Teamwork versus problem solving? Now that’s an interesting phrase to start with. Don’t you mean teamwork and problem solving? No, actually I don’t. This is a rather interesting hypothesis to have here, so I will detail my observations behind this.
Suppose you have a math problem you need to solve. It’s not a hard problem, it just involves some general purpose logical reasoning and basic high school algebra knowledge. In other words, problem solving knowledge legally mandated, by law, in most jurisdictions, by virtue of the fact that this is an education requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Surprisingly, though this sounds like a “tongue-in-cheek” metaphorical joke statement to say, it’s not. So, me thinking this is an easy problem that anyone should be able to solve, I consider the idea of asking friends and family to simply review my workflow to solving the problem. But… I think this through, and given how little motivation they have toward mathematical engagement, I decicde it wouldn’t be a good idea. Nope, I have to look around elsewhere to find people who are truly motivated.
Now, you can see the problem emerging. I can’t simply just be led to believe that if I build a team, they will be able to solve problems. That simply just isn’t the case. I am, in effect, a member of these teams, but these teams only have an interest in very specialized areas. Any time there is a prompt for them to operate as a team outside of their specialized area, there will, in essence, be a “panic.” But, to put this another way, for the actual teams I have in mind, their response will be more to try to justify why they are right not to have to solve the problem, give up, forget about it, and find more entertaining things to do instead.
So, we have a problem. The problem is that most teams are ill-equipped to being able to solve problems in general. Usually, the problem with teams, especially those built around friends and family, is that they are united by some sort of activity that does not entail problem solving, whether it be recreation, recreational cooking, entertainment, religious worship, or similar. And often times, when it comes to workplaces, these are precisely the activities that are looked to for the sake of “team building.” The point in hand is that it is generally understood that teams have an additional expense line to be accounted for, and that is the cost of building the team itself.
But, as my discussion was alluding to, the definition and limits of a team goes further than that. The idea, the underlying premise, behind most team building activities is that the primary impediment to the functioning of a good team is simply lack of effective communication due to lack of trust among team members. So, if you simply get folks to go through the motions in a low-stress test environment like that of games and the like, and they come out just fine, then you know they will be ready to tackle real problems. But, the real problem is that even with good communications within a team, most teams themselves are still ill-equipped to being able to tackle tough problems.
So, if you’ve got a tough problem that needs to be solved, how do you build a team that can tackle that problem? The primary thing that you have to understand is that humans don’t naturally operate in teams, especially teams that have the capacity to solve very challenging problems. Humans primarily operate naturally in groups. That is, collections of individuals who don’t have a shared stake in a collective outcome, but rather each individual has their own individual stakes in their own outcomes. What unites them is the similarity of their stakes, not the collective unification into one stake. So yes… what it comes down to first is to recognize this is the primary building block of most human interactions, in fact of all human life itself. That people will look to others first and foremost to see how what other people know can improve their outcome in their own stake.
So, look to yourself. Are you willing yourself to take on solving very tough problems? Then look around to see if you’ve found a group of such others who have met together. Online communities organized as forums are a really great place to start for this. The primary element of a team willing to solve very tough problems is that the individual members are willing to solve very tough problems. Why is this? The problem with challenging problems is that success does not rely on communication alone. Solving a complex problem does not primarily hinge on trust in another person. When an individual person comes down to approaching a complex problem, the problem speaks for itself, and it is ruthless in what it says.
It doesn’t care about your emotional insecurities and anxieties, but if you do have any when prompted with the challenge, it will promptly twist your arm and turn those against you. The complex problem will provoke your emotions, and then your emotions will be turned into clubs and battalions that beat you down. If you think you can turn around and try to prove a point that you are right and it is wrong, it will rebutt you by showing you the evidence that no, you really were wrong. And if you, yourself, cannot admit that and turn around and continue to work on the problem… If you think you need external emotional support from another person, you are asking for too much. Why? They’ll simply never be able to provide what you feel you need when you are prompted with a complex problem to solve.
