This ties into Pattern’s comment too. Spreading out the skills across people introduces a bunch of problems:
For the sort of problems which lend themselves to breakthroughs in the first place, the key is often one discrete insight. There’s no good way to modularize the problem; breaking it up won’t help find the key piece. (This is a GEM consequence: if it’s modularizable, it’s probably already been modularized.)
Group dynamics: Isaac Asimov wrote a great piece about this. Creative problem-solving requires an exploratory mindset, and you need the right sort of group setup to support that. Also it doesn’t scale well with group size.
Translation: different specialties use different jargon, and somebody needs to do the work of translating. Translation can be spread across two people, but that means spending a lot of time on “hey what’s the word for a crunchy sweet red fruit that’s sort of spherical?” It’s much faster if one person knows both languages.
Unknown unknowns: if each person only knows one field well, then there may be a solution in one field for a problem in the other, and neither person even thinks to bring it up. It’s tough to know what kinds of things are available in a field you don’t know.
All that said, obviously working in groups can theoretically leverage scale with less personal cost.
This ties into Pattern’s comment too. Spreading out the skills across people introduces a bunch of problems:
For the sort of problems which lend themselves to breakthroughs in the first place, the key is often one discrete insight. There’s no good way to modularize the problem; breaking it up won’t help find the key piece. (This is a GEM consequence: if it’s modularizable, it’s probably already been modularized.)
Group dynamics: Isaac Asimov wrote a great piece about this. Creative problem-solving requires an exploratory mindset, and you need the right sort of group setup to support that. Also it doesn’t scale well with group size.
Translation: different specialties use different jargon, and somebody needs to do the work of translating. Translation can be spread across two people, but that means spending a lot of time on “hey what’s the word for a crunchy sweet red fruit that’s sort of spherical?” It’s much faster if one person knows both languages.
Unknown unknowns: if each person only knows one field well, then there may be a solution in one field for a problem in the other, and neither person even thinks to bring it up. It’s tough to know what kinds of things are available in a field you don’t know.
All that said, obviously working in groups can theoretically leverage scale with less personal cost.
Heuristics left as an exercise to the reader.
What is GEM?
Generalized Efficient Markets—if something is easy and obvious, someone else is already doing it.