The Apollo Syndrome
teamtechnology.co.uk
teamtechnology.co.uk
In the end, the overall output was lower because all the "alpha layers" spent more time fighting than laying.
As a software dev, I can't count the number of times HR/hiring managers go for the 10x people, exclusively, and end up with an org that just can't drive in any one direction.
Some controllers took their simulator failures as serious lessons and improved. Others didn't stomach the constant failures and dropped out of the programme. I don't know what proportion of alpha chicken they got, but from what I can tell, the flight controllers were really good at their jobs.
I've always wanted to explore adversarial simulation as a training and selection method but I have yet to find an occsassion that warrants it.
Instead he was able to stop and deliver an iconic line that is quoted ever since to make fun of him.
That's a novel interpretation of the gaffe. So you're saying he repaired the expression mid utterance because it was better to sound like a bumbler who couldn't remember a common expression than to utter "shame on me" and have people play it out of context. Maybe? If this were the only instance of him mangling an expression, or all the other instances could be interpreted as rescuing him from a sound bite, this might be more convincing. Try these:
> I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.
or
> Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
There are more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism
> "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking 'bout new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
> "It was not always a given that the United States and America would have a close relationship"
> "Who could have possibly considered an erection in Iraq at this point in history?"
> "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
I used to think George W. Bush was stupid, but after watching this I don't think he is. I think that he played stupid because it lulled people into allowing him to get away with those terrible things that he did.
You should see that too. It's important because otherwise you'll be tricked by somebody like him again.
He was however, surrounded by people who were manipulating his earnestness to the degree that it was only to in it for themselves and their cronies. Dick Cheney was by all accounts, one of the most powerful vice presidents of the modern age and pushed GWB along on many things and was a key player in convincing GWB (and alot of other people) about WMDs in Iraq, and Dick Cheney was allowed to get away with alot of abuse of power in the position of vice president.
I also agree he didn't have a timely re-assessment of the downsides of his actions.
I really don't understand how people fall for this 'I'm one of you guys' trick.
On the other hand, I might be biased, living in a democratic country.
Trying hard and fucking up sucks for everyone, but if I were to hire someone I'd rather have someone that can learn from their/our mistakes than someone who abandons ship once the grass is greener elsewhere.
One of the highest value devs I've worked with was nicknamed the "gold plated bulldozer." He's not a 10x dev. He's not a rockstar. But you know what he does do? He shows up every day and burns his way down the issue list. He doesn't complain. He doesn't try to only work on the exciting tickets. He doesn't cause drama arguing over this or that grand conceptual scheme or architecture. He just plugs away and gets things done. Sure, with a tough algorithmic or architectural problem he'd need to ask someone, but he'd just do that without any ego involved.
It didn't really click for me until I was looking at some long term stats for that team and realized in terms of pushing the ball forward, he was doing more than just about any of us.
I think it's disappointing people like that are not just overlooked, but almost held in contempt by the more startup end of the software industry.
I thought that’s what 10x’ers do. What else could anyone call them 10x for? Complaining all day and rewriting twice a month?
Developing truly innovative solutions to hard problems? Doing the hard stuff like documenting code and writing automated tests? Fixing bugs that no one else could? Proactively identifying and resolving software reliability and performance issues?
> Validated techniques to detect and weed out these poor performers could result in vast savings in time, effort, and cost.
https://www.construx.com/blog/the-origins-of-10x-how-valid-i...
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362851.362858
complaints and issue lists were not evaluated, but rewriting twice a month would have resulted in not completing the tasks they were being evaluated on
3x: I once knew a developer who could write code about as fast as they could type. It would generally work, be inefficient, and sometimes buggy, but it moved the ball forward relentlessly. If you had a basic task to get done, this person could do it and be done in 1/3rd, or even 1/5th, the time it might take someone else.
infiniteX: I also once knew a developer who could solve problems almost no one else could. If you needed something to scale perfectly to accomplish a large task in reasonable time, this person was the perfect candidate. They weren't fast, and spent a lot of time just thinking.
It sounds like the guy referenced above was the 3x type.
