Building Teams: We Got It All Wrong
summary
Claim: team performance tracks collective intelligence not the highest individual IQ; Woolley et al. find little or no correlation between individual intelligence and group problem‑solving and teams outperform their smartest member. Predictors: social perceptiveness / empathy, evenness of communication, and moderate cognitive‑style diversity. More women increases collective intelligence (but all‑female teams slightly underperform mixed ones). Team IQ gains flatten around ~11 people. Maccheroni’s analysis of ~40,000 agile teams shows per‑person productivity and quality don’t change between 5–9 and larger teams.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:34Lunar Logic
- 2:54What makes one a great candidate?
- 3:11Technical skills?
- 3:44Craftsmanship?
- 3:59Communication skills?
- 4:46Software developer superhero
- 5:441 : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations. reason; also the skilled use of reason (2): the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria as tests
- 6:18Experiment
- 9:52Intelligence versus Collective Intelligence
- 10:38How are individual and collective intelligence correlated?
- 12:25There's no connection between individual intelligence and collective intelligence
- 12:51Collective intelligence trumps individual intelligence
- 14:30Software development is not writing code
- 16:46Cognitive styles Object viualizers (visual arts) Spatial visualizers (engineering) Verbalizers (humanities)
- 18:18How would you feel about working with women in a team?
- 19:59The more women the better collective intelligence
- 21:40What team size makes it the most effective?
- 22:36Bigger teams have better collective intelligence
- 22:59There's no difference in productivity or quality between teams of 5-9 and 10-12 people
- 24:11is a team sport
- 24:44is about solving complex problems
- 25:18Social perceptiveness Evenness of communication Moderate diversity of cognitive styles
- 25:43TL;DR: More women!
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