Good single-function design is the secret

In a competitive and crowded market a trap for new entrants is the temptation to try to do all things well. This goes against the timeless design principle of cohesiveness. Cohesiveness is about ensuring you do the main thing better than the competition. Cohesiveness is particularly important in today's market for high tech products such as portable digital devices and web-based applications.

Way back in the 1930’s researchers from Harvard Business School were running employee feedback research on various proposed innovations in their working conditions on behalf of the telecoms giant Western Electric (now Lucent). The results were quite amazing: they had discovered the Hawthorne Effect.

There are many ways to analyse dysfunctional teams in organisations such as deficiencies in trust, absence of shared objectives, poor co-operative working practices or inappropriate leadership styles/models. However taking a purely biological perspective opens up exciting new possibilities for really transforming these teams performance.