Without the likes of Makelele and Rodman teams like early to mid-2000s Real Madrid and the 1990s Chicago Bulls would have had way less trophies and wins (the Real Madrid of that era was even nicknamed galacticos/galactics because of the amount of soccer stars they had among their ranks) .
Well I was not expecting to read this sentence today
I’m currently working at a company with lots of smart people.
But everyone wants to work on the sexy stuff. The core parts of the business either don’t get done or they are half-assed. It’s like a dozen monkeys banging at a dozen typewriters. Lots of noise but little productive work.
As the saying goes “everyone wants to come to the party but no one wants to clean up”.
Quality employees know not everything is fun or exciting to work on. Hell, some of the most important stuff is viewed as “boring”.
But valuable employees recognize what’s important for the business not just their own careers or own interests.
That's valuable to the business. The problem is how to make it valuable to the employee.
When I started out in programming, I fell in with a set of people who attached a lot of importance to Delivering Business Value. It was what you did to earn respect within that group. Great for employers, but looking back, it seems a bit one-sided.
The usual answer is stock. But in any organisation larger than about five people, the relationship between your output and the stock value is too wobbly for that to work.
There's an arsenal of incentives like bonuses and promotions. But in practice, as many commentators have observed, those don't go to the people actually doing valuable work.
It's an open question, as far as I can tell.
10x is a misnomer in my comment though; 10x refers to productivity, not skill level / intelligence / complexity.
I have seen articles saying that the Apollo missions were absolutely not that. They were 9 to 5 jobs and managers made sure it stayed 9 to 5. The idea was that so many things could go wrong and they couldn't afford to have exhausted and overworked people screwing up.
> It is based on the (supposed) claim of someone to have played a vital role in the success of NASA's Apollo missions to the Moon, where scientists had to work all through the night on many occasions, battling against fatigue. One person claimed a vital role to the whole programme - by making the coffee that kept them awake!
The whole programme of 400,000 people. Really? I sort of gave up on TFA at that point. It reminds me of some pop-sci report of an experiment conducted on 'monkeys' that claimed to show some aspect of leadership, where an underling came up with a solution. If the monkeys were any sort of chimp, the underling would have got a bad beating if it seriously undermined an alpha.
> The term 'Apollo Syndrome' has also been used to describe the condition where someone has an overly important view of their role within a team. It is based on the (supposed) claim of someone to have played a vital role in the success of NASA's Apollo missions to the Moon, where scientists had to work all through the night on many occasions, battling against fatigue. One person claimed a vital role to the whole programme - by making the coffee that kept them awake!
However, it only details the MOCR and some SSRs -- it doesn't reveal much about the hundreds of engineers around the country that were called in for more confusing problems.
From the original book by Belbin:
"The welcome opportunity afforded to us [...] to form management teams much as we liked for the executive management exercise (EME) gave us the chance to draw up teams that differed from one another in measured mental ability. Teams of clever people were formed and compared with dullard and other teams. [...]
"In the past we had designated companies by letters of the alphabet – Company A would meet in the room normally occupied by Syndicate A in the usual Henley experiments, Company B in Syndicate B’s room, and so on. For a change, we decided to give our companies names instead of the more impersonal letters. The name said something about the company while still indicating the room in which it should convene.
"For what would hitherto have been our A company we chose the title Apollo (chosen out of respect for the American lunar triumph at the time) and into this alpha-type company we placed the members who were high scoring on the measures of mental ability. The individual scores were of course confidential but there was an immediate reaction from the bulk of course members. The Apollo company was immediately recognized for what it was and seen as a blatant attempt by the experimenters to form a company that was bound to win. When very clever people are put together in a group, there is no disguising the fact. [...] It seemed fairly obvious that a team of clever people should win in a game that placed an emphasis on cleverness.
"[...] The Apollo team generally finished last.
= = =
Ref: Management Teams - Why They Succeed or Fail, (Belbin, 1981), ISBN: 0-7506-0253-8
This opinion piece articulates your concern fairly well.. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/16/challe...
It's interesting, because a few weeks ago there was an article here on HN about some engineer recalling how, because of a blunder, they almost fried a multi-million dollar rover 2 weeks before a time-critical launch. And although the author did casually mention in his introduction that he was already working his second 12 hour work shift of the day, without rest, not once was the thought articulated that, maybe, the root of the entire screw-up was that exhausted and overworked people were working double shifts, setting themselves up for failure.
