Semi-OT semi-rant: Superman vs Fantastic 4

Hi all.

As I browsed the news today, I found the following article
(unfortunately
only available in Norwegian):

http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2006/august/1155111485.91

Heading: Superman beats the Super Team.

The essence of the article is that somebody on a Norwegian School of
Business (BI) have studied what are the characteristics of "inovators",

more specifically, in the comics industry.

The study shows that *most* succesful "inovators" are teams that
comrise highly skilled members, who -- at least when they succeed
in "inovation" -- have worked together on previous occations. Such
teams have members with strong specialist skilles in different
departmens. Hence the "Fantastic 4" analogy.

The one type of inovator that beats the "Fantastic 4" team, is the
"superman", the one individual that have strong skills and knowledge
in a wide field. While he may not possess the extreme skills of
any "Fantastic 4" member, he more than makes up with that by
being able to see the big picture, see how one factor influences
another and thus maybe avoid pitfalls, or see more effective solutions.
(and please, Please, PLEASE don't ask me how the authors of the
study can generalize like that from reading comics...)

While I can agree with the findings -- I used to read a lot of comics
when I was a kid -- I find it a bit scary that people actually have to
do
research to come up with this conclusion. A team's collective
skills or knowledge is *not* the sum of the individual's skills,
it is the sum of what the members are able to communicate between
themselves. Obviously, one person learning a new trade finds it
far easier to see how this new set of skills fits in with what he
knows already, than any two people with different specialities
trying to solve some problem together.

I don't know who wastes more time; the people researching to
find such obvious conclusions, or me ranting over their research...

Rune

> The study shows that *most* succesful "inovators" are teams that
> comrise highly skilled members, who -- at least when they succeed
> in "inovation" -- have worked together on previous occations. Such
> teams have members with strong specialist skilles in different
> departmens. Hence the "Fantastic 4" analogy.
> The one type of inovator that beats the "Fantastic 4" team, is the
> "superman", the one individual that have strong skills and knowledge
> in a wide field. While he may not possess the extreme skills of
> any "Fantastic 4" member, he more than makes up with that by
> being able to see the big picture, see how one factor influences
> another and thus maybe avoid pitfalls, or see more effective solutions.
> (and please, Please, PLEASE don't ask me how the authors of the
> study can generalize like that from reading comics...)

they should look "The Incredibles" - clear win for teamwork.

Andrey

Rune Allnor wrote:
> I don't know who wastes more time; the people researching to
> find such obvious conclusions, or me ranting over their research...
>
> Rune

To be fair, there have been plenty of "obvious conclusions", in all
fields, that have not withstood scrutiny under research. There is
plenty of value to seeing whether these intuitive ideas actually hold
up. It wasn't long ago that it was considered "obvious" that ethnic
group X was intellectually inferior, or that religious group Y was
evil, or that the world was flat or that humans could not possibly be
related to apes, etc. Sometimes I feel like the first years of my
undergraduate math education consisted mostly of being beat over the
head with counter-examples to "obvious" truths (of course a connected
space is path connected, of course ZFC can't have a countable model, of
course all subsets of R are measurable, etc.)

In particular, the research might have found that teams with "strong
specialist skills in different departments" were outperformed by teams
with strong specialist skills in the _one_ department that mattered, or
that they outperformed supermen instead of vice-versa (perhaps due to
almost unavoidably having a broader depth of knowledge that outweighed
the communication problems, or perhaps because communication just
wasn't such a big problem), or that skills didn't matter so much since
"innovation" turned out to be mostly a matter of luck once a base skill
level was reached. It might also have found that it didn't matter
whether the members of a team had worked together before or not.

Pretty much any business-management oriented research is going to
involve testing an "obvious" good-sounding idea to see if it really
works or was just pretty rhetoric.

Not to say that this particular research was actually any good.

