Complimentary Collaborators

Who's your go-to collaborator? There's incredible power in pairs, as demonstrated throughout the history of art, science, invention, and discovery. Lennon had McCartney. Kahneman had Tversky. Anthony had Stanton. Hewlett had Packard. Crick had Watson. So did Holmes. The power of a dynamic duo is that they not only complement, but amplify one another's contributions.

I was struck by this touching description of the collaborative dynamic between two of the three co-Nobel Prize winners who invented the transistor:

"Bardeen (who would later become the only physicist to win two Nobel Prizes) and Brattain--brain and hands, introvert and extrovert--discovered they worked well together. Indeed, they sometimes seemed hardly able to function independently. 'I was the experimentalist and Bardeen was the theorist,' Brattain would later recall, 'and in fact there were occasions where I had to go to another department and Bardeen was left in the lab and he was anxious to get the experiment done and I said, "Well, there it is, John, I'll be back in about an hour." And I'd come back in about an hour and John would be gone and I'd ask the other people in the lab what happened and they'd say, "Oh, he worked for about five minutes and said, 'Oh!' and left."'" (Excerpt from "The Idea Factory")

Such pairings, when working with closely, can drive significant "Ideaction," the portmanteau I've playfully used to describe the state where the friction between having an idea and taking action upon it has been so reduced that they almost become a singular event, rather than disparate activities.

The state of ideation can be achieved on the team scale, as described elsewhere, on the pairing scale, and even on the individual scale. But it's harder for individuals, as the risk of poor experimental hygiene increases once both parts of the equation exist in a single person's brain.

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