1 + 1 ≠ 3

It always bothers me, for obvious reasons, when I see someone on LinkedIn use “1 + 1 = 3” as a metaphor for describing the idea that a team can produce more than the sum of its parts. The latter is true, and you don’t need room for disbelief to demonstrate it mathematically.

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I’m sure that economists have worked productivity models out far more deeply than I can possibly imagine, but a simple update to the original equation produces the desired effect, at least for social media’s purposes:

In the above equation, the parenthetical 1’s represent individual production in isolation, X represents a kind of “cohesion” variable, and Y represents output. You can see that if X is positive, the team will produce more than its component parts; if zero, exactly the sum of its component parts; and if negative, less than the sum of its component parts.

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What might affect X? Leadership, hiring people with complementary hard skills and at least adequate soft skills, compensation structures, the list goes on…but basically, culture.

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This simple if flawed update has far more explanatory power than Orwellian nonsense, and I recommend we update the way that us non-experts mathematically describe the output teams so that we don’t lose ourselves by way of our own imprecision.

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For the record, in the above equation, X needs to be log₂(3), or roughly .585, to equal 3. No Big Brother required!

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