My comments and thoughts on the article were exactly in line with what you read, which is also interesting. Why did NASA in the 60s and 70s think that they could not afford exhausted and overworked people because they would eventually screw up, while JPL (also NASA) in the 2000s thought it was perfectly OK? Some lessons were clearly unlearned through the years.
I've noticed on some projects with poor leaders and many high-ego status-oriented people on the team, that sometimes people reach consensus over bad ideas because those ideas represent a kind of middle-ground between two large egos... But the middle-ground idea might actually be worse than both ideas from which it is derived.
I tried hard to avoid this when I was a team lead; the trick I used was that I would often raise half-baked ideas and then quickly admit if someone put up a counter-argument which showed how it was not ideal or just plain wrong.
I was trying to show everyone that coming up with a bad idea doesn't make you a fool and it's OK to play around with ideas and that what matters is not idea creation, but idea selection.
You need to be really knowledgeable in your field for this approach to work though because there will often be someone on your team who will try to use any opportunity to make you look bad and so you always have to be a few steps ahead.
So sometimes I might present a naive idea intentionally just to spark a discussion and get people thinking and forming their own ideas but, in fact, I have a much more developed idea in my mind about where I think it's going to go; so maybe 90% of the time, I look like I'm thinking many steps ahead.
Then maybe 10% of the time, it goes in a completely unexpected direction and I genuinely change my mind and people are pleased with themselves that they could convince me.
What I find insidious about this kind of behavior is that although they claim that it is to encourage the team to not be shy speculating on new ideas, it seems as though the true purpose is to make the team lead appear smarter that the other team members. It's a kind of reverse psychology. If everyone is throwing out spontaneous ideas, some (probably most) will be bad. Some ideas are very dumb and are easily dismissed. Sometimes however it takes time to work through the subtleties and see the problems. If the leader deliberately seeds a bad idea and then is able to quickly point out some very subtle problem, it makes them look like a genius relative to others who would need more time to see that issue. That is why it seems manipulative to some of us.
“What made Apollo a success?”
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...
Work these days has less money, fewer people and less clear direction. Half of all projects are working out what the actual job is.
Risk aversion doesn’t actually mean you’re good at addressing risk; in fact it may keep you from implementing changes (change is risky) that address real risks.
Last time NASA rushed it was because of a "war", and even then it was really just a vast international tantrum. Nobody really "won" the space race. Somebody got a trophy and someone got a participation certificate and the world went on as before.
I am glad for the research and I would far rather nations competed via engineering stunts than blowing each other up. Especially when those stunts manage to produce some spinoffs and some science... though any science is bound to produce both.
Space exploration could save humanity in so many ways. Nevermind the big "what if" discoveries that would impact the trajectory of our entire species, we also discover valuable science along the way - things that help us in our every day life.
More importantly, the country with the most advanced space agency by default has the most advanced weapons. A hostile nation could pretty easily tow a small asteroid toward Earth and wipe our any country they wanted. Rocket technology, fuel technology, etc.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the space race helped to collapse the Soviet Union to some degree, didn't it?
Regardless of whether my last point stands, I think space is incredibly important to humanity's future.
The space race had little to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, for one thing the timing is off significantly. The Soviet union mostly failed due to internal issues that were only tangentially related to the US. Excess military spending was more a symptom than an underlying cause, you can just as easily blame poor manufacturing becoming an increasing issue as technology advances, a culture of mismanagement etc. Corruption, infighting, apathy, ethnic tensions, mismanagement, etc all kept compounding until you got societal collapse.
It is as if I bought a controlling interest in Honda and told them my revolutionary idea for the North American market was to introduce a small car with 4 doors to appeal to budget conscious buyers.
Not to healthcare - to healthcare insurance administration.
Had the report been written today, it would look very different.
The results are only unexpectedly poor if you assume individual ability directly composes into team ability. I think this was a common assumption in the 1980s, but I believe that managers nowadays will not be surprised by these results.
