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Comment by sslayer | Hacker News Reader

Teams, seriously ingenious teams.

Ideas never come from teams but from individuals. Teams implement, help to refine, other team members improve upon the idea with their own ideas. But the act of creation, is something done by an individual. Teams are not good at innovation, design by committee can only give us mediocrity

I think this is a bit reductive.

I’ve definitely been a part of teams where we came up with ideas as a team. Individuals contributed, but the actual innovation came from the collective bouncing back-and-forth of ideas.

We could get pedantic and say “it was still individuals coming up with the ideas” but that’s needlessly splitting hairs and in my experience it’s the team environment/cohesion that facilitates people coming up with said ideas.

I work in nuclear physics and no one of our experiments could be designed by a single person. They’re far too large and complicated, and even relatively simple sub-parts are multi-year, multi-million dollar undertakings.

Furthermore, even the ideas of “let’s use X to measure Y” are VERY rarely completely new and unheard of ideas from a single individual. Far more common that those ideas come from long term collaboration/discussions between multiple field experts.

When people call teamwork "design by committee", it's time to move on - you know you've accumulated a prima donna or three when that happens.

Ideas on large projects are almost always collaborative. There's never just one spark of insight - you've talked about the problem for a long time, and the whole team slowly chipped away at "but we can't do that because X, Y, Z".

The idea of a single genius motivating it belies pretty much every large project in existence. (Based on personal experience, the threshold where it's not just a single person having the crucial breakthroughs seems to be at projects requiring teams of ~20+ persons)

You solve problems via "Yes, and", not via "behold the genius".

It's not about prima donnas, it's a political ideology. A close-minded ideology about the heroicness of individuals and the degeneracy of any collective.

An idea by itself is generally worth jack shit in most lines of business. People have actually game-changing ideas all the time that go nowhere because a team wasn't/couldn't be allocated to develop that idea to the point where it matters. I've seen plenty of very promising electrical and mechanical designs that might have seriously affected their market segment go to the graveyard because of lack of resources to develop that design. Somebody writing software might have a decent chance of single-handedly creating something that makes some noise in the field, but most people in science and technology couldn't come close even if they dedicated their life to it.

You might be right in the strictest sense that an idea comes from one person, but it's a largely worthless observation, because the idea gets you absolutely nothing without the work.

> I've seen plenty of very promising electrical and mechanical designs that might have seriously affected their market segment

Like what?

They were mostly related to fuel storage and delivery for a certain segment of vehicles. I'll save the specifics because my employer would be pretty easily identifiable. Ultimately, it's not really relevant; this is common, even in software, where one person stands a chance of single-handedly carrying a product. Maybe there's not be enough engineering time available outright. Maybe the group can't take a risk on allocating resources on a promising idea that might not pan out. Maybe other non-engineering resources in the company are tied up with other projects and can't bring it to market, even if you did pursue it. I'm sure if you think hard enough you can think of multiple products that were genuinely good and had a future, but ultimately died because of a lack of a team that would follow through on developing it.

I would disagree. Often leaps occur when two or three people with their heads in a problem just loosely bounce ideas around.

I’ve seen both. I’ve seen individuals pull magic out of their ass. I’ve also seen teams innovate. The latter though really happens when there’s a shared vision and domain experts from different parts are tackling disparate parts of the problem. That usually looks like “we’ll if I had X, y could be really easy” “oh I solved most of X a while ago but I’m stuck on this little part” etc. I don’t think I’ve observed team innovation directly but I’m sure it’s possible or I didn’t look correctly.

However. The most important part of innovation on a large project. Getting the team motivated by the vision and having each individual feel free to try to innovate. Otherwise individual problems being solved mean jack all and no single individual is going to build a very complicated project. There are some people who try but they are quickly outrun by dedicated teams. At a minimum it’s to have team members help you stay focused and motivated when you have moments of disbelief.

An implementation takes a thousand ideas refined and fitted together to solve a hundred problems.

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