June 14th: What Really Makes Team Work

This article highlights on what makes a team effective. Alex Pentland is someone who has researched this topic in depth. Some of the findings he discovered were that the most successful teams interact in 3 specific ways: they come up with a large portion of ideas, they engage in "dense interactions," and everyone contributes. "Dense interactions" was a term I was confused by until he explains that it is "alternating between advancing their own ideas and responding to the contributions of others with 'good,' 'right,' 'what?' and other super-short comments that signal consensus on an idea's value, good or bad." I found the information interesting that you lose social signals when using digital communication, and that when digital interaction is effective it is because the people communicating most likely have a face-to-face relationship. I completely agree with this because it has been quite challenging working on a group project with people you are only communicating with digitally, and have never met before in person.