Imagine gathering together one hundred people who all wanted to build a bridge across a canyon. They’ve never met before, and the only thing they know about one another is that they share this goal. You drop them off at the edge of the canyon and leave, leaving behind no instructions or directions, but plenty of tools and resources.
What do you think will happen?
I’ll tell you what won’t happen – they won’t flawlessly and immediately get to work. This isn’t a hive of bees or a colony of ants with a prior, established social order. These are one hundred humans, and before one hundred humans can work together on anything, someone will have to establish order.
And with one hundred humans, that’s no small feat.
Even if you imagine that the desire to build the bridge is so strong in every individual that they’re willing to stick it out, it still might take weeks before the group has organized into anything cohesive enough to begin. Who’s in charge? Who will do what? Who will decide those things? How can they change? How will the rewards be split?
If you repeated this experiment one hundred times, with one hundred different groups, the final quality of each bridge would be far, far more dependent on how each group handled this initial organization than it would be on, for example, the actual engineering abilities of the individuals in the group.
That skill – the ability to organize people – is incredibly rare. And most people don’t even understand it, let alone have it. People use the phrase “herding cats,” but that always makes me laugh. Herding cats is way easier. Most cats share the same motivations, for one. And for two, most cats are smaller than you, and can’t object to being tricked or forced. If I want a hundred cats to go into a barn, I could manage that far easier than I could manage to get a hundred humans to build that barn.
This is one of those things that most people simply can’t believe is that difficult until they’ve tried it and failed miserably. It’s one of those tasks that looks so much easier on paper, because on paper all the different people are profiles and you’re just trying to solve an organizational puzzle. That’s tricky enough, but it’s solvable. But then once you start to put your fancy little org chart into practice and people just… don’t do it, then you realize all the different layers of communication, buy-in, negotiation, motivation, conflict resolution, and rapport you need to manage to be even mildly successful.
People are so harsh on “bosses” – managers are seen as this parasite class of people that contribute nothing but steal credit and value. And look, sure, some are really bad. Some are a hindrance and are doing more harm than good. But that’s just further demonstration of how hard it is to be good at this.
The next time you see something impressive get done by any group of people larger than about five, just take a moment and remember how incredibly impressive it is that anyone managed to organize that effort. Maybe one person out of a hundred is good at it – if that.
The Opportunity Machine 