-Frederick Umminger

Frederick wrote:

> Rune Allnor wrote:
> 
>>I don't know who wastes more time; the people researching to
>>find such obvious conclusions, or me ranting over their research...
>>
>>Rune
> 
> 
> To be fair, there have been plenty of "obvious conclusions", in all
> fields, that have not withstood scrutiny under research. There is
> plenty of value to seeing whether these intuitive ideas actually hold
> up. It wasn't long ago that it was considered "obvious" that ethnic
> group X was intellectually inferior, or that religious group Y was
> evil, or that the world was flat or that humans could not possibly be
> related to apes, etc. Sometimes I feel like the first years of my
> undergraduate math education consisted mostly of being beat over the
> head with counter-examples to "obvious" truths (of course a connected
> space is path connected, of course ZFC can't have a countable model, of
> course all subsets of R are measurable, etc.)
> 
> In particular, the research might have found that teams with "strong
> specialist skills in different departments" were outperformed by teams
> with strong specialist skills in the _one_ department that mattered, or
> that they outperformed supermen instead of vice-versa (perhaps due to
> almost unavoidably having a broader depth of knowledge that outweighed
> the communication problems, or perhaps because communication just
> wasn't such a big problem), or that skills didn't matter so much since
> "innovation" turned out to be mostly a matter of luck once a base skill
> level was reached. It might also have found that it didn't matter
> whether the members of a team had worked together before or not.
> 
> Pretty much any business-management oriented research is going to
> involve testing an "obvious" good-sounding idea to see if it really
> works or was just pretty rhetoric.
> 
> Not to say that this particular research was actually any good.
> 
> -Frederick Umminger
> 
Heavens, just think what it would have meant to us if they found that a 
team run by iron-fisted accountants did well, even with newly-graduated, 
underpaid, bottom-of-the-class engineers doing the design work?

-- 

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google?  See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html

Rune Allnor wrote:

   ...

> While I can agree with the findings -- I used to read a lot of comics
> when I was a kid -- I find it a bit scary that people actually have to
> do research to come up with this conclusion. A team's collective
> skills or knowledge is *not* the sum of the individual's skills,
> it is the sum of what the members are able to communicate between
> themselves. Obviously, one person learning a new trade finds it
> far easier to see how this new set of skills fits in with what he
> knows already, than any two people with different specialities
> trying to solve some problem together.

I was lucky to have a partner (at first my technician, later my 
colleague at two different companies, and still my close friend) with 
whom synergy created abilities neither of us could muster alone. We're 
both pretty competent, but together we can accomplish more than twice 
what either of us can alone. That's rare, but it happens. I'm very lucky.

Jerry
-- 
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
�����������������������������������������������������������������������

Rune Allnor wrote:
> Hi all.
>
>>
> The one type of inovator that beats the "Fantastic 4" team, is the
> "superman", the one individual that have strong skills and knowledge
> in a wide field. While he may not possess the extreme skills of
> any "Fantastic 4" member, he more than makes up with that by
> being able to see the big picture, see how one factor influences
> another and thus maybe avoid pitfalls, or see more effective solutions.
> (and please, Please, PLEASE don't ask me how the authors of the
> study can generalize like that from reading comics...)
>

other stuff trimmed.

> Rune

Hello Rune et. al.,

I've often thought about the team vs superprogrammer problem, in where
to set the threshold for where a team performs better/worse than a
superprogrammer. Back in the early 80s, I worked for an equipment
manufacturer where the product was decomposed into modules where each
module was its own Z-80 processor and its environment. The
superprogrammers had no problem handling assembly language programs (a
complete module) consisting of 30 or more thousand lines of code. And
yes this code used banked memory and nested interrupts and was used for
real time processing in telephony, voice response, and radio paging
systems. Just average programers got lost in code of just a few
thousand lines. And a team approach to individual modules proved
problematic. Maybe due to lack of management or modern structured high
level programming methods.

So there can be some practical applications of this type of research.


