
Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others - HillRat
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html
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simula67
_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.

~~~
kendallpark
I thought I'd add a few tidbits here on gender differences.

I play women's football and coach high school guys football. Football is one
of the most teamwork-dependent sports out there. Everyone has to be doing his
job every single play. There's no way for one player to carry the team.

Before I started coaching guys' football, I had heard consistently from other
coaches in my women's league that women are way easier to coach than men in
the game of football. Reasons given included less attitude, less
individualism, less ego, more willing to work together, etc. When I started
coaching high school ball, this was exactly the case. So much of my time was
wasted beating the individualism out of these boys and getting them to play
for each other, not themselves.

Maybe it's that football attracts a certain type of male. But I think women
might be more naturally disposed to working on a team than men on average.

~~~
Clever321
I'm pretty sure Manning and other great QBs were capable of carrying entire
teams. Not to argue your point, with which I agree, but just saying :)

~~~
kelseyfrancis
I don't see how even an exceptional quarterback can be effective if the
offensive line and other backs don't block consistently well, or if the
receivers don't consistently run the right routes, escape their coverage,
actually catch the ball, and run well with it after the catch, or if the
running backs don't find the holes the line must create, make good cuts,
deflect tackles, and never fumble, or if the place kicker and/or punter don't
consistently deliver when one of those things goes wrong, or if despite doing
all that stuff right the defense never makes a stop.

~~~
kendallpark
I agree. Offense can't do anything without a solid line. QB would be sacked
every play and RBs would be tackled for loses all day long.

Talk to any football coach and they'll tell you how critical the line is to
the entire offense. Our old QB used to cook a special dinner for all her
o-line every season as a thank-you.

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lisa_henderson
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
More information on OODA:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop)

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stolio
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
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
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.

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hnhg
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-
err...](http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-
errors-1.14700))

I could well be missing something though, so please correct me if I'm off the
mark.

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armed10
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.

~~~
jasonwocky
> For example: the pyramids, cannot be build by one man, but wouldn't have
> existed if it wasn't for central leadership.

Because they were valueless items to the thousands of people that it took to
slave and die creating them? Yes, those things probably wouldn't have been
erected if it were a democratic society at the time. I don't see how that's a
bad thing.

The Pyramids are in fact a perfect example of the perils of the "strong
leader" model of leadership. At the time, they were a fantastic waste of their
society's resources.

Divisiveness will, in fact, kill a team. We're on the same page about that.
However, teams throughout history and software development that have had
"strong leaders" have plenty of track record of being internally divided.
Focusing on "Steve Jobs" is a huge example of survivor bias. Nobody hears
about the "strongly led" teams that don't make it big, or anywhere.

Democracy doesn't "divide" teams. It gives people a voice to work through
their _already present_ divisions. However, the key word there is _work_.
Simply saying you're a democracy without having patience to go through the
work won't get you anywhere. Neither will putting together a team filled with
people with irreconcilable differences.

~~~
dasil003
How about sending a man to the moon? That also seems like a waste of
resources, we just aren't morally opposed to it because everyone got paid.
However politically they both seem to be in the same class of great human
endeavours with no practical value.

~~~
Clever321
Neil deGrasse Tyson argues, and I agree, that the ability to send people,
probes, satellites, etc. into space is of utmost importance on a grander
scale. Imagine being a species capable of space-flight that is unable or
unwilling to save itself from destruction when an asteroid comes too near. "We
would be the laughing stock of the universe -- 'Oh haha, yea, look at those
silly humans who could have saved themselves, but didn't.'". The space program
is incredibly expensive, but what is the cost of Earth?

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shasta
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.

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Hermel
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.﻿

~~~
xorcist
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
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.

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cLeEOGPw
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.

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blueskin_
De-paywalled: [https://archive.today/BM7BT](https://archive.today/BM7BT)

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doczoidberg
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.

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

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

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gogeek
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?

~~~
nl
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.

~~~
toolz
I'm not sure it's fair to suggest that those women aren't famous as some sort
of mark against societies sexism (presuming you might feel that way). There
are a great number of men that aren't famous who have made significant
contributions to science, and there do exist famous women who have
contributed.

I'd venture to say most people know, Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Rosalind
Franklin, just to name a few whose names I recognize.

~~~
gogeek
I don't say they don't exist, but what's the ratio? It is also a fact that the
higher the IQ gets, the more men we count.

