Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand.

The implication seems to be that martha is the leader here. However, consider a situation where all four members behaved exactly as Martha, staring at the printout for an hour in silence, looking for the solution. In this hypothetical, Martha still gets the answer first.

In that example, it seems pretty clear that Martha was not the leader, since they all behaved exactly the same; she was merely the strongest individual contributor. It seems like that's probably the case in the blog post example as well, since Martha's behavior is the same.

This post seems to be pushing the idea that the loudest and most social person in the room is not necessarily the best leader, which I can agree to. However, it also seems to be saying that the person who contributes most directly to the solution may be the leader, which I'm not sure is accurate. In a situation like the one described, it seems like the best leader would be the one who best facilitates the performance of the individual contributors- that is, leaves Martha alone.

I like the article but I don't think it makes its point clearly.

What I took from it is that notions and mechanisms of defining leadership/influence are somewhat orthogonal to problem-solving.

In the example, it was Martha who came up with the solution, yet when asked who had been most 'influential' [1] it was Arne. Does that mean Arne was the 'leader'? According to the psychologists viewpoint/definition, yes, but does it really matter? When the question is re-framed and they watch the video again the author proposes that there was only one 'effective influencing action', which came from Martha. I find this viewpoint just as valid (and useful) as the former (i.e. not very).

[1] Note also that influence and influencing actions aren't defined in this post. It's difficult to discuss this with out further detail. It even seems like the definition changes partway through.

I think the point of the article is that an outside observer (Weinberg talks about a research psychologist, but also picture a non-technical manager or CEO) could easily miss the contributions of people who quietly solve problems as compared to the ones who take a dominant role in discussions. Even the group members themselves were confused:

"When I asked the group who had been their most inﬂuential member, they all said, 'Arnie.' Then I played the videotape, asking them to be especially alert to the method by which their problem was solved. After watching the tape, Arnie, Phyllis, and Weber changed their answer to 'Martha.' Why? Because in terms of solving their problem, the table of effective inﬂuencing actions should have read

Arnie 0 actions

Phyllis 0 actions

Weber 0 actions

Martha 1 action

Without Martha's contribution, the meeting would have gone nowhere, yet non-programming psychologists would have probably missed Martha's role entirely. When such nontechnical psychologists observe our workshops, they are consistently befuddled by the dynamics of the teams as they solve technical problems. It's as if the psychologists were watching people from another planet, people whose culture and language look and sound superﬁcially like ours but are entirely different."

> it seems like the best leader would be the one who best facilitates the performance of the individual contributors

This is just as wrong as a the "perceived leader fallacy" the post is trying to debunk. The person you refer to is a "facilitator" or manager. Leader don't always have to "facilitate" or manage. The manager is almost never the true leader. Leaders should bring the vision AND set the direction AND provide the main motivation (if one person doesn't bring all 3, then you have a collective leadership situation, which is probably the most healthy anyway).

In this example, the actual leader is the unseen person that actually identified that bug as "critical" and decided that the software should in under no circumstances be released without that bug fixed!

(or if we want to find a leader here, at this level, it would be whoever came up with the idea of "what to look for in order to fix the bug" - Martha may have had the idea herself, most likely, or she may have fished it from the discussion happening around her and just happened to be the first one lucky to find the bug while following this "fished" strategy)

Not sure about what you're saying here. In no way did Martha bring vision, set direction (see note below), or provide motivation. She sat and read the code for a while until she found the problem. Without any more detail, it seems likely enough that Arnie was setting the vision/direction and providing motivation. They just didn't reach their goal before (relatively uninvolved) Martha figured things out.

Not trying to devalue Martha's contribution. I love the Marthas in my workplace. But, very often, they're not leaders. They're the people leaders know to turn to in times of crisis. They're extraordinarily valuable, and should be compensated/lauded accordingly, but that doesn't mean they're the leaders. Nor, in my experience, do they always wish to be.

Note: Martha did, of course, "set the direction" at the end of the meeting, when she'd found the bug. But I take direction-setting to generally be an event prior to the activity (in this case, debugging). Martha did not do that.

I think the point is, that people think the person making the most noise is having the most influence, even if their influence is mostly just white noise.

The article is part of a book. I'd imagine the book has a broader thesis.

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