[Off Topic] Dunbar and Cross Functional Teams

If you don’t read Wired yet, you should. I read it on and off, but good pieces always turn up. Last month’s issue runs a series on failure and why it matters for success. In one of them (the full piece is here), Jonah Lehrer tells the story of one of Kevin Dunbar’s experiments.

Kevin Dunbar is a cognitive scientist who decided to study how scientists actually work (!). And a heads-up: he’s not the Robin Dunbar of the famous Dunbar’s number. Two different researchers, and the one that matters here is Kevin.

So what does this have to do with Emergence, Cross Functional Teams, and the other concepts we keep discussing in Agile? Halfway through the article, this passage caught my eye:

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit — researchers solve problems by themselves — Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

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 it impossible to analyze the data. “One of the labs was full of people from different backgrounds,” Dunbar says. “They had biochemists and molecular biologists and geneticists and students in medical school.” The other lab, in contrast, was made up of E. coli experts. “They knew more about E. coli than anyone else, but that was what they knew,” he says. Dunbar watched how each of these labs dealt with their protein problem. The E. coli group took a brute-force approach, spending several weeks methodically testing various fixes. “It was extremely inefficient,” Dunbar says. “They eventually solved it, but they wasted a lot of valuable time.”

The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first, the conversation seemed rather useless. But then, as the chemists traded ideas with the biologists and the biologists bounced ideas off the med students, potential answers began to emerge. “After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved,” Dunbar says. “They made it look easy.”

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

Sound familiar? Cross-Functional Teams? Feature Teams? Emergence? I’d say those “lab meetings” work like Daily Scrums or Sprint Reviews. And, as we always repeat, a team should be multidisciplinary precisely so that what Dunbar calls “looking outside the box” can happen, the outsider’s role. Only from the margin can you see from another angle, instead of looking exactly the way everyone else already looks and smothering new ideas.

One thing I try to do all the time is keep myself consciously at the margin, in the outcast role. It’s the best way to push myself toward finding outlets other people usually aren’t forced to look for.

This Dunbar story is a small sample of what leaving the comfort zone means, and of the non-linear effects of complex adaptive systems. One team spent weeks, the other spent minutes. We’re not talking about linear results here.

Read the whole article. Thinking outside the box doesn’t come naturally, and Dunbar explains how our brain automatically leads us to ignore whatever we judge to be “wrong,” which cuts us off from new discoveries. It’s an edge-of-chaos mechanism: we can’t evaluate every micro-variation that shows up, but we can’t ignore everything either, so we keep going back and forth (and that’s a long way from “balance”). Discussions in multidisciplinary groups are clearly facilitators of this mechanism.