What complexity science says about what makes a winning team (2020) | Hacker News Reader

What complexity science says about what makes a winning team (2020)

aeon.co

90 pointsgHeadphone14 comments

I've felt the "flow state" they allude to near the end on teams I've worked with. Everything just clicks, and there's a sense of cohesion and momentum. Perhaps because it's about sports, the article focuses more on physical descriptions/dimensions, but the common variable I think in the work world is whether or not the culture is high in trust. High-trust work environments (you trust that those around you have your best interests at heart) produce much better work because everyone can put each other and the work first rather than all the overhead/friction of worrying about drama and politics.

Nailed it. Trust is everything. Part of trust is competence. Part of it is being a decent human. A big part is getting to know your coworkers and understanding what makes each other tick.

One of the biggest mistakes I made early in my career was thinking work was all about the work. It didn’t matter what people thought of me or what I thought of them. It matters a great deal. You don’t have to be friends with coworkers, and have drinks with all of them on Fridays, but you should generally respect the people you work with and they should respect you and that can take some effort and time, but it will pay off in the long run and you will like your job more.

Copy pasting from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21753347

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Similarly, Google trying to find out what successful teams did differently is a great read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399

Some excerpts:

> ... Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

> ... Google, in other words, in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.

> Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.

> (you trust that those around you have your best interests at heart)

So true - this tracks my experience exactly. What I find interesting is that sometimes high trust is necessary but not sufficient, and other times it's both necessary and sufficient, for great teams. I've never found a situation where a great team stays great (or arguably ever was in the first place) without high trust, though.

I think the common variable for achieving flow state is not being interrupted.

Echoing other responses, I've found that trust is a hugely important dimension of effective teams. In a technical setting, there is a key benefit to trust. Do you trust your mates enough to share an idea that you feel is probably stupid/lame, but might have some seed of value in there somewhere? New ideas that initially seem "off the wall" may lead to important breakthroughs with some nurturing and reformulation. I've also experienced a sort of team-level flow, in which an idea triggers a variant idea from someone else, and then another and another, and collectively you end up with an idea that feels like an emergent property: you end up with something really good that no one could have gotten to on their own, that represents something greater than the sum of the parts.

I remember long ago going to the gym to play some basketball and joining 4 other random people I didn't know to play against a team who wanted to play a full court practice game. Even though we were random and individually not as skilled as the other team, we somehow played well together on both ends of the court; the other team was composed of superior individuals but each wanted to be the star and failed to connect as a team. We blew them out.

In putting together teams over the years (in software) sometimes you don't get to pick who you get, but you try to find out what each can do well and design things around that, to maximize what the team can do. I've rarely had a problem delivering really good results. Maybe its just luck, or maybe you can make teams with mismatched people as long as you can find some way to maximize the good and minimize the bad, unless all you have is bad.

Dennis Rodman I observed when he played for the Detroit Pistons was worth one game in every playoff series. He had the ability to get in one players head and force him to drastically underperform.

With the Chicago Bulls it was Scottie Pippen. Michael Jordan saw it and convinced the Bulls to trade for him not just for his prodigious rebounding capability but for the intangible. Pippen wasn't excited about it because he hated Rodman but he went along with it and a dynasty was born.

Turns out it’s just Tom Brady.

Really is.

Too long and meandering. Can some kind soul post summary points?

I don't think it's a problem that can be covered in a three-step plan. This type of article, I think, attemps to make you think, instead of giving a cookie-cutter solution. Think of it as the equivalent of a review article in science.

If you want "solutions", perhaps try clicking on some of the links that are in the text. They lead to papers or other articles that go more in depth.

Great topic. I’m curious how much we ascribe “flow” in a team setting after the fact. Unfortunately the article doesn’t help on conclusions.

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