Everything is a team sport

 I have been reading this article on the Rebels At Work tribe site and I would like to share my thoughts on diversity, but taking a different vantage point for looking at this. Let me start with two insights:
1) whatever you do is a team sport and
2) you have to understand the game you're playing

Let me give some example before I dig deeper in this concept.

Example 1: Complex Tooling

Imaging you want to build the tool to design your next cool device. It will need some physics, stats, CAD, circuit design. You're trying to write something like a scientific library. This is a team sport: specifically, it feels like basketball. Since very in-depth discussion are the bread-and-butter here, you need small teams in order not to get lost in group dynamics; also, since in-depth knowledge is very rare, it almost never pays off to have duplicates. If you are trying very hard to get this library for doing multiphysics modeling of microdevices, you dont want to have two fluid dynamics experts and no software engineer.  You would miss one discipline badly. For every role on your team you need exactly one person: one point and one shooting guard. One small and one power forward. One center. You need them all.

Example 2: Hardware Development

You now have your tool to design your devices, with very cool physics implemented, you can do CAD and whatever else. You want to bring now to production. Your team will grow. Deadlines will now feel more important than technical depth. You need redundances; on the other hand, do you really need to have production engineers and software testers in the same meeting? Probably not, so you can enlarge your team, and you speficically need coordination. It feels now more like a football team. You have a goalkeeper, 3-5 defenders, 3-5 midfielders, 2-3 strikers. You typically need a deep-lying midfielder, the project manager, purely in charge of keep the ball moving. Also interestingly, you have reduced interaction between separated roles: although the occasional pass from defense will serve a good scoring chance for a talented striker, this is an exception.

How do I recognize which game I am playing

As usual, there is no easy recipe. I find mapping your environment can help you. If you are doing research on something very innovative and technically challenging, you probably will need small teams to encourage in-depth discussions: we are talking about basketblall. If you are in product development, and you need to meet deadlines, but the technical challenges are solved, maybe you need a football team with redundances.

I think using this model can help you investigate two important aspects: the amount of necessary internal communication and the right level of diversity.

More or less communication?

Imagine a football team in which the goalkeeper always tries to pass to the forwards; passes will be not precise, the goalkeeper will not even see exactly what is going on on the other side of the field. If passes are the communication in ball games, and we use this model in our product development team, it seems that too much of communication could even be detrimental in a product development team. You need the midfielder who let the ball move from defense to offense, so to speak. Ever asked yourself if you really need a weeky meeting with all 50 members of the team?

On the opposite, imagine a basketpall team in which the shooting guard plainly refuses to pass to the center: it sounds like the team is doomed to fail. In small teams with tough challenges is the same. You sometimes really need the combined skills of both the avionics expert and of the software tester to get the reliable library you really need to fine tune your airplane wing!

Right level of diversity

Accordingly, you can use this model to understand on which level to address skill diversity in your team; it does not make sense to insist in having two central defenders with very different passing skills. It does not hurt and it does not help, so you're free to choose using other criteria. On the other hand, make sure to have some defenders and some midfielders and some strikers. Yes, and more than one player which can kick penalties will not harm.  The same at work: in a product dev team, make sure to have some redundancy in every field, but don't get to stressed about lacking skill diversity inside of a position. Lack of diversit will kill you in the mid-term, though, in the research team, as soon as you encounter a problem outside the range of the people there. Ah yes, and they will not even notice that they have a problem, probably.

Hope this helps you, feel free to comment and share you're experience!