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The Business of Social Games and Casino

How to succeed in the mobile game space by Lloyd Melnick

Tag: teams

Turn Your Company Around

Turn Your Company Around

During these chaotic times, many companies that have previously enjoyed high employee satisfaction are now finding themselves in an unfamiliar situation, dealing with an increase in employee churn and employee dissatisfaction. Some leaders who prided themselves on building great and collaborative teams are finding that team health issues are becoming their primary focus. A colleague recently recommended David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around, a book about Marquet’s experience as a US nuclear submarine Captain, where he turned around the performance and morale about the USS Sante Fe.

turn the ship around

Although the book was written several years before the pandemic, Marquet highlighted that team health and job satisfaction were already critical issues facing business. He writes that from 2004 to 2012, less than half of US workers were satisfied with their jobs; while a 2009 survey showed worker satisfaction to be at its lowest rate ever. Dissatisfaction is also very costly, as he shows that it led to lost productivity of up to $300 billion in the US alone.

The crux of the problem

One of the strongest drivers of workplace dissatisfaction is that most organizations are built for workflows that made sense 50, or 500, years ago but have not kept up with the time. I found this insight particularly strong coming from Marquet, as the military has traditionally embraced very hierarchical leadership structures (though it echoes what General Stanley McChrystal describes in Team of Teams).

Marquet explains that most companies are structured on a leader-follower approach, where decisions are made by a boss and carried out by the workers. This design works great if you are trying to build a Pyramid, or even during the Industrial Revolution, but not for jobs that are dominated by cognitive tasks and decision-making. While the leader-follower approach creates great Pyramids, it does not lead to efficient attack submarines or gaming companies.

Moving to a leader-leader organization design

At the root of Captain Marquet’s success turning around the USS Sante Fe was empowering workers and overhauling the idea of leadership. Marquet argues that to create a satisfied, empowered workforce, you need to move to a different leadership structure, a leader-leader system.

The difference between a leader-leader and leader-follower approach is exposed by the way decisions are made. In a leader-follower structure, information is sent up the chain of command, and a decision is made only once the information has reached and been digested by those at the top. In a leader-leader system, the power to make decisions is distributed throughout the chain of command, allowing individuals to act even on newly arrived information.

Marquet uses an example from his navy career to highlight the difference in approaches. “A navigator realizes his submarine is off course and in very shallow water. Instead of alerting his commander first, he jumps into action, rectifying the problem safely and effectively. “

Building a leader-leader system by giving up power

To move to a leader-leader system, and thus improve both productivity and team health, you need to recreate the building blocks of your organization. The first step is to ensure that decision-making involves employees and is sustainable. To do this, however, you may need to give up some of your perceived power.

There are several ways to empower better your team;

  • Talk to everyone and ask them how you could better empower them.
  • Encourage deliberate action. By deliberate action, ask your team to pause, vocalize and gesture toward what they were doing before they did it. In the case of the Sante Fe, Marquet used a simple three-word phrase to involve actively the entire crew in the running of the submarine. The phrase was: “I intend to…”
  • Change your emphasis from briefing to certifying. When briefing, you can only ensure the competence of the person giving the brief. Those being briefed often daydream or stop listening halfway through, as the task is a familiar one, and they’ve heard it before. Rather than just giving information, certifying makes your team members answer questions about the task you assign to them.

Develop and communicate core values

I wrote several months ago about best book I read this year, General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams, not coincidentally also by a military leader and he and Marquet share a very important common learning. Both Marquet and McChrystal saw the need for core values to keep your organization united and productive. When you are empowering your team, you set them up for success by conveying the company’s values and strategy. This information helps everyone make decisions that drive your company forward.

It is also important to align the culture, with your words and rewards, towards these values. Marquet understood that praise had the greatest impact when good performance was recognized immediately. He also believes that the way rewards are structured can have an impact on an organization’s productivity. Man-versus-man rewards, where employees are encouraged to compete against each other, are unproductive. Man-versus-nature rewards, though, pit employees against an external enemy, which helps build camaraderie and a stronger work either among workers.

Turning your ship around

To improve your team’s culture, as well as productivity, Marquet shows that a traditional leader-follower approach to leadership is ineffective and does not tap the natural leadership abilities everyone has. Changing to a leader-leader structure entails a reassessment of the way you lead but the benefits of such a switch will benefit both your team health and your productivity.

