In my experience, attempts to build these organizations are unsuccessful primarily because they fail to understand the functional role of the visionary leader and/or they select team members based on them being very smart with little thought toward how the selection will impact social dynamics.
A “visionary leader” is not a charismatic person executing someone else’s vision, but this is the model many organizations use. A visionary leader is always executing their own vision, the object is to find one with a vision that aligns with the organization and giving them a platform to execute their vision. It is difficult to navigate the intrinsic ambiguities of a vision effectively without it being your own. In the specific context of research organizations, leaders must be viewed as technical peers by the people they are leading or it will be difficult to build trust in the vision. An ideal leader is one that everyone suspects could do their job if required. You can’t fake that technical gravitas with seniority, pedigree, and credentialing but I’ve seen many organizations try. I would argue that finding a suitable leader is the biggest hurdle to building an effective disruptive research organization.
One under-rated aspect of building a top-tier team in my opinion is selecting each member for unique, critical expertise that does not overlap with any other person on the team. This simple practice mitigates many adverse social dynamics that destroy team productivity when two excellent people have non-distinct expertise. It creates natural ownership, encourages self-organization, and makes it obvious to everyone on the team the value every other member brings to their work. With this comes the obligation to educate and mentor the rest of the team on your area of expertise and to explain/defend decisions to anyone that asks. Pride in being the expert in their area and wanting to be recognized for that usually compels it. No one is excluded from this obligation, not even leaders. This sounds like a single point of failure but in practice it causes a lot of critical knowledge to be efficiently socialized by the members of the team that are expert in that knowledge.
> Psychological safety, i.e., the feeling that voicing controversial ideas or dissent will not cause abandonment or loss of status, seems to be an important factor for making interactions between researchers particularly fruitful. It’s not clear to me how exactly this can be achieved.
I know I've read various articles/blogs on this topic, including techniques to achieve it, but it seems I neglected to save any of them in my EverNote. Anyone happen to know of any good ones off the top of their head?
Here are a couple but just reading through them, I think they are lacking. I need to think more about why. I suspect it's about tactics vs. principles.
For example the one talks about pre and post mortems. I have seen those done badly first hand where they do NOT create psychological safety.
Anyways, check these out but do so with an inquisitive mind.
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Before Google came along with Project Aristotle there was W. Edwards Deming, who advocated "driving out fear" in reference to creating psychological safety.
Here's a blog post with some ideas from Deming's work. You'll see things at the tactics level but also much at the system level, like stack ranking is a bad idea for psychological safety.
Much of Deming's work had manufacturing as its context but an enterprising mind can see how it relates to knowledge work and other endeavors. Read Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull to see how he used ideas from Deming to build their systems and culture.
“...I picked based on my own non-systematic judgment...” is a pretty big caveat for deciding what makes something good. If his judgement is biased toward being impressed by quality X of a group, then sure enough the study will conclude that quality X is important.
However, any objective measure of research group effectiveness is probably worse. You sometimes see them ranked by number of papers published, or number of patents filed, which is definitely the wrong criterion. Whereas the author’s judgement is probably mostly aligned with what you or I might value.
It’s better to be subjectively right than objectively wrong.
The article talks about how the evidence seems to point to the opposite direction of constraints stimulating innovation, but I wonder if this finding is a side effect of the small sample size issues the author discussed at the beginning. The amount of innovation coming out of startups is high, and they certainly operate under enormous constraints. Furthermore, there is a difference between no inconveniences (no teaching obligation) and no constraints - technical constraints in particular (Wozniak dealing with significant constraints in designing computers etc.) could be powerful stimulants of creativity.
The author mentions they dont know how a culture if psychological safety is created, and then mentions the outsized importance of the leader. I would hypothesize that the leader's character is what helps create that safety. If you are allowed to disagree with the boss and have robust debates, then surely you can disagree with your colleagues and deal with colleagues disagreeing with you as well.
A “visionary leader” is not a charismatic person executing someone else’s vision, but this is the model many organizations use. A visionary leader is always executing their own vision, the object is to find one with a vision that aligns with the organization and giving them a platform to execute their vision. It is difficult to navigate the intrinsic ambiguities of a vision effectively without it being your own. In the specific context of research organizations, leaders must be viewed as technical peers by the people they are leading or it will be difficult to build trust in the vision. An ideal leader is one that everyone suspects could do their job if required. You can’t fake that technical gravitas with seniority, pedigree, and credentialing but I’ve seen many organizations try. I would argue that finding a suitable leader is the biggest hurdle to building an effective disruptive research organization.
One under-rated aspect of building a top-tier team in my opinion is selecting each member for unique, critical expertise that does not overlap with any other person on the team. This simple practice mitigates many adverse social dynamics that destroy team productivity when two excellent people have non-distinct expertise. It creates natural ownership, encourages self-organization, and makes it obvious to everyone on the team the value every other member brings to their work. With this comes the obligation to educate and mentor the rest of the team on your area of expertise and to explain/defend decisions to anyone that asks. Pride in being the expert in their area and wanting to be recognized for that usually compels it. No one is excluded from this obligation, not even leaders. This sounds like a single point of failure but in practice it causes a lot of critical knowledge to be efficiently socialized by the members of the team that are expert in that knowledge.