Who discovered the lightbulb? If you answered “Thomas Edison,” you’re not aloneand you’re also not quite right.
Despite conventional wisdom that associates great inventions with lone geniuses, breakthrough inventions are team efforts. Incandescent light bulbs existed before Edison was born. His patent built on prior versions of the light bulb, aiming to make it practical and affordable. Even then, it wasnt a solo achievementEdison collaborated with a team of skilled collaborators, known as the Muckers, whose contributions have largely faded from memory. Yet it was Edisons name on the patent, and thats the version of history that stuck.
Were suckers for lone genius narratives like Edisonsthe brilliant scientist, the fearless military general, or the savvy CEO. The version of history we glean from popular books, movies, and the internet attributes greatness to single individuals.
But individual greatness is rarely the whole story. Research shows that teams are the main creators of new knowledge across most industries. New ideas dont emerge fully formed from the mind of a single personit takes collaboration and teamwork to develop them to their full potential.
In reality, the engine behind sustained successwhether in science, business, or governmentisnt a singular mind. Its a well-designed team.
The illusion of individual success
We tend to over-attribute both success and failure to individuals. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: we explain peoples behavior by their traits, rather than their context. If a product flops, we blame the CEO. If a startup takes off, the founder is a genius. We rarely ask about the teams that surround them.
It gets worse. Even inside groups, people regularly overestimate their own contributions to collective endeavors. In one study, researchers asked each team member to estimate what percent of the groups success they were responsible for. The total? A whopping 235%. Thats a lot more than 100%!
Our individualistic tendencies lead us to build groups and organizations around the wrong assumptions. If you believe success comes from star individuals, you hire stars and hope for fireworks. But for complex problemsand most of our work now is complexit takes more knowledge and skill than any individual has to solve it. Thats why we need to put the conditions in place for individuals to combine and build on what each alone can bring.
What good teams do differently
In my research, Ive found that high-performing teams arent built through charisma, happy accidents, or trust falls. Theyre designed for success. There are four key elements of group structure that maximize your chances of creativity:
Composition: Many teams are composed haphazardly, based on whos available and office politics. But the best teams are small (i.e., three to seven members) and have a task-appropriate, diverse mix of knowledge and skills.
Goals: Its hard to achieve a common goal when members have different ideas about where theyre headed. Thats why clear, measurable, vivid goals are a critical antecedent for building teams that can outperform individuals. For instance, innovation at NASA spiked when John F. Kennedy swapped the vague goal of, advance science by exploring the solar system, to the vivid goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Task design: Teams can bring ideas to life when they have well-designed tasks that require a variety of skills, give members autonomy over how to conduct their work, and allow members to see progress toward their goals. For creative work, poorly designed tasks are repetitive and control the process, like a manufacturing assembly line. Well-designed tasks give teams whole pieces of work and the freedom to explore, such as the design firm IDEOs effort to redesign the shopping cart to better fit the needs of users.
Norms: Too often, groups are places where members fall into bad habits. In many organizations, workers are used to sitting passively in meetings. They worry that experimentation and suggesting new ideas will be scornedor even punished. But the most innovative teams actively fight these norms. Leaders actively encourage members to share their ideas, experiment, and learn from one another. And the battle against norms toward conformity and the status quo never ends. IDEO, for instance, plasters reminders of these norms on the walls of their buildingsthings like defer judgement, encourage wild ideas, and build on the ideas of others.
The real edge
We live in an era that celebrates ideas: TED Talks, startup pitches, visionary founders. But ideas dont execute themselves. And many great ideas die in bad teams. The reverse is also true: A good team can turn a mediocre idea into something extraordinary. Not because theyre smarter, but because theyre structured to think together better.
The great innovations and businesses of today were never built by a solitary lone genius. For all the credit Steve Jobs gets, he couldnt have built Apple and its collaborative innovation engine without the help of his cofounders and teammates. As you dig deeper into stories of great innovations, you almost always find a great team just under the surface.
The next time youre tempted to credit a lone genius, remember the people behind the curtain. The collaborators, the editors, the dissenters: the ones who made the idea betteror made it real.
Good ideas matter. But good teams matter more.
Imagine youre Mark Zuckerberg. What does an average day at work look like for you?