Key takeaways

  1. Less than 50 percent of people are satisfied with that job, and Covid has made the situation more dire.
  2. The key to improving employee satisfaction, and growing productivity, is evolving from a leader-follower approach (where you tell people what to do) to a leader-leader approach (where people control their decision-making.
  3. To move to a leader-leader organization, you need to empower your team (including asking them how to empower them better) and encourage deliberate action where they vocalize what they are doing rather than ask what to do.

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on December 9, 2020December 6, 2020Categories General Social Games Business, General Tech BusinessTags leadership, management, teams1 Comment on Turn Your Company Around

Leading in a complex world: building a team of teams

Leading in a complex world: building a team of teams

I am very careful to avoid management books that are popular because they are the flavor of the day or driven by the halo effect (looking back and attributing success or failure to an individual based on results though the success was driven by other factors), but once or twice a year I come across a book that is invaluable. I just came across that book for 2020, Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams . The book initially appealed to me for several reasons:

  1. Many of the most valuable lessons I have applied to business come from sports or war. McChrystal is one of the most successful military leaders in my lifetime.
  2. The thought of a former General evangelizing less hierarchy, with him coming from one of the most hierarchical organizations in the world, was intriguing.
  3. He does have a strong track record, he’s literally not an armchair general. Halo Effect aside, he is largely responsible for turning around the war effort in Iraq and defeated Al Qaeda there.
  4. McChrystal’s challenges in Iraq are in many ways consistent with the challenges I have experienced in mobile gaming — having to adapt structures built to fight one enemy (the Russians) to fight something entirely different (Al Qaeda).
  5. Reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads were not only positive but pointed to real life applications.

Team of Teams met and exceeded my expectations, providing a great framework for designing your business organization to meet modern day challenges, particularly the type faced by mobile and social game companies. The book shows how to build a fast, resilient and adaptive company. It also shows that building a great company is not about finding brilliant people but about creating the underlying structure. As McChrystal experienced, “although [his] Task Force struggled in Iraq, we could not claim we were mismatched against a world-class team. Honestly assessed, Al Qaeda was not a collection of supermen forged into a devilishly ingenious organization by brilliant masterminds. They were tough, flexible, and resilient, but more often than not they were poorly trained and under resourced. Much like a Silicon Valley garage start-up that rides an idea or product that is well timed rather than uniquely brilliant to an absurd level of wealth, AQI happened to step onto an elevator that was headed. Second, and most critically, these factors were not unique to Iraq, or to warfare. They are affecting almost all of us in our lives and organizations every day. We’re not lazier or less intelligent than our parents or grandparents, but what worked for them simply won’t do the trick for us now.”

team of teams

As Walter Isaacson (an author I respect) wrote in the foreword, “whether in business or in war, the ability to react quickly and adapt is critical, and it’s becoming even more so as technology and disruptive forces increase the pace of change. That requires new ways to communicate and work together.” McChrystal describes the dynamics that have impacted the world, and business, and then how you can build your company to react to this new environment.

This isn’t our parent’s world

McChrystal highlights how the world has evolved and why companies need to adapt to survive and thrive. While Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) initially seemed to be a traditional insurgency, he found that it functioned differently than anything the US military previously faced. Rather than a traditional hierarchy, “it took the form of a dispersed network that proved devastatingly effective against our objectively more qualified force.” This experience is very similar to the new type of competitors many of us face.

AQI’s success was not simply a result of how they used new technology. It was their underlying structure, networked and non-hierarchical, that made them a dangerous enemy. It was not that they knew how to post on YouTube or communicate with messaging apps. McChrystal writes, “in some ways, we had more in common with the plight of a Fortune 500 company trying to fight off a swarm of start-ups than we did with the Allied command battling Nazi Germany in World War II.”

This new and unorthodox structure diverged radically from what the US military ever faced previously as it was “more connected, faster paced, and less predictable than previous eras.” This phrase sounded very familiar to challenges I have faced in gaming. To win, or even survive, McChrystal had to change. The change according to McChrystal, was “less about tactics or new technology than it was about the internal architecture and culture of our force — in other words, our approach to management.”

He had to change, and forget, what the military thought they knew about war and the world. They had to tear down familiar organizational structures they were comfortable with and build completely different lines and flows to deal with the new type of threat.

The key takeaway is that the situation was not unique to the military but is what companies are facing every day. In our world, game development now is entirely different than what game developers faced in the 1990s or 2000s. We also need to tear down our familiar organizational structure and reconstitute it along completely different lines, swapping our robust architecture for organic fluidity.

