Have you heard about the theory of “strength of weak ties” ? Weak ties are those people with whom you interact rarely. Your acquaintances and colleagues you only talk once a while. Their strengths come from exactly this limited interaction. As you don’t interact often with them, chances are high that they know things you…
The news by Google on how to create a dream team stimulated some conversation in my academic circles. Especially the point that Google was not able to replicate the importance of team composition created some stir. For me, this was obvious. I never considered team composition to be an important factor predicting team performance. Of…
The New York Times described Google’s finding about what makes teams effective as “surprising” . The article tells the story of how members of Project Aristotle analyzed huge amount of data, looking for patterns that explain why certain teams are more effective than others. Their first culprit, team composition, turned out to not explain anything.…
Featured image from Humans of SBE. It shows Wim Gijselaers, Full Professor in Education & Chair of the Department of Educational Research & Development It happened as an accident, one of those side-effects of doing research on teams. A colleague was researching teams and needed to select the best task for it. She already settled on…
Archimedes Eureka moment, finding out how to measure the volume of irregular objects, is well-known for two reasons: (1) He apparently ran naked through the streets and (2) he connected a personal experience (seeing the water swap over the edges) to the problem of how to assess the purity of the irregular gold crown of…
Changing Learning and Working 