Darkness on the Jungle Floor
The Erosion of Team Intelligence in the Face of Assumed Genius
“The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart.
More often than not, it’s the other way around”
- Malcolm Gladwell, “The Talent Myth” 2002
Last week, a recently hired colleague and I spent some time in my office where we shared our perspectives on the numerous challenges we faced in creating a new team in his organization. I love to watch the steps of a freshly minted ninja: agile thinking unencumbered by status quo! Nearing the end of an exciting discussion, he summed up a vibe he got from some of the people around him: “Hey, the new guy’s here! He’ll figure it out.” While I certainly agree that one of the reasons we hired him was to help us figure out some interesting problems, it reminded me of quicksand I’ve seen teams wade into before.
In 1997, while I was writing software for a videoconferencing company, our chief architect visited the office for a series of meetings. As the week wore on, I was struck by the amount of talking this fellow could do. He had a dandy vocabulary and seemed quite intelligent. Every issue that came up, he would postulate loquaciously (hey - speaking of vocabulary, check that out!). The room would be silent, but it wasn’t an awe-struck silence. It felt to me more like relief. The group seemed happy to have someone in their midst that could solve all problems and just tell them what to do. I interpreted in the glazed looks around the room: “this guy sounds smart enough...” I clearly recall thinking “we’re screwed if this guy is wrong.”
Fighting Out of the Shade
Around 2001, while working at another software company, one of the architects on the Eng team had such a grip on technical power on his project that it sapped the creative energy of an entire group of developers. Engagement and ownership slowly shriveled away over a number of months. The team had been so beaten down by his withering genius, there was no debate, no dialog, no idea exchange. If the code didn’t turn out the way he wanted, he was well known to just overwrite it with his own. As a peer architect of his, I made it my job to argue with him in every meeting I could find on his calendar. I knew he was smarter than me, but I felt the team needed permission to pick a technical fight.
The Talent Myth
The following year, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker entitled “The Talent Myth,” where he asked “what if smart people are overrated?” Written less than a year after the Enron collapse, Gladwell was curious if Enron (with help from McKinsey & Company) had incorrectly structured their talent acquisition and development programs. Their focus was on top B-school talent with an emphasis on intelligence and drive. There was little doubt that, individually, the people recruited to Enron were rock stars. But the culture at McKinsey and Enron rewarded solo performance and self-promotion over results. While there is merit to the belief that hiring great talent is a competitive differentiator, the Enron prima donnas “took more credit for success than was legitimate, that did not acknowledge responsibility for its failures, that shrewdly sold the rest of us on its genius, and that substituted self-nomination for disciplined management.” The documentary film made to chronicle the rise and fall of Enron was fittingly named “The Smartest Guys in the Room.”
The Enron example is extreme. Theirs was an overt culture which nurtured individual strength to the detriment of the larger system: the business, the surrounding communities, and the vast ecosystem of businesses connected with it. In far less severe situations, milder mistakes of a similar variety can infuse a culture with bad habits, distracting the development of a strong system in favor of the “easy” path: gratefully following the loudest smartypants in the room.
Let the Sunlight Hit the Jungle Floor
Here are some ideas of how we can continue to create more team ownership of ideas and improve development of systems:Empower the Crowd
Weeks after introducing retrospectives to my Products organization, I abruptly uninvited all management from these meetings as a means to empower the team with a method and voice for problem solving. Several people have asked to have our architect re-invited. His ideas find their way into our system a number of ways. The crowd needs to have a forum to find its own solutions, in its own voice, without the overpowering ideas of a singular, strong (and smart) leader.
Practice Concision
If you are leading a team or a meeting, recognize when you are being verbose. Engage the group in the discussion, then step aside and allow alternative ideas to flow. Prolixity chokes off group creativity, disengages the group, and wastes time. A leader’s job isn’t to push ideas on the team but to support and encourage the development of ideas that create stronger systems and solutions.
Look for Ways to Make the System Smarter
When solving problems, focus equally on how the system (the organization, business process, and repeatability of the steps taken to success) supports the solution. Find patterns in the problems we solve and develop changes to our systems that prevent them in the future.
One of many examples is the problem of patching our systems’ software. Sure, there is a need to urgently patch production systems with software updates, but more importantly, teams need a process and approach for identifying patches, scheduling, testing, communicating and deploying these consistently. A true solution is not just one fix on one platform: it must be across all systems, continuously and forever. That’s a smarter system.
Stoke the Crucible of Debate!
This week, Fast Company covered Behance, a creative consulting agency that is coaching companies to foster “fighting the way to creative breakthroughs.” We didn’t have to hire an expensive consulting agency to learn that a little conflict helps strengthen systems and teams!
Listen actively and ask questions, especially when the person who is talking sounds as if they have made their mind up. You can sense the feeling in a meeting when a group has stopped trying to go deeper. The room gets silent, but lacks the confidence of conclusion. Each of us should have an internal alarm that suggests “there must be something wrong with this.”
Beware the Status Quo
Ironically, a well-entrenched process or one that has enjoyed a rapid acceptance can also erode team intelligence and participation. Just because we call something a process doesn’t make it axiomatic. Think of a process as a map of a well worn trail through a familiar problem. The trampled route under our feet should tell us nothing more than “other feet have been here before.” We should not assume they were perfect steps.
A software release process and checklist, fine tuned and marching toward perfection, has led to a recent release readiness meeting that was short on debate and equally lacking in a sense of confident conclusion. I noticed how this session fizzled into silence. Is the process becoming a crutch? Look for the flaws: they’re always there. Make it a personal challenge to be the one who finds them.
“The System is the Star”
Gladwell distinguishes the need for individual greatness in society with the strength of systems in business:
“Groups don’t write great novels, and a committee didn’t come up with the theory of relativity. But companies work by different rules. They don’t just create; they execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star.”
Untangled
Now think again about the exciting challenges faced your team, or any of our many Gordian Knots that become wrapped around our axles. A stellar team, not an individual star, will create a system that not just attacks and slices problems through, but detects and avoids them in the future!
Alexander Cuts The Gordian Knot by Jean-Simon Berthélemy
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