Complexity vs Complicated

The most important concept I got from the book is the difference between complexity and complicated and how that impacts your organizational structure.
Being complex is different from being complicated. Things that are complicated may have many parts, but those parts are joined, one to the next, in straightforward and simple ways. A complicated machine like an internal combustion engine might be confusing to many people but it can be broken down into a series of neat and tidy deterministic relationships.

Conversely, things that are complex, such as insurgencies or the mobile gaming ecosystem, have a diverse range of connected parts that interact regularly. McChrystal explains, “because of this density of linkages, complex systems fluctuate extremely and exhibit unpredictability. In the case of weather, a small disturbance in one place could trigger a series of responses that build into unexpected and severe outcomes in another place, because of the billions of tiny interactions that link the origin and the outcome.” In a complex system (like mobile games or insurgencies), it is often impossible to tell what events would lead to what results. Moreover, due to these dense interactions, complex systems exhibit nonlinear change .

I often like to bring Chaos Theory into conversations about the gaming space, not only due to the chaotic nature of many game companies, but because it points to the impossibility of predicting how changes in the environment could impact your development. McChrystal also references Chaos Theory, pointing to Lorenz’s butterfly effect (a butterfly in China flapping its wings can cause a hurricane in Europe). McChrystal writes that “the significance of Lorenz’s butterfly effect is not, however, just the nonlinear escalation of a minor input into a major output. There’s uncertainty involved; the amplification of the disturbance is not the product of a single, constant, identifiable magnifying factor—any number of seemingly insignificant inputs might—or might not—result in nonlinear escalation. If every butterfly’s fluttering always led to a hurricane halfway across the world two days later, weather would be predictable (if insane). The butterfly’s fluttering leads to a storm only if thousands of other minor conditions are just right. And those conditions are so precise as to be practically immeasurable, rendering the outcome unpredictable….The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.”

The same technologies that help the military with enhanced transportation, communication, and data abilities concurrently fill the operating environment with escalating nonlinearity, complexity, and unpredictability. According to McChrystal, “speed and interdependence together mean that any given action in any given time frame is now linked to vastly more potential outcomes than the same action a century or even a few decades ago: endeavors that were once akin to a two-or three-ball pool problem now involve hundreds of collisions.”

This unpredictability is fundamentally incompatible with reductionist managerial models based around planning and prediction. There are too many events occurring simultaneously that no matter how big your Big Data is, you cannot monitor and process it all. The new environment demands a new approach.

The old approach

The most familiar structure and attitude that needs change is the focus and goal of efficiency. Since the Industrial Revolution, most business have pursued Scientific Management (developed by Frederick Taylor), a system that is excellent for achieving highly efficient execution of known, repeatable processes at scale. Scientific Management revolves around replacing working by common sense to studying work and determining the most efficient way to perform specific tasks. It also entails allocating the work between managers and workers so that the managers spend their time planning and training with workers focusing only on executing their tasks efficiently.

The military pursued the same practice, focusing on making the soldier more disciplined and efficient. McChrystal found, though, that while his task force in Iraq was eminently efficient it was no match for AQI. What worked for the military (and business) in the twentieth century was no longer enough. The reason it is not enough is that the world has evolved from complicated to complex.

The need to build resiliency

Another takeaway from Team of Teams was that given the complex environment it is imperative to build a resilient organization. Resiliency means you and your company accepts you will have to deal with unpredicted challenges and threats. You then build an organization and systems that can “roll with the punches” rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses. Resilient systems are those that can encounter unforeseen threats and, when necessary, put themselves back together again.

Creating resiliency requires admitting you do not know everything. McChrystal writes, “[r]esilience thinking is the inverse of predictive hubris. It is based in a humble willingness to ‘know that we don’t know and ‘expect the unexpected.’”

Resiliency puts managing complexity before managing for complication. You manage complication by creating robust systems that are strengthened on their weakest links. Resilience is the result of linking elements that allow them to reconfigure or adapt in response to change or damage, like a coral reef.

You must pivot away from seeing efficiency as the managerial holy grail. Instead, McChrystal writes “the key lies in shifting our focus from predicting to reconfiguring. By embracing humility — recognizing the inevitability of surprises and unknowns — and concentrating on systems that can survive and indeed benefit from such surprises, we can triumph over volatility…. In effect, we needed a system that, without knowing in advance what would be required, could adapt to the challenges at hand; a system that, instead of converting a known x to a known y, would be able to create an unknown output from an unpredictable input.”

