Business performance is on a spectrum. All of the middle comes from pragmatic, left-brained mindsets. Creativity fuels the most brilliant ideas, but also the dumbest ideas.

The ideal team is comprised of the top end of left-brain thinkers and proven right-brained thinkers.

1/?

Should this be a thread? Do we want to dive deeper?

What determines whether a person prefers pragmatic thinking or creative thinking are two psychological traits called Conscientiousness and Openness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

What determines where a person is on the x-axis is Competence, or something I call Fluency.

Fluency can be broken down into 6 elements

1. Personality (see above)
2. Knowledge
3. Skills
4. Experience
5. Analytical Ability
6. Design Ability

1. Personality is the deepest motivator and will steer and nurture the rest. The research on this is interesting and shows great stability in internal motivations, curiosities, and satisfaction/enjoyment/engagement in different work contexts.

2. Knowledge is about detail. How much does the person really know about a subject? How much have they read and researched. Knowledge is still academic, so stay tuned for #4...

3. Skills are the ability to deploy competence. It's what shifts a critic into a creator. A lot of people know about architecture, food, or film, yet can't create these things. Skills are the proven abilities to make, not just to judge.

4. Experience is the real world exposure that supports knowledge. Does a person have real world experience? Have they done the thing they are talking about, or have they just read about it or interviewed people who have done it? If you haven't been there, you're missing fluency.

5. Analytical ability is the specific ability to infer things, to read between the lines, to realize where there is smoke there is fire, and more. People with poor analytical ability cannot accurately surmise the root causes and key influencing factors of something.

6. Design ability is about a person's real ability to turn their skills into intuitive, beautiful, understandable, functional things. Skills allow you to complete the build, but design ability allows you to make the best versions of it and to do so more quickly.

5 of the 6 factors of Fluency are things you can improve and optimize. Invest heavily in your fluency and you move significantly up the x-axis, making every minute of your work more competent and closer to maximum potential.

The ideal team is about scooping from the top of the Fluency distribution and balancing psychological diversity first, and diversity of 2, 3, and 4 second. You always want 5 and 6 to be as high as humanly possible across the entire group.

When you build teams this way, you near-perfectly balance the priorities of today and tomorrow, of the shareholder and the customer. The next requirement is a culture that allows the diversity of the team to mesh rather than clash. That's for another thread. Want that one?