%% date:: [[2023-06-14]] parent:: %% # [[It Only Takes One Genius]] speaker:: "[[Isabel Evans]]" - Failure is useful and sometimes a good thing. - Book on teamwork: Achieving Software Quality through Teamwork (but with only one author) > [!abstract] Premise > Our projects are hard... would a genius help? Or would that just mess it up? ## What is genius? - Guided by the gods - Very narrow description. If you didn't fit into it, then you had a mental health problem. - Tortured misfit, brilliant but lacking imagination ### Genius in poetry > [!quote] Wordsworth > Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, > But to be young was very heaven! - Coleridge: a tortured misfit - Lord Byron - Shelley - Mary Shelley: [[Frankenstein]] - [[Ada Lovelace]] - Never fully built a computer... lots of ideas left unfinished - Didn't talk to stakeholders - Classic case of geniuses stuffing it up - [[Florence Nightingale]] - Martineau - [[Alan Turing]]: [[The Turing Test]]: a good communicator > [!quote] Alan Turing on innovation > Sometimes it's the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine. - [[Wernher von Braun]]: genius isn't always ethical - [[Alan Cooper]]: book about high-tech products and the issues with the industry - genius is not always understanding ### What genius is not - receptive or original - it's understanding what's going on - connecting concepts: [[Personal Knowledge Management]] - expertise - Expertise takes work, not just raw talent. - [[Einstein]] was a team player. His papers were team efforts. - about knowing everything - Stupidity is more useful than genius - [[Dorothy Graham]]: Naïve questioning - the ability to ask stupid questions is one of the most important things we can bring to a team ## Genius of a team - ... not an individual - [[Intelligence]]s - Maths/Logical - Linguistic - Spatial/dimensional - Musical - Bodily/kinesthetic - Natural - Interpersonal - Intrapersonal - Hire people who have different intelligences. - Isabel is writing a research paper called *Artists to Urban Planners* about the people who are doing the testing. - Cooking analogy: ingredients need to have heat applied to them to come up with a winning dish ## Conclusions - Genius can be a good thing or a bad thing - Communication trumps genius - Genius is the movement of ideas between us - Ideas only work if you share them - [[Learning in public]]