Ideas are worthless, teams are priceless

Often people talk about million-dollar ideas. Few get to see any millions from them. In his book “Where good ideas come from”, Steven Johnson says that “good ideas do not –for the most part– come from inside someone's head. Instead, they come from outside –specifically from social interaction.”

Johnson goes on: “We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus.”

A lot is going on in these paragraphs.

First, a sobering view of breakthroughs and innovation. Second, a shift in focus from a deeply individualistic narrative of a single event to a refreshing view of creativity and discovery as a social and interactive process that evolves over time.

Let’s dive into it.

Ideas are worthless

This is a controversial notion, yes. But let’s keep in mind that, although the current cosmovision puts ideas at the center of our daily lives, this is a function of the individualistic sense of how the world works that permeates our culture.

As living beings, we are wired to protect our existence. This is true for every living thing on the planet, but it gets a bit more complicated when we factor in human psychology: as our species became self-aware, that preservation mechanism began to include our ego. Thus, we can say that we believe we are what we think.

On top of that, we seem to extend our ego to our belief system, so our new formula would look like this: I am what I believe. 

Therefore, a perceived attack on one of our beliefs is perceived as an attack on our self, which we respond to with all of our evolutionary self-preservation arsenal.

Things get even more interesting when we understand that ideas for products or services are based on a belief system: [our product] is needed because people behave in such and such ways, and the world works like this and that, and everybody will be happier if they use [our product].

Yet another ingredient to throw in the mix is that we assign value to our ideas because we perceive them as part our self. I know, this sounds like quite a stretch, but stay with me.

But that is exactly why ideas are worthless: they are based on an extremely narrow, biased, subjective, single point of view. That creates inevitable friction in the process of building ideas with others, since it means we'll be confronting belief systems and having to work through the pain of feeling our egos attacked.

A first instinct is to find ways to avoid this altogether. 

This is the absolute worst we can do. It's only through that "bumping" with others that those ideas confront more perspectives and address a still-fractional but more encompassing part of reality. Conflict creates an ideal environment for ideas to evolve and adapt to a much richer environment than your single mind: that of a collective of minds with different contexts, mindsets, and perspectives. If the idea can adapt, it’ll thrive. 

This leads us to an interesting point: it becomes clearer that teams are necessary, not merely to share the workload that goes into making ideas real, but more importantly, because they are the perfect environment for ideas to evolve into a better version of themselves.

Lifecycle of an idea

Numerous studies have shown, time and time again, that isolated eureka moments are rare. Most transformational ideas that reshaped the world as we know it have emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work.

Related to this notion, in his book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb challenges Karl Popper’s idea of evolutionary epistemology: “My take is that this evolution is not a competition between ideas but between humans and systems based on such ideas. An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the [person] team who holds it has survived!”

So, we’ve gathered a few interesting propositions thus far:

1. Ideas are not one-time-events that arise in the minds of an individual, but rather the product of a process of social interaction
2. We are emotionally attached to our ideas because our brains are wired to see them as constitutive parts of who we are
3. While it can be painful to have our ideas challenged, it seems to be the only way in which we can make sure our ideas adapt to a richer and more realistic view of the world. 

All of these precepts point towards the need for teams.

Teams are priceless

Here we can invoke Charlie Songhurst, who approaches this issue from a very interesting angle: “[...] One of the things I think that sort of is perhaps underestimated is if you want to live forever, maybe don't start thinking about studying centenarians, instead, work out how to not die of a DUI or drunk driving or anybody else smoking 20 cigarettes a day.”

This idea is closely related to what Fred Kofman says about incentives. Kofman explains that, if an organization creates incentives for team performance, some will eventually realize they can work a bit less and still get rewarded, However, if the organization wants to avoid freeloaders by creating incentives for individual performance, sooner or later those incentives will collide with each other, as you get players who would rather lose a match 3-2 than win 1-0 because they get paid for every goal they score, while goalkeepers would rather lose a match 1-0 than win it 3-2.

What sounds like an unsolvable paradox, Kofman says it’s true for every organization out there. This means you don’t have to solve it, you only need to manage it slightly better than the competition. This applies to every other polar tension: most organizational problems are paradoxical, thus impossible to solve: trying to solve them leads nowhere, but getting better at dealing with a problem everyone else is dealing with is all you need to excel.

This takes us right back to the capital importance of teams in the incubation process for ideas. Individual contributions can sometimes go a long way, yes, but very few times that has been the case: most times, a single person will either be blocked by their own biases, reach a point where they can’t figure out the solution to a specific part of the problem, and lose motivation or simply lose interest.

One of the main causes of this stagnation in innovation projects has to do with tension. Like a string on a guitar, if we lose tension, we lose properties. Teams create tension around ideas in different ways.

On one hand, each member of the team has their own mental framework to make sense of the world and, of course, of the ideas the team is working on. This tension between perspectives and points of view is what Steve Jobs talks about when referring to conflict within a team: “A group of [...] talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together [...] polish each other and polish the ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones.”

For many, this sounds some alarms and raises a few red flags. It’s understandable. Jobs isn’t regarded as the most empathetic leader, and much has been said and written about it. That being said, the problem isn’t so much in the fighting (which is, to some degree, necessary) but

1. in the ways people approach, process, and engage while fighting, discussing, and arguing
2. the little amount of effort spent in repairing after

About that first point, Dan Hill, author of "Dark Matter and Trojan Horses. A strategic design vocabulary", stresses that “When the conversation is abstract, as it often is in strategic work or the realm of ‘good ideas’, it is difficult to resolve. By building something we pull conversation towards consensus. We have to agree in order to build; the physical reality of something pulls discourse into a more meaningful, more tangible territory.”

This is another dramatic difference between the concept of an individual genius working alone on their magical, transformational ideas, and a team of specialists gathering to build something that none of them could build alone: conversations strive away from the land of opinions and into the far more productive realm of objectively measurable evidence.

Pricing

Arriving at this point, we may conclude that the title of this article is a bit harsh. Perhaps we could say that ideas are usually overpriced, while teams are usually undervalued. That sounds more accurate but, on the one hand, it’s less catchy. And on the other hand, and far more importantly, it would be false.

In truth, ideas are worthless. At least for the most part. No one flies on an idea, communicates over hundreds or thousands of miles over an idea, cooks their meals or commutes to work on an idea. What’s more: plenty of brilliantly productive ideas create zero value for our everyday lives, solely because they haven’t been executed on.

What changes the course of History are teams of talented people who decide to bet on an idea, adopt it as part of the belief system that makes up their identity, and commit to building a tangible product or service that gives said idea a vehicle to interact with the world.

This article was co-written in collaboration with  Martin Pettinati , with super valuable input by Martin Verzilli, and the idea behind it came up in the endless conversation threads that take place at Manas.Tech.