I was watching TEDx Warsaw today and the main topic of the event is 2+2>4. Meaning that if we stick together we might achieve a lot. But is it really true?
There’s no I in team. Or is there?
One of the speakers – Sandra Bichl mentioned an interesting point. There are three types of people who enjoy working in teams. One is the people who found a group that they can really well work with (which is very rare). The second one is people who cope nicely with not meating deadlines and team tensions. And the third one is the ones who are just lazy and they want others to do their work for them. But how often does team work actually influence a positive change? I can honestly say that based on my experience it’s about 25% of good team work that will eventually wear out in time anyway, and 75% of good work done in one person “teams”.
2+2 = however the dice will roll
So it’s random (well not completely random since there are only a couple of possible outcomes) but still is it really a good idea to have a down-to-earth approach to communication within a team. Which in fact leads us to another speaker – Noah – who said that being selfish can also work as a positive reinforcement to people working together towards some higher goal. Sure he was speaking about helping people, but can we translate that point to any kind of project ? I think we can. I think that if we make the team feel and/or know they’re not only doing the project “for someone” but also that it’s important for their future, career, skills that might help to have the team working. But if we assemble teams out of necessity from people who are frustrated (even slightly) the team will fail miserably, even if in the end it produces the project.
Creation Machine is also a team and it seems that it actually might work in time. But we’ll have to see how the dice will roll.