Building adaptability

A key to building resiliency is building adaptability. According to McChrystal, “one can make contingency plans, but these can account for only a modest number of possibilities. A contingency plan is like a tree that branches at every variable outcome (if they fire when we arrive, choose path A, if not, choose path B). But when dozens of saplings shoot out from those branches every second, the possibilities become so overwhelmingly complex as to render complete contingency planning futile.”

To create adaptability you need to focus on teams. Fundamental structural differences separate commands from teams. Command structures are rooted in reductionist prediction, and very good at executing planned procedures efficiently. Teams are less efficient, but much more adaptable.

McChrystal the navy SEALs as a model team. SEALs are widely considered one of the most effective fighting units in the world. McChrystal writes, “SEAL teams accomplish remarkable feats not simply because of the individual qualifications of their members, but because those members coalesce into a single organism. Such oneness is not inevitable, nor is it a fortunate coincidence. The SEALs forge it methodically and deliberately…. The first step of this is constructing a strong lattice of trusting relationships. This will seem intuitive to anyone who has been on a team, but it runs against the grain of reductionist management; in a command, the leader breaks endeavors down into separate tasks and hands them out. The recipients of instructions do not need to know their counterparts, they only need to listen to their boss. In a command, the connections that matter are vertical ties; team building, on the other hand, is all about horizontal connectivity.,,, The formation of SEAL teams is less about preparing people to follow precise orders than it is about developing trust and the ability to adapt within a small group.”

To create an effective team you need to connect trust and purpose. Teams overcome challenges that could never be foreseen by a single manager, their solutions often emerge as the bottom-up result of interactions, rather than from top-down orders. According to McChrystal, “while building trust gives teams the ability to reconfigure and ‘do the right thing,’ it is also necessary to make sure that team members know what the right thing is. Team members must all work toward the same goal, and in volatile, complex environments that goal is changeable…. Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.”

Teams do not become effective without effort. The establishment and continuation of a team requires both active management and the invisible hand of emergence, zigzagging the elements together and guiding their work. McChrystal writes, “parallel computing, joint cognition, and the oneness of a team all work toward the same goal: building a network that allows you to solve larger, more complex problems.”

The need for a Team of Teams structure

While trust and purpose is critical to creating effective teams, most mature businesses are too large to be one team. This problem often leads to a command structure telling each team what to do, which negates the resiliency and adaptability of teams. While the teams may be adaptable, a command superstructure will limit the overall organization. McChrystal writes, “[i]n a response to rising tactical complexity, many organizations in many domains have replaced small commands with teams. But the vast majority of these organizations have to be much larger than a single team; they consist of multiple teams, and these teams are wired together just like a traditional command.” In his case, “stratification and silos were hardwired throughout the Task Force.”

While teams bring some adaptability to previously rigid organizations, these performance improvements have a ceiling as long as adaptable traits are limited to the team level. As the world grows faster and more interdependent, you need to scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations.

I love sports analogies as much as military ones in business, and McChrystal uses a sports one to exemplify this problem. He writes, “picture a MECE [mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive] structure with clear roles and responsibilities sports team, and you’d have a ridiculous spectacle: players ignoring one another and the ball, their eyes fixed on the coach, awaiting precise orders. A coach might be able to devise a more efficient way to execute any given play than whatever it is the players would improvise in the heat of the game. But the coach has no way of predicting exactly how the game will develop, and no way of effectively communicating instructions in real time fast enough to be useful to all players simultaneously…. The team is better off with the cohesive ability to improvise as a unit, relying on both specialization (goalies mostly stay in goal; forwards mostly don’t) and overlapping responsibilities (each can do some of the others’ jobs in a pinch), as well as such familiarity with one another’s habits and responses that they can anticipate instinctively one another’s responses.”

The solution McChrystal devised was a “team of teams” (hence the name of the book), an organization within which the relationships between teams resembled those between individuals on a single team. Teams that had traditionally resided in distinct silos fused to one another via trust and purpose.

Creating a shared consciousness

McChrystal dealt with a larger organizational challenge than most of us will face in linking his teams, as he was responsible for thousands of soldiers across the world. To create his team of teams, he looked at a similarly complex situation that had great results, NASA’s ability to put the first man on the moon. NASA also had hundreds of very diverse teams operating at multiple locations. According to McChrystal, “because of the interdependence of the operating environment, both organizations would need members to understand the entire, interconnected system, not just individual MECE boxes on the org chart.”

To achieve this team of teams, both NASA and McChrystal’s task force had to create unprecedented levels of transparency and information sharing. It demanded a disciplined effort to create shared consciousness.

Each individual team took pride in its own performance, like the striker who celebrates his goals while his team consistently loses. The silos of the organization looked inward, where they could see metrics of success and failure. He needed to change the definition of success, not measuring the team individually but on the overall success.

McChrystal also had to foster information sharing. Both at NASA and the Army, information was closely guarded on a “need to know” basis. The problem is this approach is it depends on the assumption that some manager or algorithm or bureaucracy actually knows who does and does not need to know which material. The team of teams had access to virtually everything, it was not pre-ordained who would see what.

Functioning safely in an interdependent environment also requires that every team possess a holistic understanding of the interaction between all the moving parts. Everyone has to see the system in its entirety for the plan to work. McChrystal writes, “NASA’s success illustrated a number of profound organizational insights. Most important, it showed that in a domain characterized by interdependence and unknowns, contextual understanding is key; whatever efficiency is gained through silos is outweighed by the costs of ‘interface failures. It also proved that the cognitive “oneness” — the emergent intelligence — that we have studied in small teams can be achieved in larger organizations.”

Ensuring communications flow by embedding people on other teams

As the above shows, to achieve a team of teams there needs to be team like cooperation across your business. To achieve fluid, team like cooperation, you need to build inter-team trust. One way is to embed people from one team in another team. This helps build strong lateral ties between internal and external teams.

Where systemic understanding mirrors the sense of purpose that bonds small teams, this forced mating generates trust. McChrystal recounts the story of a SEAL who worked with his force in Iraq, according to the SEAL ‘When we started constantly talking at lower levels of the organization we could basically see where the fight was hot, where it wasn’t, and where people needed ISR the most. Plus, we could see that it was actually to our benefit sometimes to surrender that asset.’ With that awareness came a faith that when theirs was the priority mission, they would get what they needed when they needed it. Holistic understanding of the enterprise now permeated the ranks.”

By embedding people on other teams, you create idea flow.
Idea flow is the ease with which new thoughts can permeate a group, like a virus, which is a function of susceptibility and frequency of interaction. The key to increasing the contagion is trust and connectivity between otherwise separate elements of an establishment. The two major determinants of idea flow are engagement within a small team exploration, frequent contact with other units. As McChrystal writes, “in other words: a team of teams.”

Less command and less control

One of the things I found most appealing in McChrystal’s book is that his ideas run counter to the traditional beliefs of the military. That resonated with me as it shows how we need to adapt these dogmas everywhere to succeed in the 21st century. Nowhere is this more apparent than command and control.

While almost everyone acknowledges that the world has changed, many managers and leaders reflect a model and style that out of date. We often demand unrealistic levels of knowledge in leaders and force them into ineffective attempts to micromanage. McChrystal points out “the temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing…. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an ‘Eyes-On, Hands-Off’ enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.”

To achieve this role, senior leaders are more important than ever, but the role is very different from that of the traditional heroic decision maker. In McChrystal’s case, he said “I needed to shift my focus from moving pieces on the board to shaping the ecosystem…. Creating and maintaining the teamwork conditions we needed – tending the garden – became my primary responsibility…. I found that only the senior leader could drive the operating rhythm, transparency, and cross-functional cooperation we needed. I could shape the culture and demand the ongoing conversation that shared consciousness required.

Leading as a gardener meant that I kept the Task Force focused on clearly articulated priorities by explicitly talking about them and by leading by example.”

The actions and behavior of an effective leader in a team of teams is very different than what is required in a traditional command system. McChrystal identified several attributes and actions critical to success:

  1. Leading by example, he found his “most powerful instrument of communication was [his] own behavior”
  2. Showing focus and commitment, which he did on daily calls by wearing his combat uniform against an austere plywood backdrop
  3. Demanding free-flowing conversation across the teams during their daily meeting
  4. Never cancelling the daily meeting and making attendance mandatory
  5. Showing interest in what everyone said during meetings, never looking bored, sending emails or talking
  6. Greeting everyone, regardless of rank, by their first name (and ensuring he knew their name going into the meeting)
  7. Display rapt attention when being briefed and, at the conclusion, asking a question
  8. Realizing that critical words were magnified in impact and could be crushing
  9. Asking seemingly stupid questions or admitting openly “I don’t know” was accepted, even appreciated. Asking for opinions and advice showed respect.
  10. Nonstop communications and visits, from town halls to larger groups. Important that everyone on the teams heard directly from him.