Most people with experience in management would probably guess the Facebook boss spends his working hours in an endless series of meetings. Maybe he even schedules his time down to the minute like his fellow billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
But when Zuckerberg sat down for a fireside chat with Stripe co-founder John Collison recently and described his productivity system, it looked nothing like the overscheduled meeting mania many leaders suffer through. Instead, Zuckerberg claimed favors an alternate approach to productivity (and sanity) favored by many other superachievers, from Google executives to Albert Einstein.
Its called the 80% rule.
Why Mark Zuckerberg avoids one-on-one meetings
The relevant portion of the conversation kicks off when Collison asks Zuckerberg how he organizes his time “to actually spend time on the things that you think are valuable for the company.
Its a key question faced not just by the CEOs of multibillion-dollar behemoths but by everyday small-business owners and middle managers too. Which makes Zuckerbergs answer even more fascinating.
While he talks to his team informally frequentlyI talk to all these people more than they want to talk to me, he jokesZuckerberg generally tries to avoid standing, regular one-on-one meetings.
Instead, he tells Collison, I try to generally keep a bunch of time open in his schedule.
Why? Stuff is pretty dynamic and you wake up in the morning and you’re like, Okay, I need to work on these three things today. I want to make sure that I have a block of time where I can go do that, he explains.
Slack in his schedule allows Zuckerberg to be more agile, but it also helps him keep an even keel mentally.
I get really frustrated and in a bad mood if my whole day is scheduled and there’s a thing that I know is really important and I don’t get time to do it because I’m sitting in other things that are not the most important thing to be doing, he complains. You have too many days like that in a row and I just like explode.
Which is why hes such a firm believer in keeping a meaningful amount of your time open. That way we can have space for reflection and self-development and respond to issues as they rise.
Googlers call Zuckerbergs approach the 80% rule
Zuckerberg may use the vague phrase keep a meaningful amount of time open when describing his approach to productivity. But there is a more formal and precise way to think about this principle.
Laura Mae Martin, Googles in-house productivity coach, helps the search giants execs make the best use of their time. She calls this idea the 80% rule. It states you should schedule only about 80% of your days. Leave 20% open to absorb whatever craziness comes up.
I always tell people, shoot to under-commit because you end up then committing at the right level. Shoot to that 80%, and thats really where you end up being involved in the right amount of things, Martin explained on the HBR IdeaCast.
Superachievers and productivity experts swear by the 80% rule
Data obsessed Google might have formulated a precise rule for the trick of leaving slack in your schedule, but a variety of superachievers have, like Zuckerberg, intuited and applied this basic logic over the years.
Einstein was famous for leaving big chunks of time in his schedule open to tinker and think. But the approach doesn’t just work for dreamy scientists. Steve Jobs was another superachiever with a legendarily open schedule.
Various productivity experts have come to the same conclusion too. More than 20 years ago, software engineer Tom DeMarco wrote a whole book arguing for what is basically the 80% rule. Titled Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency (Crown Currrency), it explains that when your days are too full you cant absorb the inevitable shocks and surprises that arise. You end up getting less done in the long run than if you kept a looser schedule.
Sociologist Christine Carter is another author who wrote a book advocating for strategic slacking. Journalist Oliver Burkeman has a number of bestsellers focused on less rigorous scheduling.
I dont embark on each day as if on a tightrope walk, needing everything to go exactly right in order for me to make it through the plan, he writes.
What percentage of your day is scheduled?
Zuckerberg might not call his approach to scheduling the 80% rule, but the underlying principle is identical. And there are advantages to using Martins more precise formulation to describe the idea.
First, its catchy. The 80% rule is more memorable than just saying, Hey, um, maybe its like a good idea to leave some meaningful time open in your schedule.
Its also a exact target to aim for. With a hard number in hand, leaders can review their calendars and make adjustments. Which is just what Zuckerbergs recent interview should probably nudge you to do. What percentage of your days are currently booked up in advance?
If the Meta boss can manage to clear enough space to have time for strategic thinking and quick pivots, certainly you can too. A boatload of experts suggests youll get more done if you schedule less.
By Jessica Stillman
This article originally appeared on Fast Company‘s sister website, Inc.
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