One secret on building digital effective teams
As I recently ended the “How to manage a remote team” course by GitLab and also started some new projects, I am more interested in how different teams work and what drives them to success.
I recently found out (thank you, @BogdanNitu) an idea that Nick Law, VP — Marcom Integration at Apple, stated some years ago. At that time he was working at R/GA while presenting an effective team as being composed by:
- Systematic thinkers that understand how each node plays with each other and can look at all the implications simultaneously.
- Storytelling thinkers that have the ability to distill everything in a narrative and creative way.
Building a team with this equilibrium you will get:
“a lovely tension between simplicity and possibility. When that tension is absent, when all you have is simplicity, you just have simple brand storytellers, really just a lucid brand, but without innovation. And when you just have systematic thinkers’ input of possibility, then you get really interesting and multiple tactics that don’t ladder up to a simple brand idea. So that’s how we can tell whether or not we have the balance right; whether things are simple but not innovative, or innovative but not lucid. That balance becomes very important, that interplay. This doesn’t mean that underneath that organizing principle, you won’t have all sorts of different combinations: art directors, copywriters, data scientists, and strategists, and all sorts of other combinations, but that’s the sort of balance you should try to achieve in building a project team: a balance between storytelling and systematic thinkers.”
For inspiration on this topic, I recommend this interview:
