Post and comments seem useful for students and teachers, but I was hoping for hints or links for teams of motivated adults. The teams I’ve been on mostly produce scientific publications (original research or reviews). Some observations:
1) work doesn’t need to be divided equally, so long as each team member makes an essential contribution, but major contributors need to get more credit;
2) “you do most of the work and we share credit” can work if the one doing most of the work is essentially an apprentice (e.g., a grad student or postdoc) -- it’s understood what the roles were—but maybe not for two people with similar status;
3) two (or maybe three) people can brainstorm effectively without needing much structure;
4) big teams are tricky; if one or two people do most of the work with small contributions from many others (each getting a little credit), that seems to work OK. But I would have no idea how to organize a project that took major effort from more than 3-4 people;
5) email works OK, especially with collabators many time zones away; I always wonder about shared-screen-plus-audio tools, though.
I was hoping for hints or links for teams of motivated adults.
These days, I only work for small companies, not huge corporate behemoths.
The majority of why this is so is because IME, huge corporate behemoths have a much higher proportion of unmotivated people working in what they consider “cushy jobs” (ie they’re “wally” from Dilbert—trying to get out of doing any actual work), as well as far more political bullshit.
Small companies don’t have so much time or money to waste on that. I won’t say that they’re entirely without their own problems… but the ratio is likely to be better. After all—it’s harder to hide lack of motivation in a small team. and a small company simply can’t afford to keep on somebody that won’t pull their own weight.
So—if you want a heuristic for finding teams of adults that work well together—look at smaller, rather than larger companies.
My second heuristic is to find companies that are actually on the cutting edge of technology. Note: not people that say they’re on the cutting edge… high levels of corporate BS bespeak of teams that are likely to be more busy politically wrangling than actually Getting Stuff Done. To find companies that are actually on the cutting edge… you need to know what it actually looks like when you see it—which means you need to learn an industry at least well enough to be able to spot the difference between people actually doing interesting stuff, from people just saying they are.
IME, people that are working on something really cool—and actually getting stuff done… are far more likely to be a motivated, interesting team to work with.
So: small companies, not large companies, companies that are Getting Stuff Done, rather than talking about it...
That’s where you’ll find interesting teams of motivated adults to work with.
I’d rather have a motivated group that’s poorly organized than a well-organized bunch of goof-offs. Given motivation, though, I wonder whether some forms of organization (especially voluntary organization) work better than others.
I’m particularly interested in situations where there’s a significant opportunity cost to collaboration, that is, where any time participants spend on collaborative project X comes at the expense of time they would otherwise spend on worthwhile project Y. How can we get things done together while wasting as little of each others’ time as possible?
Yes—definitely agree that there are better and worse forms of organisation for well-motivated teams. I think the exact details probably differ depending on the personalities of the team (and the nature of the project) - but I’m sure there are generalisable skills too.
As to opportunity costs, I’m not sure about collaboration in general, but too many meetings wastes everybody’s time. Time that could be spent Getting Stuff Done.
There’s also the principle found in the Mythical Man Month about team-size… after a certain team-size—if you keep building the team (and increasing collaboration) eventually a larger and larger percentage of the time is spent on just keeping up the intra-group communication (ie the activities of collaboration themselves). The opportunity cost there is that you could split into two teams, working on separate things and get a higher throughput.
I also recall reading something (probably by Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky) about the opportunity costs involved in joining a team of people that aren’t as motivated or skilled as yourself… the conclusion of the article was that there’s an opportunity cost because you’re averaging your skill together and coming out with a lower number—and you could be working with people better and thus raising the average (and therefore the payoff from working together).
But I would have no idea how to organize a project that took major effort from more than 3-4 people
You can do this by breaking the main problem into smaller chunks—and assigning them to smaller teams within the structure. If the chunks are still too big—you just break them down further and so on.
This is how really big software projects work (eg Microsoft Windows) where you have hundreds of programmers.
Post and comments seem useful for students and teachers, but I was hoping for hints or links for teams of motivated adults. The teams I’ve been on mostly produce scientific publications (original research or reviews). Some observations: 1) work doesn’t need to be divided equally, so long as each team member makes an essential contribution, but major contributors need to get more credit; 2) “you do most of the work and we share credit” can work if the one doing most of the work is essentially an apprentice (e.g., a grad student or postdoc) -- it’s understood what the roles were—but maybe not for two people with similar status; 3) two (or maybe three) people can brainstorm effectively without needing much structure; 4) big teams are tricky; if one or two people do most of the work with small contributions from many others (each getting a little credit), that seems to work OK. But I would have no idea how to organize a project that took major effort from more than 3-4 people; 5) email works OK, especially with collabators many time zones away; I always wonder about shared-screen-plus-audio tools, though.
These days, I only work for small companies, not huge corporate behemoths.
The majority of why this is so is because IME, huge corporate behemoths have a much higher proportion of unmotivated people working in what they consider “cushy jobs” (ie they’re “wally” from Dilbert—trying to get out of doing any actual work), as well as far more political bullshit.
Small companies don’t have so much time or money to waste on that. I won’t say that they’re entirely without their own problems… but the ratio is likely to be better. After all—it’s harder to hide lack of motivation in a small team. and a small company simply can’t afford to keep on somebody that won’t pull their own weight.
So—if you want a heuristic for finding teams of adults that work well together—look at smaller, rather than larger companies.
My second heuristic is to find companies that are actually on the cutting edge of technology. Note: not people that say they’re on the cutting edge… high levels of corporate BS bespeak of teams that are likely to be more busy politically wrangling than actually Getting Stuff Done. To find companies that are actually on the cutting edge… you need to know what it actually looks like when you see it—which means you need to learn an industry at least well enough to be able to spot the difference between people actually doing interesting stuff, from people just saying they are.
IME, people that are working on something really cool—and actually getting stuff done… are far more likely to be a motivated, interesting team to work with.
So: small companies, not large companies, companies that are Getting Stuff Done, rather than talking about it...
That’s where you’ll find interesting teams of motivated adults to work with.
I’d rather have a motivated group that’s poorly organized than a well-organized bunch of goof-offs. Given motivation, though, I wonder whether some forms of organization (especially voluntary organization) work better than others.
I’m particularly interested in situations where there’s a significant opportunity cost to collaboration, that is, where any time participants spend on collaborative project X comes at the expense of time they would otherwise spend on worthwhile project Y. How can we get things done together while wasting as little of each others’ time as possible?
Yes—definitely agree that there are better and worse forms of organisation for well-motivated teams. I think the exact details probably differ depending on the personalities of the team (and the nature of the project) - but I’m sure there are generalisable skills too.
As to opportunity costs, I’m not sure about collaboration in general, but too many meetings wastes everybody’s time. Time that could be spent Getting Stuff Done.
There’s also the principle found in the Mythical Man Month about team-size… after a certain team-size—if you keep building the team (and increasing collaboration) eventually a larger and larger percentage of the time is spent on just keeping up the intra-group communication (ie the activities of collaboration themselves). The opportunity cost there is that you could split into two teams, working on separate things and get a higher throughput.
I also recall reading something (probably by Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky) about the opportunity costs involved in joining a team of people that aren’t as motivated or skilled as yourself… the conclusion of the article was that there’s an opportunity cost because you’re averaging your skill together and coming out with a lower number—and you could be working with people better and thus raising the average (and therefore the payoff from working together).
To address a previous point you made:
You can do this by breaking the main problem into smaller chunks—and assigning them to smaller teams within the structure. If the chunks are still too big—you just break them down further and so on.
This is how really big software projects work (eg Microsoft Windows) where you have hundreds of programmers.