Have we gone too far with “Teams”?

In this article, I question corporate culture’s tendency to focus exclusively on the concept of team and collaboration. Firstly, I have to say I am not knocking teams. All I am proposing is that space should be considered to accommodate, nurture and provide support for creativity and individualism.

I could easily have renamed this article “Team vs Individual”. First some background. I recently stumbled across this video posted on Dave’s Garage which explores collaboration vs creativity in the context of autism. If you watch the video, at the end Dave introduces a 10 second autism test. I won’t spoil it for you — just go watch the video all the way through and take the test.

As I watched this video, it caused me to reflect and question common corporate culture which is deafeningly centered around the concept of team and collaboration. This makes sense to a degree. An enterprise needs multiple disciplines that exceed the realm of expertise and capacity of a single person.

There is after all “No i in Team” or so they say.

Software development, my chosen profession since the beginning of my career is indeed a team sport. Modern software development teams are often referred to as squads or scrum teams. The very term “Scrum” is taken straight from the Rugby field — another team sport. We do so love our sports metaphors in corporate culture don’t we?

There is a point of diminishing returns. We know that a team can break down once it reaches a certain size. What happens in a large team is communication breaks down and there can be a diffusion of responsibility. Amazon famously popularized the idea of the “two pizza team:” if a team couldn’t be fed with two pizzas, it was too big. My personal experience over the years does indeed confirm this idea that big teams suck and small teams are better.

What is an ideal team size though? Can we go smaller? How about a team of just 1?

This may seem striking. But, here are some thoughts to ponder. The book you are currently reading — was it written by a team? The painting you have hanging in your living room — was that the work of a team?

The open source community is full of examples of extraordinary solo efforts that demonstrate creativity over collaboration. A wonderful example, is the story of the web framework “Ruby on Rails”.

Before “Ruby on Rails”, there were two dominant choices for web app development in the early 2000s. J2EE (aka Java EE now known as Jakarta EE) was one of those (the other one was .NET from Microsoft).

J2EE, as it was known in the early 2000s, is a set of published specifications developed using the Java Community Process. The vendors in the space would come together to collaborate and define the specifications and would compete on implementation. The standard of that time, was J2EE 1.4 and comprised of an expert group 18 companies/experts. It is a good example of “Collaboration”. Although comprehensive, it was extremely complicated and lacked sophistication and simplicity resulting in a poor developer experience.

David Heinemeier Hansson, a young solo developer at the time from Denmark decided to create something that was sophisticated, far simpler than J2EE yielding a far superior developer experience. It is a good example of “Creativity”. It was a good example of individualism. Ruby on Rails became an extraordinary success used by hundreds of thousands of developers.

To wrap-up, Id like to see equal emphasis on the power of the (often introverted often overlooked) individual and not just the emphasis on team. Maybe this is the key to unlocking innovation within the enterprise.

If you are interested in learning more about the story of Ruby on Rails, I recommend this highly polished documentary.