Here's two excerpts from a book I am reading, "Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Business and Life," by Charles Duhigg:***
Onstage, Bock brought up a series of slides. “What matters are five key norms,” he told the audience.
Teams need to believe that their work is important.
Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful.
Teams need clear goals and defined roles.
Team members need to know they can depend on one another.
But, most important, teams need psychological safety.
To create psychological safety, Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors. There were Google-designed checklists they could use: Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don’t know. They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.
There were dozens of tactics on the checklist. All of them, however, came back to two general principles: Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.
“There are lots of small things a leader can do,” Abeer Dubey told me. “In meetings, does the leader cut people off by saying ‘Let me ask a question there,’ or does she wait until someone is done speaking? How does the leader act when someone’s upset? These things are so subtle, but they can have a huge impact. Every team is different, and it’s not uncommon in a company like Google for engineers or salespeople to be taught to fight for what they believe in. But you need the right norms to make arguments productive rather than destructive. Otherwise, a team never becomes stronger.”
For three months, Project Aristotle traveled from division to division explaining their findings and coaching team leaders. Google’s top executives released tools that any team could use to evaluate if members felt psychologically safe and worksheets to help leaders and teammates improve their scores.
“I come from a quantitative background. If I’m going to believe something, you need to give me data to back it up,” said Sagnik Nandy, who as chief of Google Analytics Engineering heads one of the company’s biggest teams. “So seeing this data has been a game changer for me. Engineers love debugging software because we know we can get 10 percent more efficiency by just making a few tweaks. But we never focus on debugging human interactions. We put great people together and hope it will work, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, and most of the time we don’t know why. Aristotle let us debug our people. It’s totally changed how I run meetings. I’m so much more conscious of how I model listening now, or whether I interrupt, or how I encourage everyone to speak.”
***
Uzzi and Jones—along with their colleagues Satyam Mukherjee and Mike Stringer—wrote an algorithm to evaluate the 17.9 million papers. By examining how many different ideas each study contained, whether those ideas had been mentioned together previously, and if the papers were popular or ignored, their program could rate each paper’s novelty. Then they could look to see if the most creative papers shared any traits.
***
Uzzi and Jones—along with their colleagues Satyam Mukherjee and Mike Stringer—wrote an algorithm to evaluate the 17.9 million papers. By examining how many different ideas each study contained, whether those ideas had been mentioned together previously, and if the papers were popular or ignored, their program could rate each paper’s novelty. Then they could look to see if the most creative papers shared any traits.
The
analysis told them that some creative papers were short; others were
long. Some were written by individuals; the majority were composed by
teams. Some studies were authored by researchers at the beginning of
their careers; others came from more senior faculty.
In other words, there were lots of different ways to write a creative study.
But
almost all of the creative papers had at least one thing in common:
They were usually combinations of previously known ideas mixed together
in new ways. In fact, on average, 90 percent of what was in the most
“creative” manuscripts had already been published elsewhere—and had
already been picked over by thousands of other scientists. However, in
the creative papers, those conventional concepts were applied to
questions in manners no one had considered before. “Our analysis of 17.9
million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science
follows a nearly universal pattern,” Uzzi and Jones wrote. “The
highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally
conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an
intrusion of unusual combinations.” It was this combination of ideas,
rather than the ideas themselves, that typically made a paper so
creative and important.
If
you consider some of the biggest intellectual innovations of the past
half century, you can see this dynamic at work. The field of behavioral
economics, which has remade how companies and governments operate,
emerged in the mid-1970s and ’80s when economists began applying
long-held principles from psychology to economics, and asking questions
like why perfectly sensible people bought lottery tickets. Or, to cite
other juxtapositions of familiar ideas in novel ways, today’s Internet
social networking companies grew when software programmers borrowed
public health models that were originally developed to explain how
viruses spread and applying them to how friends share updates.
Physicians can now map complicated genetic sequences rapidly because
researchers have transported the math of Bayes’ rule into laboratories
examining how genes evolve.
Fostering
creativity by juxtaposing old ideas in original ways isn’t new.
Historians have noted that most of Thomas Edison’s inventions were the
result of importing ideas from one area of science into another. Edison
and his colleagues “used their knowledge of electromagnetic power from
the telegraph industry, where they first worked, to transfer old ideas
[to the industries of] lighting, telephone, phonograph, railway and
mining,” two Stanford professors wrote in 1997. Researchers have
consistently found that labs and companies encourage such combinations
to spark creativity. A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm
IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as
“combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s
designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a
standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo
container.
The power of
combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the
prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally
developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling
techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he
could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and
design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one
of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book
of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian
psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques.
“A
lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially
intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer
knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of
different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so
they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”