So, that’s about all I can say on the subject, but incidentally just about all that can be said. If you think you’ve found a complex problem to solve, you’re going to need to expect to spend a lot of time with the problem just between you and yourself, because it’s going to take a long while to find a suitable group if it comes down to needing to find a group to finish tackling the problem. By contrast, if you’ve think you’ve found an easy task to perform, then you will have absolutely no trouble bringing it to a group or team to perform. 100%, by all means, when it comes to groups and teams, you need to be obsessed with the answer to the question: what is the least you can ask of other people? Heck, that’s the oft-repeated adage in negotiation in general.
Oh, finally there’s one last note. Complex problems are not humans only arch-nemesis, but so is mundane and repetitive labor. Too difficult and pepople will give up, too easy and people will also give up. On the other hand, for the easy, mundane, and repetitive labor, we have found an obvious solution that has proven successful ever since ancient times: just throw more people ath the problem, and for those working at it, pay them enough that they’re not going to go elsewhere.
Or, consider this more modern approach, made possible only by the Internet: simply by dividing up any job into a billion components each so small it is novel rather than mundane to the human laborer, then scaling it across a billion volunteers are are willing to do the task for a short period of time before they get bored. The primary problem with most traditional physical labor is the time that is required for commuting to the job site results in diminishing returns for smaller tasks, and this is exacerbated when you multiply the number of job sites and completely disparate, unrelated labor to be done. The Internet totally eliminates commutes measured by the minute, so completing several disparate tasks that are only a few minutes in length becomes a reality. Alas, the other problem with this approach is that it divides the pay so small that transactional costs in traditional electronic payment systems easily exceed the value of the task performed. So, typically these tasks are structured around the assumption that they pay with an entertainment reward rather than a financial reward, since that is one of the most popular reasons that many people turn to the Internet, when they are not using it for communications with another person in particular.
In modern workforces, the successful application of these human factors upon laborers to result in a system where human laborers are actually getting useful work done, despite their internal characteristics that would lead one to believe they are not capable of otherwise doing so, has become such an applied science that it is often times very difficult for new businesses to start precisely because of these reasons. There’s just so much competition from the big, established businesses that can scale their workforce and proportionally scale their productive output to no end that it can become hard for new businesses to find employees willing to do new tasks, unless they intend to operate using one of the old and already proven business labor models.
Now, time for my personal reflection. This is the reason why most software is written in a rather repetitive manner. This is the reason why programers perfer simple concepts that are mundane and repetitive, extended out for a large number of repetitions. It is, indeed, just a extension of the reason why human laborers in general have this preference. I don’t like it, I know the result is a terrible bloated mess for the computer to have to wade through on the back-end, but given all the factors you have since described, I can see why modern software has overwhelmingly taken on this form. And, to make matters worse, why most people honestly don’t care that modern software is a mess.
You know what I think? Why’d you have to be right? It’s clearly not a good idea what we, as a human society, are working ourselves into, this kind of software structure is going to slow us down in the long run, and if it’s the only thing at our disposal, eventualy we are going to just see diminishing returns on what computers are capable of. And, well, yes, that’s just it: that’s exactly what we are seeing going on in the commercial computer world.
Why did this form of human labor ever work in the past of human history? The answer, is, well, of course, it didn’t. It was merely a compromise that was better than the alternatives. The primary problem that humans faced in ancient times that held them back was that of depreciation: the inability of humans to craft durable tools and information repositories was what held them back. The half-hearted approach was to throw more human labor at the problem, to rebuild what was constantly being lost, and obviously that didn’t solve the underlying problem, it merely mitigated secondary factors caused because of the underlying problem. Namely, the lack of tools and information being available at hand.
In modern times, we have not only found a solution to the problem of depreciation in information technology, software in particular, but it has become ubiquitous. In some sense this is rather phenomenal since throughout most of the early history of computers, computer platforms were constantly being created and destroyed, but now we have stabilized on a durable base of software technologies that isn’t going to become obsolete any time in the foreseeable future, though hardware technologies still remain constantly in flux. This is a tremendous gift that we have, the problem we face is not an external one, but rather an internal one: it is that we humans seemingly remain too foolish to be able to leverage the gift we have available. Most humans are in great need to reinvent their minds to understanding how to interact with a world where depreciation does not happen, and by far the biggest requirement is being able to have an excellent penchant for organizing complex environments.