Team Problem Solving

How your team interacts depends very heavily on the kind of work your team does

Last week, I introduced the idea that most modern management techniques have negligible effect on team performance. They are valuable for employee retention, and manager employee relationships. However, they do not directly affect the factors that influence team performance. Why? Because team performance is dominated by how the team members interact with each other, not how they interact with their boss. It is a much more challenging task for a manager to influence teammate interactions. In fact, this is probably the criteria that turns a manager into a leader. They influence the creation of work.

At this point, I want to be clear that I am going to expand this series beyond the ideas presented by Google’s [[🔗 re:Work Project Aristotle]]. A big part of the puzzle is creating a better environment; however, I also believe tools can play a part. Now I could spend 100 years reviewing project management software and still not touch everything that’s out there. Instead, what I want to dive into are the principles that can help you use the project management software of your choice more effectively to boost your team productivity.

Different Kinds of Work

When we dive into making teams more productive, we definitely need to differentiate between two very different kinds of work. Work that is fundamentally well contained — let’s call this “convergent” work, and work that is fundamentally unbounded. Let’s call this, “Divergent” work. While academics have been arguing for at least three decades whether there are multiple intelligences, educators have known for a long time that different students learn differently. Most skilled managers recognize, as Ray Dalio said, “different people think differently.” How this relates to work, is that convergent tasks are ones in my book where the end condition is easily visualized by most people. In other words, you have the best chance at the beginning of a project knowing what “done” means.

Divergent tasks tend to be open ended. These tasks are inherently problematic because it may be impossible to know what “done” means when you start out.

It turns out, that convergent thinking and divergent thinking are not surprisingly, orthogonal in people. One does not predict the other and they can vary wildly from person to person. We know this from the stereotypes. Engineers and accountants tend to be bottled up, rigid, linear thinkers. Artists and marketers tend to be social, creative, and not particularly good at details. Of course, these are stereotypes, but the point is that it is really rare to find someone who is high in both axis. Likewise, it is hard to find project management software that can attack both kinds of problems equally well.

Solving Convergent Problems

In my experience, when I rallied my team around solving convergent problems — an office move, setting up a trade show, shipping like a zillion Nintendo Switches that showed up on 9 pallets in the back of a semi to 100 franchisees around the country, it felt easy to rally the troupes. The outcomes were easy for everyone to visualize. “All of these must LEAVE”. We will be done when the boxes are gone. That is not to say we didn’t use SCRUM, or project management. In some problems, we had to scope out (using the Fibonacci dogs is one of my favorite task scoping tools) but getting alignment and cooperation toward project completion was relatively straight forward. People could look at a task and understand how they could help. What’s more, task sharing was straight forward. Anyone one can plug in a phone or a roll a chair across the floor.

The projects that ran the smoothest for us that we absolutely crushed lined up with these attributes:

• Clear vision of completion
• Anyone could do nearly any task
• We spent time talking through task estimation until we had agreement on scope.
• Everyone had visibility to the task backlog

Having a clear finish line and a solid understanding of the steps that would get us there made those projects fly and teamwork was at an all-time high.

Solving Divergent Problems

Now, take in contrast to that, divergent problems. These are problems with no clear end state, no clear solution, and no clear path to get there. Say, “We need a product with better margins that produces annuity like income.” Oh, and it should be unique to us, simple to deliver (so we don’t make mistakes) but hard for others to replicate so they can’t steal our idea. Go.

You finished yet?

Okay, that may sound ridiculous (but it’s actually a conversation I have had with my team many, many times.) How about, we need to move from a Business to Consumer (B2C) sales model to a Business to Business (B2B) sales model.

How do you do that?

What pieces do you need?

What are the steps?

What does that even look like?

Many people get stuck on content creation. I know how to use the tools, but what on earth am I going to say? One of my favorite pieces of advice came from Stephen King in his book On Writing — you make two drafts of a book, one with the door closed, the other with the door open. He points out that the first draft of the book, you have to tell your inner critic to shut up because you are simply trying to figure out what it is you have to say. There is this oddity with creative work that when we begin it, what we get may not be what we started out to do. There is discovery along the way. King understood this and wanted his inner critic to let him get about discovering.

Divergent work is fundamentally creative work. You are looking for solutions. Perhaps, you are trying to discover the best way to do something. This is usually where innovation lies, and the biggest risks.

Why?

1. Success might be hard, or impossible to visualize.
2. Not everyone can do every task. Some work is highlight specialized.
3. Some tasks are enormously difficult to scope.
4. The total scope of the backlog might be hidden from everyone on the team because the real tasks have yet to be revealed.

You can only scope what you know about. Creative work nearly always involves a healthy dollop of unknown.

Summary / Takeaway

Before we can get into the heart of what makes a team perform better, we have to acknowledge that the type of work they are doing can dramatically impact team interaction. If anyone can do any task, but no one can do every task, it is much easier for people to help each other out. When you have creative projects however, the involve the interaction of disparate skills with almost no overlap (say art and coding to pick an example from my background), negotiating team communication and dynamics can be trickier. Much, much trickier.

As you dive into figuring out how to improve team communication, it is worth paying heed to the kinds of problems you are asking your team to solve. In general, teams solve three kinds of problems:

1. Convergent problems
2. Divergent problems
3. A mixture of the two

Next week, we will start to dig into what tools an practices you can use to help improve teamwork for problem types one and two. The important thing about type three is that you recognize it. As you might imagine, it’s far more convergent problems that turn into divergent problems than the other way around. So we figure out how to handle that one.

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References

1. Re:Work Project Aristotle. (n.d.). Retrieved February 2, 2020
2. Duhigg, C. (2016). Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of RealProductivity (Reprint edition). Random House.
3. Dalio, R. (2017). Principles: Life and Work (Illustrated edition). Simon & Schuster.
4. Convergent Vs Divergent Thinking. (2017, November 17). Psychestudy.
5. Marenus, M. (2020, June 9). Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Simply Psychology.Org.
6. Fibonacci Agile Estimation | Definition and Overview. (n.d.). Retrieved March 25, 2021