The end product

Creating a team of teams is not an overnight product but a transformation that requires changing both your thinking and your structure. It is also a process where shortcuts not only risk the outcome but can make the effort negative. For example, if you empower your teams without creating shared consciousness you are likely to have people driving to different goals.

Similarly, shared consciousness alone is powerful but ultimately insufficient. Building holistic awareness and forcing interaction will align purpose and create a more cohesive company, but will not unleash the full potential of the organization. You need to use shared consciousness to spread information and empower people at all levels.

As you transform your business, both your speed and precision should improve. Technology should enable your success if the culture change allows you to use it properly.

McChrystal writes, “At the core of the Task Force’s journey to adaptability lay a yin-and-yang symmetry of shared consciousness, achieved through strict, centralized forums for communication and extreme transparency, and empowered execution, which involved the decentralization of managerial authority. Together, these powered our Task Force; neither would suffice alone…. As complexity envelops more and more of our world, even the most mundane endeavors are now subject to unpredictability, and we can learn from those at the vanguard…. Our transformation is reflective of the new generation of mental models we must adopt in order to make sense of the twenty-first century. If we do manage to embrace this change, we can unlock tremendous potential for human progress.”

Key takeaways

  • The difference between complexity and complicated is central to building an organization that works in the 21st century. Things that are complicated may have many parts, but those parts are joined, one to the next, in straightforward and simple ways and are like an equation that needs to be solved. Things that are complex, such as insurgencies or the mobile gaming ecosystem, have a diverse range of connected parts that interact regularly.
  • Accept that you will have to deal with unpredicted challenges and threats. You then build an organization and systems that can adapt rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses.
  • Teams, while not always optimally efficient, are extremely adaptable. Teams overcome challenges that could never be foreseen by a single manager, their solutions often emerge as the bottom-up result of interactions, rather than from top-down orders. Your teams must then interconnect into a team of teams, rather than siloed organizations. Create an organization within which the relationships between teams resembled those between individuals on a single team.

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on October 14, 2020October 11, 2020Categories General Social Games Business, General Tech Business, Lloyd's favorite postsTags leadership, organizational structure, Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams, teams4 Comments on Leading in a complex world: building a team of teams

Diversity is much more than superficial fixes

Diversity is much more than superficial fixes

When I worked at the Stars Group, I learned the value of having a diverse team. My team had people from the US, UK, Russia, France, Israel, Isle of Man, Kazakhstan, The Netherlands, Ireland and India; while colleagues at the company increased this list even more. This diversity led to solutions and approaches that helped us to create great products (and results) with limited resources. While I already grasped the value of diversity, Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed showed how you can magnify this value.

Rebel Ideas

Strive for cognitive diversity

At the core of Rebel Ideas is the concept of cognitive diversity, that you need people that think differently rather than just look different. While you can create an incredible relay team by cloning Usain Bolt, Apple’s design department would not have been as incredible if they simply cloned Jony Ive. Tackling complex problems demands more than just intelligence or skill. Two designers may have different nationalities and genders, but if they use the same inputs, materials, techniques and approaches to solve problems they will come to similar designs. If you recruit designers, however, who use different approaches, they will draw on different materials, ask different questions and make different assumptions.

To get the broadest range of solutions, and thus the one most likely to be optimal, you need true diversity. Diversity should not be limited to demographic attributes, like gender, race, age, sexual orientation or religion. It must be a diversity of the mind, or cognitive diversity, something we cannot achieve simply by cloning our top performers. It is by finding people with different mindsets.

One other way to get diversity is by not boxing people in. Do not limit design ideas to designers or product management to product managers. You will find that by letting people participate in conversations out of their core function they will often bring a new layer of diversity. One of the best examples is again Apple, where its design team drove some of the biggest manufacturing innovations.

Avoid homophily

While the idea of cognitive diversity is logical, we often face a counterforce that prevents us from achieving this diversity, homophily. People surround themselves with others that they identify with due to appearance, beliefs, hobbies or perspective. This subconscious and usually unintentional habit, known as homophily, happens because it is validating to have your ideas reflected back by those around you.

Unfortunately, homophily also inhibits the success of a team as it creates collective blindness. Even if a team is made up of highly intelligent individuals, if they think alike, they will not know what they are seeing or missing.

