreds of millions, suffered through racism and the African slavery it enabled, and obviously some still suffer today due to racism.

 

The process by which people and groups of them think seems to work smarter and better, if not always faster, when it is critical. As I pointed out in a previous post (Calls for Justice and Truth), a vital component in finding truth or justice is conscious acceptance that what you believe right now may be untrue, a little or a lot or totally. That realization is part of being self-reflective, functionally critical, and less inclined toward all manner of bias. This mode of thinking is by no means common. But it is possible for individuals and for groups of them.

 

I said above that logic applies equally to numbers as to ideas. Sir Isaac Netwon’s Third Law of Physics is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the same way, Johann Gottlieb Fichte first explained the process by which ideas evolve. He dubbed this thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (TAS). A thesis is an initial proposition. An antithesis is a partial or whole contradiction of the first proposition. Synthesis is the process by which common truths and value are identified in the previous arguments to form a newer proposition (a synthesis is the result of that process).

 

Example: (T) Everyone should financially fend for themselves. It’s not my job to look after everyone. (A) We’re not animals in the forest. The state should look after everyone from the cradle to the grave no matter what. (S) People have been shown for many centuries that they will work harder when they stand to gain from that work. Still, luck and circumstances play a part in financial success too. It is inhumane to let a sick person perish, a child miss out on an education, or a family starve because their abilities, luck, circumstances, or all of those left them unable to look after those things. Therefore, some people need and deserve help.

 

That synthesis is the foundation of public healthcare, public education, and the welfare system, to name just three common elements in the modern democracies. For another example of TAS, look at the adversarial court system and, ideally, the investigations which precede someone being put into that court system.

 

Investigations usually head in one direction as determined by the evidence. However, thorough investigations also assess the reliability of the evidence, look for alternative interpretations of it, and avoid tunnel vision, which is a form of confirmation bias.

 

So, whether the context is software design, product promotion, writing the next episode of a show, or investigating a serious crime, how good the team is seems to be determined by how open team members are to each other’s ideas, and how effectively they are at thrashing them out. Where ideas are thrashed about, teams seem to thrive. Where the people posing the ideas are thrashed about, those people stop offering ideas. Missed ideas could otherwise spawn the next great subroutine, a clever commercial, an hilarious comedy sketch, or a suspicion that a certain witness might be holding something relevant back.

 

Another book The L School read early on was Edward DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats. DeBono is perhaps best known for coining (and trademarking) the term “lateral thinking”. With Six Thinking Hats, DeBono encouraged team members to assume different roles, to wear different hats, such as the person who looks for why something shouldn’t be done, or how precisely it can be done and what it is required for that.  In that way, negative feedback and wild suggestions and logistical questions aren’t necessarily attributed to individual team members, which can leave lasting interpersonal problems.  Instead, different roles are played by different people, sometimes chosen by a leader and other times by the group itself. That book wasn’t popular within our group but, again, I thought it had some value. In my view, that value increases somewhat in light of what I heard from Rozovsky and Duhigg.

 

In his Forbes article, How Do We Avoid The Problem Of Too Much Focus?, James Heskett highlighted a couple of books relevant here. One is Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think, the topic of which is self-explanatory. Another is Max Bazerman’s The Power of Noticing, which concerns how leaders think and where some flaws exist. Despite the differing contexts, both discuss how bad outcomes can come from too much focus, and how outside possibilities, ideas, or information can be ignored.

 

Groopman advised his readers to ask, “What else could it be?” as a means of interrupting the diagnostic focus a particular physician may be caught up in, albeit with the best of intentions. And, as Heskett wrote, Bazerman “…concludes that excessive focus, among other things, is one of the reasons leaders fail to notice important facts relevant to their decisions.”

 

Critical thought, in one’s own mind and in group settings, seems a logical means of getting smarter and  better at all sorts of things we do. Each piece of software is a specifically-arranged collection of subroutines that are often coded by various contributors. Space craft, air planes, and cars are collective efforts by many teams and subcontractors. So is your house or apartment. So are the best practices of how we think. Those practices have evolved for over 24 centuries so there might be a thing or three to learn from that, for those truly interested in truth finding, collaborative discussions, and clearly-logical decision making. Many smart people in today’s  world are learning that. Many are not.

 

I’m fine if you don’t want to take my word it. Aristotle, Newton, Fichte, Rozovsky, Duhigg, Heskett, Groopman, and Bazerman, some in different times and in different contexts, seem to point in the same general direction. Of course, I could be wrong. That’s easy to say without actually asking some of these folks. So I’m asking.

 

What do you believe about the value of knocking ideas around between people without knocking around the people offering those ideas?