What are the types of things which are better built with others? Why?
Unless there is an audience of one (which is so very rarely the case unless you’re making something solely for yourself), every single type of thing that is created by people could benefit from having more than one person involved. I used to be part of a book writing class that specifically was built because there’s a myth that creative work happens when people toil alone. It is always a collaborative effort. Having multiple perspectives brings a diversity of thought, preventing blind spots, enables more to be done, expands the potential impact and sustains the project when energy, resources or effort wanes from an individual. While there is a definite benefit to having more than one person involved in whatever endeavor, be it merely for feedback or for collaborative effort, there is a maximum number of people to be effective in a group setting. IBM (or Intel? I don’t know, I’m on a plane and can’t look this up) conducted a study on the effectiveness of teams and determined a mathematical principle that the amount of communication increases by x^n + 1 for each new member added to the team. At a certain point the amount of communication time exceeds the amount of work time necessary for a project to be sustained. This means there is an optimal number of people for the minimum amount of communication while maintaining the effectiveness of the team’s work. The number is <=7 people, otherwise known as the pizza party principle. You want to work in a team of this size or smaller as communication is effective and direct, while the productivity of the team is maximized. I think the other key word in this question is “better” — this hints at the question of what team forms the best possible environment for creation.
A big factor at play is human specialization. While there may be certain bits of knowledge on the team, I believe in the era of the internet and with intelligent effective people who have learned how to learn, there are better categorizations of work functions outside of basic knowledge. Certain people seem to be better inclined to some of these than others depending on desire, personality type, time of day, etc. They are as follows:
1. Identify + enable. This is grossly lumped into a category known as marketing. And marketing as a category of work is an absolute travesty. The current paradigm is that we spend oodles of money to get the attention of people to “build an audience” in which we slice and dice categorizations to make hypotheses about human behavior. There is a better way. The best community builders implicitly understand that to form a new community, one has to combine an overlap of two or more existing communities. You convince active members in different communities that they may get some benefit from interacting with each other in a third space and set up a context in which it is easy to interact in that place. That third space is the environment where you’re building something. This skillset is best measured by the number of active people in the overlap of communities and how that number changes over time through enabling activities.
2. Search + select. This is a sales or research function. The people who are best at this are ones who easily create lists of options, then narrow down the scope of that list to find a desired result. Salespeople do this by going from a large number of prospects down to a select few. The most important skill here is listening. These people are measured in the first order by activity, the second order by the rate, and the third order by their discernment in listening which leads to results.
3. Prototype + test. These type of folks feel wrong if they haven’t made something by the end of the day. They’re constantly creating something new and putting it out into the world. It could be writing or designs or physical prototypes, the only thing they’re measured on is how often and how much.
4. Measure + optimize. This is the anthropologist, the editor, the keeper of the time, the operational guru who tracks everything, makes sure everything has a proper place and constitently takes the pulse of the team to identify places where there could be improvement. This sometimes takes the form of documentarian, problem identification and sets the right metrics to measure. They keep incrementally improving on the task in front of them.
5. Organize + teach. The coach, the manager, the champion. This person picks the right people then is in charge of ensuring the team stays on task and is focused on the right things. They help unblock problems and find ways to improve the communication, coordination or composition of the team. They can add or remove team members, mediate conflict and delve into strategies to improve the meta process of the thing being built.
For my methods of making I like getting feedback 1–1, working in teams of 3 on one of the specialties to break disagreements, and organizing in groups of ~10 (with the understanding that at least ~50% tend to not show up) to make sure there’s at least the basic specialties covered for bigger long-term projects. The people matter so much + part of why I was a participant in the analog astronaut community was to investigate how we might construct high-performing teams in stressful environments. Picking the right people has been mattering more and more to me over time.