Communicate to support diversity

Once you have true cognitive diversity, you need to ensure that the benefits of diversity are not lost due to communications issues. It does not help to have a diverse group if only one or two people are heard.

You need to avoid what Syed refers to as dominance hierarchy. Even with a diverse team, in group situations such as projects, meetings, brainstorming sessions, calls, etc., a leader will either be appointed or emerge. The issue that arises is that this de facto structure may silence non-leaders. Unless leaders foster open communication, you will lose ideas.

The solution is to create an environment of psychological safety. Leaders should harness the benefits of cognitive diversity by establishing an environment that encourages ideas sharing. A technique that helps is brainwriting, where employees contribute ideas by writing them down anonymously and then voting on the best ones. Syed points out that psychological safety is the most important factor in driving success, since generating ideas is a crucial step in arriving at optimal solutions.

Another key to leveraging communications to amplify diversity is avoiding echo chambers. Echo chambers form when your beliefs are reiterated by those around us, in person or online. It is often driven by homophily, as we love to hear how great our ideas are and how smart we are. If opposing points enter our echo chamber, they sometimes do not encourage us to question our own positions; they actually polarize us further. The best way to combat the echo chamber is by forming meaningful connections with individuals, even (or especially) if we are fundamentally different.

One other way to leverage diversity is by creating a shadow board, a group you go to that challenges and reviews key decisions. Set up a shadow board with people who are cognitively diverse from you, including having shared different experiences. Shadow boards highlight the importance of sharing wisdom and individual perspectives. Sharing ideas within a cognitively diverse team creates a mutually beneficial environment, where recipients gain wisdom and givers become connected within a supportive network.

Intrinsic diversity

As part of building diversity, it is also useful to develop your own internal diversity. Some of the most innovative businessmen are immigrants, from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk. As immigrants, they have had to traverse multiple cultures, training their minds to identify new possibilities. They see how their own ideas combine to form great solutions and combine their own ideas with the concepts of others in imaginative ways. This approach drives innovation.

Syed points out that we can diversify our thinking by ensuring that we do not become a slave to one area of interest, crossing conceptual borders if not geographical ones. This was a practice Charles Darwin adopted. Alternating his research between botany, zoology, geology and psychology gave him a fresh perspective and allowed him to draw ideas together across fields.

Key takeaways

  1. While most people accept the value of diversity, it is often looked at too narrowly. True diversity is not based on demographic or sex or background but creating a team where people think differently and approach problems in unique ways, cognitive diversity.
  2. The challenge in creating cognitive diversity is homophily, gravitating to people like you or share similar ideas.
  3. Once you have a cognitively diverse team you need to structure your communications to leverage this diversity by preventing leaders from dominating discussions, get people who are not outgoing to write down and submit their ideas, avoid creating an echo chamber and building a shadow board of advisors.

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on March 31, 2020March 23, 2020Categories General Social Games Business, General Tech BusinessTags cognitive diversity, team building, teams1 Comment on Diversity is much more than superficial fixes

Try to be the dumbest person in the room

I have seen many examples of people who want to be the smartest at a meeting, or on an email thread, but the most successful are the ones who want to be the dumbest at the meeting. While it may feel that the strategy of highlighting your intelligence is important for your career or management, the opposite is true. Instead, if you focus on trying not to be the smartest person in the room, you are likely to be the most successful. You will get better input, more creative ideas and improved team performance when you allow others to be the smartest.

Shut up
from alliefallie.tumblr.com

Surround yourself with the best

First, you should surround yourself with the best people available. If your goal is to be the smartest, then you are not necessarily putting great people around you. Thus, their performance is likely to be sub-optimal. Great people generate great results and you need to be willing to surround yourself with great people. It is these top performers who drive success.

Not going to learn from yourself

If you spend most of a meeting talking or trying to impress, you are not learning anything. How can you learn when you are talking. If you are trying to find the optimal solution to a problem but focus the conversation on what you are saying, you will cap out at your best solution to the problem, not the best solution in the room. By letting everyone speak and respecting their ideas, you will have the option of selecting the best one. Assuming it is your decision, you then have the option of your best idea or your best idea plus all the others that are proposed. In a worst case, you can still proceed with your idea but now you have many more options.

