Evolutional Team Building
Nature is the treasure box of knowledge. I recently get interested in reading a books in Ecology or Evolution. There are many application of those theories. Ecology theories are applied to business competition strategy. Evolutionary psychology find out unconscious tendencies of people. They provide us insight in many different way.
I recently realize that Evolution provides us a lot of clue how we can build better team.
Why We Care Diversity?
Everybody care diversity these days. But why?
Diversity provides the team many different point of view to tackle issues. Chad Sparber found that even a little increase of racial diversity result in the 25% better productivity comparing to the others.
Joseph Schumpeter argued innovation as a connection of different knowledges. As more different angle of knowledge comes in, we can make much more combination of knowledges.
Many business now try to build the team with diversity because of these reasons. It’s not matter of just ethics or politics. We want diversity because it’s quite important to make successful team.
It’s interesting that human being cannot produce offspring with brothers or sisters. It does not work because genes are too similar. We have a blueprint to look for somebody different. Diversity is built into our body by nature in some level.
Why We Psychological Safety?
Word of Psychological Safety become popular after Google publishes the idea.
Species need errors to evolute themselves. Genes get copied from parents to offspring. Sometimes, some copy error happens which result in mutation. Some species adopt to new environment with the mutation. This mades species went on lands, or even fly high into the sky. We have many different species on our mother land because of this.
The great innovation sometimes comes from error. Leo Esaki, who is the winner of novel prize, found Quantum Tunnelling while he is analyzing defective transistor. Just like somebody said, error is father of innovation.
We need to design “error” built in the team because of this. Psychological safety encourage people to put some moon shot, and try it. We will most likely fail to achieve the original goal but that is not the matter. Thought this challenge, we make much more error which have the potential to innovate things.
Can Our Team Evolved?
It’s quite insightful for us to look into evaluations. We should keep asking ourselves “can our team evolved?”. By embracing more diverged talents and allow people to make mistake, our team can be evolved. This is such an important to such a volatile, rapidly changing the world.
