When I was a kid, I sat glued to the television watching behind the scenes shows on the workings of industrial plants. I couldn’t get enough of watching a series of machines work in tandem to convert raw materials into marvelous things like crayons, cotton swabs, and especially soda pop. 
Each machine had its specialty: squirting just the right amount to fill the pop bottle, placing a metal disc on top, crimping the disk to make a lid, printing the ink on the bottles—it still gets me excited just thinking about how screws, pulleys, levers, and gears can be made to do such interesting things. (Geek moment.)
By the time I graduated from high school, there were few local jobs left in the traditional manufacturing economy. Many of the factories had left town and in their places were office towers, filled with knowledge workers. It was serendipity (and a bad physics grade) that led me away from science to the study of psychology. But from the very first course in Industrial Psychology, I had a new fascination with the modern business machine—the team.
Simple machines (pulleys and levers, etc.) change the direction or magnitude of a force, creating a mechanical advantage over work done without the machine (thanks Wikipedia). That’s what great teams do too. Combining different people and processing information in myriad ways transforms ideas and information into products and services the way gears and pulleys transform water and corn syrup into soda pop. Here are three of the most exciting transformations you can create with your team machine.
- Mixing, Blending and Homogenization. Machines take corn syrup, water, carbon dioxide, and artificial coloring and mix them into a delicious drink. That drink is better together than as a collection of ingredients on their own. Does your team do enough to take really diverse ingredients (ideas, information, processes) and mix, blend, and homogenize them into something that no one person could have created? Do you bring in new perspectives, do you leave time for discussion and blue sky thinking, and do you pull together different ideas instead of just taking the single best suggestion and running with it, as is?
- Filtration and Selection. Another common machine in a factory setting is a filter. Filters are important in manufacturing because they weed out ingredients that you don’t want in the end product. Is your team filtering ideas to make sure only the highest quality ones proceed? Are you spending as much time figuring out what not to do as what to do? Are you looking at the risks of different approaches and proceeding (or not proceeding) accordingly?
- Acceleration. When one gear connects with another smaller gear, it can make the second gear spin even faster. The same is true of great teams. Each person is a cog in the machine. One person starts the idea moving and the added value of the next person gets it moving faster and faster. Do you have a strong connection with your teammates? Does your team focus on adding value to each other’s ideas? Do you use one idea as a springboard for others? Do you keep things moving forward rather than grinding things to a halt?
The team is an amazing machine, able to blend disparate ingredients into valuable outputs, to filter the best ideas from the rest, and to accelerate the pace of innovation. It might not be shining chrome but to me it’s just as amazing.
I know I’m only a physicist wannabe, but who’s with me? Who wants to contribute to my geeked out list? Add your comments about the other amazing functions of a team machine in the comments below.