Everyone has good ideas

If you look at all the fantastic ideas throughout time, you will see that there was not one (or even) a small group responsible for the majority of them. While Stephen Hawking wrote about singularity, Albert Einstein built the theory of relativity, Michio Kaku came up with string theory, etc. The point is that no matter how smart any one person is, there are millions of other very intelligent people. This phenomenon exists on all levels, from the best physicists to the smartest marketers to the best product managers. While you may have some very creative solutions to improve monetization, do not think that others in the room do not have even better ideas.

Great leaders are not great at everything

If you are a great leader, there is no way you are also great at every functional area you are responsible for. You may have wonderful leadership skills, and have risen to that position by innovating on the growth team and building a Unicorn. That does not mean you know analytics better than your lead analyst or finance better than your CFO. You should defer to the experts rather than trying to tell them how to do their work.

Listen

It is not only important to let other’s talk at meetings, it is more important to listen to them. Nobody is going to be motivated to talk if you are not listening. People can tell if you are asking them to talk just to check off a box or whether you and others are actually listening and digesting what they are saying. More importantly, you are not generating any additional value by having people propose ideas or raise concerns and then not addressing them.

Don’t ignore

The above point leads to a critical element of why you want to be the dumbest in the room, you want to leverage the suggestions and ideas everyone has. This is not an exercise in getting buy-in from everyone by pretending to listen to their concerns or advise and then going with your initial idea. The goal is to get the best comments from everybody, have the team work together to synthesize the suggestions into an idea superior to anything anyone (yourself included) initially had. Come out with a better idea, not a perceived feel good exercise that really puts you in the same position.

Measure on results, not sound bites

The measure of success of a meeting, or a working group, or an email thread is not how smart it made you look but that it generated the best possible results. These results are what will also drive your long-term success, not how much you impressed the others at the meeting or on the email (last thought, you didn’t impress them anyway but made them think you were pompous).

Key takeaways

  • Rather than trying to sound the smartest at a meeting, you should aim to be the dumbest.
  • It is more important to surround yourself with great people who will bring performance to a level higher than any individual can achieve.
  • You not only need to get input from everyone but actually use the input to come up with better solutions than you are initially proposing.

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on May 25, 2016May 1, 2016Categories General Social Games Business, General Tech BusinessTags collaboration, Meetings, teams2 Comments on Try to be the dumbest person in the room

Bringing out the best in your team

I have written multiple times about collaboration and how valuable it is, and a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review – “Bringing out the best in your team” by Brian Bonner and Alexander Bolinger – reminded me of one critical ingredient. As all of us have experienced repeatedly, from case studies in business school to conference calls to team meetings, usually a small subset of the group drives the call or meeting. This phenomenon leads to two problems:

  1. The people dominating the meeting are not necessarily the ones with the most relevant knowledge.
  2. Everyone at the meeting should have something valuable to add, otherwise they should not be at the meeting, so letting a few monopolize restricts the knowledge shared.

Effectively, outgoing people get the most air time and visibility even if they are not the most expert on the topic or problem. Continue reading “Bringing out the best in your team”

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on October 21, 2014November 4, 2014Categories General Social Games Business, General Tech BusinessTags collaboration, Meetings, teamsLeave a comment on Bringing out the best in your team

The Soft Edge for building a great business

Over the summer, I read Forbes Editor Rich Karlgaard’s The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success and it had some very interesting insights. I have written many blog posts on optimization, how to get the most out of your customers, etc., but Karlgaard points out that all good companies are optimizing. To be great, you have to find transformative gains.

The Soft Edge

As Karlgaard points out, the “innovation response” in companies is very much like a healthy immune response in living organisms. People who enjoy long-term health don’t have episodic bursts of health. They are healthy nearly all the time. In great companies, innovation is a natural response to threats. According to Karlgaard, a healthy innovative response comes from a deeper place within your company, what he calls the “Soft edge.” Continue reading “The Soft Edge for building a great business”

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on September 16, 2014October 14, 2014Categories General Social Games BusinessTags cognitive diversity, Forbes, Rich Karlgaard, smarts, Soft Edge, story, taste, teams, trustLeave a comment on The Soft Edge for building a great business

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Lloyd Melnick

This is Lloyd Melnick’s personal blog.  All views and opinions expressed on this website are mine alone and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that I may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity.

I am a serial builder of businesses (senior leadership on three exits worth over $700 million), successful in big (Disney, Stars Group/PokerStars, Zynga) and small companies (Merscom, Spooky Cool Labs) with over 20 years experience in the gaming and casino space.  Currently, I am on the Board of Directors of Murka and GM of VGW’s Chumba Casino

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