[Off Topic] Dunbar and Cross Functional Teams

If you don’t read Wired yet, you should. I read it sporadically but very good articles always show up. Last month’s brings a series on failure and its importance for success. In one of the articles (read the full piece here), it talks about one of Dunbar’s experiments (who’s never heard of Dunbar’s number?).

Now, what does Dunbar have to do with concepts like Emergence, Cross Functional Teams, and others we commonly discuss in Agile? He decided to study how scientists work (!) Halfway through the article I saw this passage that caught my attention:

Although the scientific process typically appears to be a solitary pursuit — researchers solve problems alone — Dunbar discovered that most new scientific ideas emerge from lab meetings, those weekly sessions where people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the meetings isn’t the presentation — it’s the debate that follows. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently trigger major discoveries, since the scientists are forced to reconsider data they previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation; a single question was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, capable of looking at their own work in a different way.

But not every lab meeting was equally effective. Dunbar tells the story of two labs that both ran into the same experimental problem: the proteins they were trying to measure were sticking to a filter, making the data impossible to analyze. “One of the labs was full of people with different backgrounds,” Dunbar said. “They had biochemists and molecular biologists and geneticists and medical students.” The other lab, in contrast, was all E. coli specialists. “They knew more about E. coli than anyone else, but that was all they knew,” he says. Dunbar watched how each of those labs handled their protein problem. The E. coli group used a brute-force approach, spending several weeks methodically testing various fixes. “It was extremely inefficient,” says Dunbar. “They eventually solved it, but they spent a lot of valuable time.”

The more diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem over in a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein specialists, so they started a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first glance, the conversations seemed pretty useless. But then, as the scientists exchanged ideas with the biologists and the biologists kicked ideas to the medical students, potential answers began to emerge. “After about 10 more minutes of conversation, the protein problem was solved,” says Dunbar. “They made it look easy.”

When Dunbar reviewed the meeting transcripts, he discovered that the intellectual mix generated a distinct kind of interaction where the scientists were forced to fall back on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab didn’t have a specialized language that everyone could understand.) Those abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, since they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone forced them to think, even for a moment, like an intellectual at the margins, full of self-skepticism.

Sound familiar? Cross-Functional Teams? Feature Teams? Emergence? I’d even say those “lab meetings” are like Daily Scrums or Sprint Reviews. And as we always say, a team should possibly be multidisciplinary precisely so that what Dunbar calls “looking outside the box” exists, being an “outsider.” Only by being marginalized is it possible to look from another angle instead of looking exactly like everyone else is already looking, which discourages new ideas.

One thing I personally try to do all the time is keep myself at the margin. Not just being “randomly rebellious,” but “consciously at the margin” — an outcast would be more accurate. It’s the best way to pressure yourself into finding outlets that other people normally aren’t forced to.

This Dunbar story is nothing more than a small sample of “out of the comfort zone,” and the non-linear effects of complex adaptive systems. Even so: one team spent weeks, the other team spent minutes. We’re definitely not talking about linear results here.

And read the whole article: it isn’t natural to think outside the box. Dunbar explains how our brain automatically leads us to ignore things we think are “wrong,” cutting us off from the possibility of making new discoveries. It’s an edge-of-chaos mechanism: we don’t have the capacity to consider and evaluate every micro-variation that appears, but on the other hand we can’t ignore everything, so we keep going back and forth (no, that’s not “balance” — far from it). Discussions in multidisciplinary groups are clearly facilitators of this mechanism.