Sam Gentle.com

Groupwork

I'm sure everyone's had a bad groupwork experience. They're something of a rite of passage for high school and university students. There's always one or two people who do all the work, either because they're egomaniacs or because nobody else can be bothered (or both). Nobody is organised, everyone resents working together, the final output is always mediocre, and they're generally pretty terrible experiences. Teachers seem to like them, but honestly the only thing they seem to teach is how bad working with other people can be.

The obvious reason behind this is that, in the real world, people (usually) get fired for doing nothing. More generally, though, the members of the group don't control the group's composition. This isn't a group of cohesion, where everyone has decided to gather together for a common purpose; it's a group of adhesion, a bunch of people smooshed together by circumstance who have to make the best they can out of it. The goal isn't to build an exceptional team so much as survive the crushing mediocrity.

The problem isn't just the inefficiency of 20% of people carrying the other 80%. It's that having bad people, or people who just don't care, fundamentally changes the way you operate a team. You can't rely on any assumption of shared goals or common purpose, you can't even assume that people you're working with won't actively work against the best interests of the group because there's no mechanism to remove them if they do. So the strategy changes completely. The biggest win in such a group is in what's euphemistically called "managing", the process of limiting the damage of bad actors.

I find these strategies particularly interesting, and they show up in a lot of places. You can (usually) choose your friends, so mostly these are relationships of mutual benefit. Families, on the other hand, are groups of adhesion, and it's fairly common to have strategies for managing certain family members. Don't get grandpa going about immigrants, but if he starts you can distract him with questions about football. Your brother-in-law's going to keep offering you a drink until you accept one, so you may as well just let him.

Probably the most common group of adhesion is the workplace. Obviously people can and do get fired, but the bar for that tends to be relatively high. It's pretty tough to get fired just for mediocrity, especially in countries with strong labour laws. So a substantial amount of the work in a larger company is just damage control, designing structures to stop mediocrity from becoming catastrophic failure. Much like in software, mediocrity can't be redeemed, only removed or contained. The entire middle management layer of most large companies is a CORBA-like tentacle monster of runaway abstraction.

Why are we so ready to accept this? I mean, why does it seem so natural to form a group where negative influences are managed rather than ejected? I think it comes back to schools. Sure, schools have groupwork projects, but in a larger sense they are groupwork projects, 12-year-long ones where we force disinterested kids to see each other every day whether they want to or not. The strategies for surviving socially at school are so different from real life that parents and teachers end up laughably out of touch. "If someone's bullying you, just walk away" – and go where? This isn't a world where you can choose not to see people.

By the time we're done at school, we're packing an arsenal of stratgies for managing groups of adhesion, to the point where perhaps it seems more natural than any other way. Of course, every group has useless people in it. Of course, you need to round off your rough edges to maintain compatibility. Of course, part of life is just learning to get along with people whether you want to or not. Why wouldn't it be? We've been doing it so long it seems like a law of nature.

But imagine what the world would look like if we eliminated groupwork. Not just the projects, but any environment where we can't choose who to associate with. Sure, there's a risk of filter bubbling ourselves, of misusing that control to avoid discomfort and growth, or of removing interesting outliers to the group's detriment, and those are serious concerns.

However, if we can avoid those pitfalls I think the rewards could be enormous. Perhaps we can trade our tragedy-of-the-commons "management" for genuine coordination between people with compatible goals. Perhaps we can focus entirely on achieving a shared vision rather than building abstractions to pretend one exists. Perhaps it's only when we stop optimising ourselves to survive mediocrity that we can reach towards excellence.