I think most people would be surprised to find negative correlation between individual ability and team ability, unless they've read this book or something like it. Weak correlation, perhaps, but outright negative correlation is truly surprising.
Teamwork is important.
Also, sometimes certain people just work really well together, and one of them may not seem all that great on their own.
From what I can tell, the only finding here is that teams with individual aptitude as the sole selection criteria performed poorly in competition against teams that had more traditional selection process. This would be an expected result for me.
The sad part is if you are highly disagreeable as well but also the only person in the debate that recognizes the importance of getting shit done over semantics or minute details, it will cause severe burnout.
Don't repeat my mistake and leave early if you see no levers to sway the team dynamics.
When is this not good advice? And how does ergodicity fit into the reasoning? (It is attractive advice, but...?)
In one of the more successful teams I was on back in the day, I was a JavaScript developer and was paired with some Flash developers on a project where we had a lot of back and forth calls crossing the boundary. I'd ask them to implement a way for me to call their logic and then they'd ask me for a way to call my logic. We were both super-responsive to the other because neither side had much interest in imposing our preferences in the other's very distinct domain.
On the flip side, we were both quite capable in our own right and thus able to agree on the overall architecture pretty quickly. With some people, you'd probe, "it seems like you should have a way to do X, right?" and they'd respond immediately, "that's definitely not possible, you'll have to work around that". So you'd push, "do you want to check?" but they'd decline so you'd take it upon yourself to dig in and point them to relevant documentation. With these guys, their response to the first question was, "Of course we can do that and you can do Y for us, right?".
i.e. its a case of "We're all very competent at an individual level, but having never worked in a group as individuals, and then being thrust into a group requiring us to discard individual control, makes us all pretty incompetent."
We certainly had lots of people who wanted to come in to work and write software, and didn't have a ton of ego wrapped up in which direction to march. We just weren't clear on which direction to march.
I thank them for trying. But it seems like a great example of an “Apollo Team”.
- make a hackable, open source tool
— create a new interaction model for PIM data
- be a livable Mail/Calendar client
The team assembled would probably have been quite competent at doing any one of those things!
It’s not clear to me there was a path to achieving a harmonious combination of all three given any staffing.
>They spent excessive time in abortive or destructive debate, trying to persuade other team members to adopt their own view, and demonstrating a flair for spotting weaknesses in others' arguments. This led to the discussion equivalent of 'the deadly embrace'. They had difficulties in their decision making, with little coherence in the decisions reached (several pressing and necessary jobs were often omitted). Team members tended to act along their own favourite lines without taking account of what fellow members were doing, and the team proved difficult to manage. In some instances, teams recognised what was happening but over compensated - they avoided confrontation, which equally led to problems in decision making.
> They tend to live in troops, with the leader being called a silverback.
1981.
There is a wrinkle in this, however, something he doesn’t talk about. The fifth member, though much better than average within the competition, was not a Navy Seal. Mark was a commando himself, and knew what would happen.
> This page describes 'The Apollo Syndrome', a phenomenon discovered by Dr Meredith Belbin where teams of highly capable individuals can, collectively, perform badly.
If I try to imagine the Apollo project then I always see a group of glasses wearing (of the sixties type), white coat scientists and rocket engineers.
In reality the Apollo team counted 400.000 people. (Yes, some just made the sandwiches, but still)
My feeling is that The Apollo Syndrome is feeding of the same nostalgia.
Intellectual and emotional skill development are very well recognised as two different spectrums these days.
There exists a cohort of otherwise very capable individuals (my intuition would be that it is comprised of a much larger and varied population that would be difficult to identify and select for) who are maybe not so driven by glory or personal ambition, or who tend to share credit for their accomplishments with the people and circumstances that meaningfully shaped the outcome, rather than taking victory laps and draw the attention to themselves.
There are certainly distinct traits of “leaders” that can be critically valuable to a team, whether it’s charisma and the ability to sell an idea, or organizational skills that facilitate the efficient application of resources. The point this article seems to be making is that an ideal team will be comprised of a relative few “leaders” with most of the members being more in line with the aforementioned cohort.
It’s essentially just an academic exploration of the old “too many cooks in the kitchen” idiom.