How would you build a humanity-saving product if you don't know what each member of the team IS capable of?
In 1971 the philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice. It contained an idea called the "veil of ignorance".
It is a thought experiment where you make decisions about a social structure without knowing what position you will occupy within it. So you don't know what colour you are, your wealth, intelligence, gender etc.
You could be white, you could be black, you could be poor, you could be rich, but you don't know. In these circumstances, how would you create a society where you aren't discriminated against, for example?
For our thought experiment using the "veil of ignorance”, you are part of a team that is building a product that will save humanity.
You are one of ten in the team.
The team has the skills and knowledge to do it but you have no idea what each individual is capable of. You only know your own capabilities.
There is a hierarchy within the team but no one knows what it is and where they fit into it.
You know the importance of the product but not 'why' it needs to exist. The 'why' being the fundamental reason it's needed. Like peeling back the layers of an onion till you get to the centre. You need to find the centre. The need to save humanity is not the 'why', the 'why' will be closer to what has actually happened so that people need saving.
You have 6 months from the first meeting to the product being in people's hands.
What do you do?
What do you need to find out?
How would you find it out?
Do you focus on the product or worry about who is in charge before doing anything?
Tick tock!
This is my view.
Listening is the answer to resolving this conundrum. The hierarchy is an irrelevance when no one knows what it is. If you asked yourself the question - Would knowing the hierarchy help you and the team solve the problem? What would your answer be? Mine is it doesn’t help at all, and it would be actually detrimental to solving the problem.
The moment you understood the hierarchy, you then have to combat it. Flattening the hierarchy is essential, but if there effectively wasn’t one in the first place, you’d all be in a much better position. It takes effort to flatten the hierarchy and time is against you. Hierarchy is the enemy of complex problem-solving.
At the beginning, do we need to understand each and everyone’s capabilities before we start the task of solving the problem? Again, I think not. If you listen to each other to truly understand, you would find out much more about each individual, through the answers they give, than you ever would by asking - What are you good at? Most people would struggle to answer that question anyway. They spend all day being themselves and genuinely intelligent people have no clue what they are good at as they realise there is so much they don’t already know.
Due to the ‘veil of ignorance’, there is a very real chance people might not want to say anything through fear of being judged. If you don’t know anything about someone, you could be very guarded in your responses. So you need a way of enabling psychological safety to occur, where every member of the team feels they can contribute without fear of being judged, shouted down, etc.
The first thing the team needs to do is discover the ‘why’. Without that, humanity is not going to be saved as you’d build the wrong thing - you would build a thing that solves something else, not what you set out to solve.
Then, once you understand that, what are the absolute minimum requirements for the product to succeed and save humanity? What is the worst-case scenario, what are the characteristics of the most vulnerable person? If the product works for them, it works for everyone.
This is where I would start, and I would use Equal Value Thinking to do it, as it’s designed to enable everyone to be listened to, flatten the hierarchy, allow psychological safety to emerge, and find all the ideas that are needed to solve a complex problem.