Turning People into Teams

Putting Our Ideas to the Test

This idea is going to work. Something’s broken on our team, and we’ve got Just the Right Thing to fix it. We know it.

But that’s idealism talking. Ideas don’t fix problems. People do. But people are also the ones contributing to the problems, remember? We’re dealing with the complexity of human beings in all of their beautiful and stubborn glory. So your fantastic idea may lead to reactions you hadn’t intended.

You’ll need to be more experimental about it. Flash back to learning about chemistry in school. Donning rubber gloves and safety goggles, you mixed caustic liquids in a beaker dangling over a hot flame, trying to prove a basic hypothesis about what happens when you mix elements. Then the entire mixture frothed ...