Clay

"Clay" <physics@bellsouth.net> writes:
> [...]
> I've often thought about the team vs superprogrammer problem, in where
> to set the threshold for where a team performs better/worse than a
> superprogrammer. Back in the early 80s, I worked for an equipment
> manufacturer where the product was decomposed into modules where each
> module was its own Z-80 processor and its environment. The
> superprogrammers had no problem handling assembly language programs (a
> complete module) consisting of 30 or more thousand lines of code. And
> yes this code used banked memory and nested interrupts and was used for
> real time processing in telephony, voice response, and radio paging
> systems. Just average programers got lost in code of just a few
> thousand lines. And a team approach to individual modules proved
> problematic. Maybe due to lack of management or modern structured high
> level programming methods.
>
> So there can be some practical applications of this type of research.

I think Rune may have already mentioned or intimated this, but it
seems like the tradeoff depends on two key things: how "super" the
superprogrammer is, and the speed of the communication between average
programmers.

In my experience, it seems that a true superprogrammer is much more
efficient - no comparison. The problem is, there are few such
superprogrammers, so software development methodologies in industry 
have come to cater to the interconnected average programmer approach.
-- 
%  Randy Yates                  % "Rollin' and riding and slippin' and
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC            %  sliding, it's magic."
%%% 919-577-9882                %  
%%%% <yates@ieee.org>           % 'Living' Thing', *A New World Record*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

Rune Allnor wrote:

(snip)

> The study shows that *most* succesful "inovators" are teams that
> comrise highly skilled members, who -- at least when they succeed
> in "inovation" -- have worked together on previous occations. Such
> teams have members with strong specialist skilles in different
> departmens. Hence the "Fantastic 4" analogy.

> The one type of inovator that beats the "Fantastic 4" team, is the
> "superman", the one individual that have strong skills and knowledge
> in a wide field. While he may not possess the extreme skills of
> any "Fantastic 4" member, he more than makes up with that by
> being able to see the big picture, see how one factor influences
> another and thus maybe avoid pitfalls, or see more effective solutions.
> (and please, Please, PLEASE don't ask me how the authors of the
> study can generalize like that from reading comics...)

Brooks' "Mythical Man Month" has a pretty good description of
the team size trade-offs for software engineering.  Most of the
examples come from OS/360, as an example of how not to do it.

-- glen

Randy Yates wrote:


> 
> I think Rune may have already mentioned or intimated this, but it
> seems like the tradeoff depends on two key things: how "super" the
> superprogrammer is, and the speed of the communication between average
> programmers.

Both above mentioned qualities are vectors rather then scalars; there 
are many side effects. The task is vector also. The sad truth is most of 
the practical tasks are nothing but a big legwork for a bunch of cheap 
mediocrits.


> In my experience, it seems that a true superprogrammer is much more
> efficient - no comparison. The problem is, there are few such
> superprogrammers, so software development methodologies in industry 
> have come to cater to the interconnected average programmer approach.

This looks like a medieval arguments about knights vs conscript armies. 
  The history showed that the crowds won.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

http://www.abvolt.com

Vladimir Vassilevsky wrote:
> Randy Yates wrote:
>
>
> >
> > I think Rune may have already mentioned or intimated this, but it
> > seems like the tradeoff depends on two key things: how "super" the
> > superprogrammer is, and the speed of the communication between average
> > programmers.
>
> Both above mentioned qualities are vectors rather then scalars; there
> are many side effects. The task is vector also. The sad truth is most of
> the practical tasks are nothing but a big legwork for a bunch of cheap
> mediocrits.

Maybe so, but somebody needs to see the big picture and make sure
that the "mediocrits" don't run around in circles. Taking the history
of warfare as an example, at least two attempts on Russia/Soviet have
failed because of  "trivia": Napoleon's attempt some 200 years ago
because he could not feed his troops, and Hitler's in 1941 because
his troops were not equipped for winter conditions. 

Rune