Hey and welcome to the first update of the Brave New Teams newsletter.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Mark Twain is widely considered “the father of American Literature”. His often sarcastic quotes and jokes have been told and retold. Over the course of his legendary life, Twain wrote more than a dozen novels plus countless short stories and essays and still found time to be a steamboat pilot, work as a miner, invent new products (including a board game and improvements to suspenders), hang out with famous scientists, and look after a house full of cats.

A quick update from SuperScript

The work on SuperScript began two years ago, in September 2018. Since then, extensive market research has been conducted, the problem was understood and validated as a real and relevant need for organizations, and a solution was defined. The feasibility of building the product has been assessed and work on the mechanism design, the coding of the prototype, and an agent-based simulation model is now far advanced. 

First discussions with medium-to-large-sized organizations have been positive. Over the coming months, this interest will be further clarified with pilots and in non-binding letters of intent. SuperScript plans to release a functional prototype on its website to illustrate the mechanics of the tool with an engaging game-like experience. The purpose of the prototype is to illustrate use cases and to collect proof points. The prototype will represent teamwork as a social multiplayer game, will take the user through the ‘happy path’ with basic user interface design, will make the value-add of the tool tangible to a broad audience of corporate leaders, and at the same time collect simulated raw data to feed the machine learning algorithm.

Below is a high-level plan for the prototype:

• Development of an agent-based model in Python, using the Mesa framework [complete, more details and results in one of the coming posts]
• Introduction of optimization and Machine Learning algorithms in Python using the Gekko and PyTorch libraries to solve the team assembly (workforce assignment) problem, based on heuristic solution methods [in progress]
• Basic UX/UI and deployment via the Django framework on Heroku [in progress]

Upon completion and deployment of the prototype, SuperScript is looking for CHF 500’000 of seed funding. The funds will be used to develop the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), hire two teammates, and get ready to onboard pilot organizations. The MVP will consist of two separate web applications, one for the organization and one for the workers. As a complement to seed funding, agreements with organizations to frontload future fees and co-fund features of the application will be evaluated. The seed funding will enable SuperScript to continue its mission to help organizations and knowledge workers alike gain and maintain an emergent competitive advantage.

The paradox of choice

Putting together a team in a traditional organization with a hierarchical structure and rigid silos is easy and straightforward. As a project initiator, you merely look around and pick people you know well and who seem available. Ideally, those individuals report to you to avoid conflict and discussions with other managers. The search space is very limited, the team is average at best, as are the results. Choice is limited by design. If you increase the search space, the challenge of assembling a team becomes suddenly very hard. Simple combinatorics provides ample evidence of how intractable the problem of team formation is. There are over 2 million possible solutions to forming a team of five from a population of 50 people. Not all of those 2 million solutions will perform equally well, and a random selection will likely produce mediocre results. As McKinsey puts it: “Innovation is a team sport. For projects to succeed, they must be staffed with the right combination of talent.”

The critical question for optimal teamwork is how roles mesh together into a team that has complementary strengths. Advances in sports pave the way to more data-informed and more evidence-based decision making when it comes to team formation. Like in sports, data about individuals’ relevant characteristics are required, and profiles need to be assessed. Academics in complexity science have decomposed contributions to team performance in order to understand and improve successful collaboration.

Teamwork is a social multi-player game

Optimal teamwork is akin to a cooperative game. In many ways, SuperScript resembles an MMORPG, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Gamers are building and exchanging in immersive, distributed communities. Vital gameplay elements such as nudges to change behavior, predictive user guidance, frictionless entry, ludic loops, intermittent positive reinforcement, social approval and comparison, tribal mechanisms, micro, and macro challenges, and incentives are used as part of the design of the user interface and user experience to direct decision-making and to keep engagement high.

Endnote

Thank you for subscribing to Brave New Teams. As discussed in the article Automatic for the People, there is plenty of reason to be optimistic about an augmented future of knowledge work. 

In the next newsletter, agent-based models and their application to emergent teamwork will be discussed. Another topic will be the use of Markowitz optimization techniques with heterogeneous workers, rather than asset classes. And much more!