Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Stephanie Beath

Every time I work with a new team I hear the same rhetoric.

Whatever the real or perceived problem, they intend to be ‘the solution’ to it.

To be better than or different to and smarter than the others.

The idea that they need people outside the group to co-create a solution is a foreign and often threatening thought, even in collaborative environments.

Many see it as a sign of failure, that they are not good enough on their own.

The individual supremacy myth

This is partly because we have been taught that smart individuals are the key to success.

By implication, a group of smart individuals with complementary expertise forms a smart team.

This ideology is reinforced because organisations hire and reward individuals who outshine others.

There’s nothing wrong with recruiting the best talent or compensating high performers but it can lead to an assumption that any solution can emerge from these silos.

Work structures and practices follow, reinforcing this approach.

A common example — a technical team works on an IT solution and only takes it to the broader group at the presentation stage, failing to fully understand the business or end-user requirements.

Modern organisations need models designed to tap the greatest source of intelligence in any organisation — the collective.

We’re not used to these models. We may not even know they exist. It can mean fundamental disruption to old routines.

Humans were never the fastest, or strongest species but by putting our heads together we came up with novel ways to flourish.

The smartest person is no match for the collective.

Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management shows that teams of people display a collective intelligence that has surprisingly little to do with the intelligence of individual members.

Neither the average intelligence of the group members nor the person with the greatest intelligence strongly predicts how well a team does.

‘By each doing one thing and getting good at it, then sharing and combining the results through exchange, people become capable of doing things they do not even understand.’

Alison Reynolds and David Lewis ran a 12-year study that showed there is no correlation between demographic diversity (gender, race, age) and performance; but that cognitive diverse teams with different perspective and information processing styles were highly productive.

In company lies opportunity

Teams find the rapid shift to decentralised models and need to access to other people’s unused resources challenging if they think it means haven’t got everything worked out already (they haven’t) and that their ideas will be challenged again (they will be).

Some people thrive on the uncertainty and they’re best equipped for new ways of working but for many it generates insecurity.

Some assume others think their ideas are stupid and if you can’t think of something smart to say right now, that proves the point.

The most productive problem solvers and frankly the most interesting people are the ones that always seek to understand a fresh perspective and weave it into the greater fabric of their experience to build a wider bridge rather than a deeper moat.

Building collective intelligence also makes the organisation resilient.

It won’t be hostage to losing the single golden boy or girl with the keys to the kingdom.

Collective intelligence is also highly malleable.

You can fundamentally shift a group’s intelligence by changing who is in it or how you run it, for example, by distributing speaking time rather than allowing a single leader to dominate. As this report suggests joint financial incentives can also work.

A shared purpose is a great unifier

The instinct for exclusion can be mitigated by connecting people around a shared purpose greater than themselves or immediate group.

People easily relate to that model in sport where teams have a joint purpose, each a role to play in which they must lead. If the choices a player makes are not inspiring to their team to fully engage and be the best they can — they’ll never play for the All Blacks.

In business we have to learn that leading in our role requires us to have a clear purpose aligned with everyone else on our team and across the organisation that we are absolutely committed to what the whole game is about.

Organisations are under huge pressure to maximise outcomes for resources. We have to establish new routines.

Connect with me Stephanie Beath.

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The dangers of a superhero culture: the smartest person is no match for the average group was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The dangers of a superhero culture: the smartest person is no match for the average group

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