
Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams - barry-cotter
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dCjz5mgQdiv57wWGz/ingredients-for-creating-disruptive-research-teams
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jandrewrogers
In my experience, attempts to build these organizations are unsuccessful
primarily because they fail to understand the functional role of the visionary
leader and/or they select team members based on them being very smart with
little thought toward how the selection will impact social dynamics.

A “visionary leader” is not a charismatic person executing someone else’s
vision, but this is the model many organizations use. A visionary leader is
always executing their own vision, the object is to find one with a vision
that aligns with the organization and giving them a platform to execute their
vision. It is difficult to navigate the intrinsic ambiguities of a vision
effectively without it being your own. In the specific context of research
organizations, leaders must be viewed as technical peers by the people they
are leading or it will be difficult to build trust in the vision. An ideal
leader is one that everyone suspects could do their job if required. You can’t
fake that technical gravitas with seniority, pedigree, and credentialing but
I’ve seen many organizations try. I would argue that finding a suitable leader
is the biggest hurdle to building an effective disruptive research
organization.

One under-rated aspect of building a top-tier team in my opinion is selecting
each member for unique, critical expertise that does not overlap with any
other person on the team. This simple practice mitigates many adverse social
dynamics that destroy team productivity when two excellent people have non-
distinct expertise. It creates natural ownership, encourages self-
organization, and makes it obvious to everyone on the team the value every
other member brings to their work. With this comes the obligation to educate
and mentor the rest of the team on your area of expertise and to
explain/defend decisions to anyone that asks. Pride in being the expert in
their area and wanting to be recognized for that usually compels it. No one is
excluded from this obligation, not even leaders. This sounds like a single
point of failure but in practice it causes a lot of critical knowledge to be
efficiently socialized by the members of the team that are expert in that
knowledge.

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paulsutter
You don’t create breakthroughs through checklists.

Examples:

“This study says 80% of successful pitches have a ‘purpose’ slide so we need a
purpose slide”

“If we build a control tower, the cargo planes will return”

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mistermann
> Psychological safety, i.e., the feeling that voicing controversial ideas or
> dissent will not cause abandonment or loss of status, seems to be an
> important factor for making interactions between researchers particularly
> fruitful. _It’s not clear to me how exactly this can be achieved._

I know I've read various articles/blogs on this topic, including techniques to
achieve it, but it seems I neglected to save any of them in my EverNote.
Anyone happen to know of any good ones off the top of their head?

~~~
heymijo
Here are a couple but just reading through them, I think they are lacking. I
need to think more about why. I suspect it's about tactics vs. principles.

For example the one talks about pre and post mortems. I have seen those done
badly first hand where they do NOT create psychological safety.

Anyways, check these out but do so with an inquisitive mind.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Psychological Safety from NOBL
Academy
[https://app.getpocket.com/read/2567268015](https://app.getpocket.com/read/2567268015)

Tool: Foster psychological safety
[https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-
effe...](https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-
effectiveness/steps/foster-psychological-safety/)

\----------------------------- Before Google came along with Project Aristotle
there was W. Edwards Deming, who advocated "driving out fear" in reference to
creating psychological safety.

Here's a blog post with some ideas from Deming's work. You'll see things at
the tactics level but also much at the system level, like stack ranking is a
bad idea for psychological safety.

Much of Deming's work had manufacturing as its context but an enterprising
mind can see how it relates to knowledge work and other endeavors. Read
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull to see how he used ideas from Deming to build
their systems and culture.

[https://michelbaudin.com/2012/10/27/deming_8_of_14_drive_out...](https://michelbaudin.com/2012/10/27/deming_8_of_14_drive_out_fear/)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18077903-creativity-
inc](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18077903-creativity-inc)

------
tlb
“...I picked based on my own non-systematic judgment...” is a pretty big
caveat for deciding what makes something good. If his judgement is biased
toward being impressed by quality X of a group, then sure enough the study
will conclude that quality X is important.

However, any objective measure of research group effectiveness is probably
worse. You sometimes see them ranked by number of papers published, or number
of patents filed, which is definitely the wrong criterion. Whereas the
author’s judgement is probably mostly aligned with what you or I might value.

It’s better to be subjectively right than objectively wrong.

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vikramkr
The article talks about how the evidence seems to point to the opposite
direction of constraints stimulating innovation, but I wonder if this finding
is a side effect of the small sample size issues the author discussed at the
beginning. The amount of innovation coming out of startups is high, and they
certainly operate under enormous constraints. Furthermore, there is a
difference between no inconveniences (no teaching obligation) and no
constraints - technical constraints in particular (Wozniak dealing with
significant constraints in designing computers etc.) could be powerful
stimulants of creativity.

~~~
fuzzfactor
Resource constraints act like foul lines, limiting where you are allowed to
hit it out of the park, but also making you concentrate on where you can.

Distractive constraints are like fewer times at bat.

A natural abilty for overcoming either or both disadvantages can give rise to
exponential performance once the restrictions are reduced or removed.

------
vikramkr
The author mentions they dont know how a culture if psychological safety is
created, and then mentions the outsized importance of the leader. I would
hypothesize that the leader's character is what helps create that safety. If
you are allowed to disagree with the boss and have robust debates, then surely
you can disagree with your colleagues and deal with colleagues disagreeing
with you as well.

