The Intelligent Teams Manifesto
In this post I’m hoping to find a punchy summary for 4e Cognitive Science as it relates to agile teams. I’ve been trying to distil down the ideas from the last 6 months into an overall schema that can be shared and understood easily, so this is the first attempt.1
The project I’m engaged in is about building Intelligent Teams. Intelligent Teams face certain problems and are well adapted to solving those problems. That’s kind of it. The issue is that it’s hard to know what makes a team well adapted for a particular problem. My bet is that we can learn about intelligence from Cognitive Science, and apply some insights when we think about our teams.
The 4E Cognitive Science tradition asserts that human intelligence and cognition (which I will carelessly start to use as synonyms…) is
Embodied - Cognition is just about what happens in the brain, but also about what happens in the rest of the body
Embedded - Cognition is not limited to the body of the organism being studied, but also includes the relationship between the organism the cultural and physical environment in which it is embedded
Enacted - Cognition is not just about processes that happen in the mind or brain of the organism leading to action, rather action and perception are entwined and are fundamental elements of cognition
Extended - Cognition is not just limited to the skin of the organism, but is also extended through the tools (which includes shared narrative and social structures) which exist outside of the body
We can quibble about some of those definitions and whether and where there is overlap or redundancy but thats the essence of the topic as far as I see it.
Which leads us to a team - what does this 4e cognitive science paradigm have to do with agility?
Part of the 4e cognitive science is the notion that our minds emerge from the interactions of many simpler processes and functions. In the same way that an orchestra is more than just the individual musicians, it is rather an emergent phenomenon arising from interactions between musicians, instruments and the score they are playing. Marvin Minsky called this in the human context the ‘Society of Mind’.
So just as my own personal mind emerges from the interaction of many individual parts, a team is the the mind that emerges from the interactions between individual team members, playing a certain role, within a problem space.
The team is a kind of mind, and therefore we can apply some of the principles of cognitive science to it. Just as the Agile Manifesto set forth a new paradigm for building software, the Intelligent Teams Manifesto might say
Embodied - Team cognition is not just about how individual people think through a problem, rather it is about how the whole team ‘body’ interacts with a problem. Just as a human body has evolved to make certain things easy (e.g. walking) and certain things hard (e.g. surviving a fall from a tall tree), a team with its members’ skills, experiences and size will make certain actions hard and some easy.
Embedded - Team cognition is not isolated to the team alone, but rather is interwoven with the rest of the organisation and beyond. If we are considering how to make a more intelligent team, we need to look at how to change elements that sit outside of the team body
Enacted - Team cognition is not just about processing a problem once and being done with it, rather the team will need to learn through action-perception loops. An intelligent team has fast feedback cycles between actions and effects, and will be well adapted to work iteratively and progressively.2
Extended - Team cognition doesn’t just happen in the minds of the team members and in their conversations, but happens through the tools the team uses to do their work and the stories that the team tells about the work and the organisation.
I know, it needs to be punchier. It’ll get there.
Practically speaking I’ve got more work to do to tell you what that means, but my goal here is to create a new philosophical paradigm for thinking about teams from which future, more practically minded work can flow.
If I can help people realise that this thing they think of as a team is not atomised and isolated, but rather entangled and dynamically interwoven with the wider organisation and environment and acts as a kind of distributed mind, then real and meaningful opportunities for interventions will begin to arise.
For a richer treatment, check out my conversation with Dave Snowden, and my post pondering about Embodied Cognition in organisational process
This is at the essence of Scrum and the Agile Manifesto - discovering how to solve a problem by starting to solve the problem and seeing where you get to.
I like this. As you say, imperfect...but that is possibly why I like it. We are imperfect creatures, always striving for better. Your 4e manifesto is an open, flexible (and introspective) beginning for exploring ourselves, our environment and our work.