My name's Mark Whiting.
And I'm going to talk about parallel worlds--
repeated initializations of the same team
to improve team viability.
We're going to introduce a technique that
erases bad initial team dynamics through creating
parallel versions of the same team
and keeping their best version.
This is work with some great students
and with Michael Bernstein.
Teams that start off on the wrong foot
often end in fracture.
By this, I mean they end up in a state
where they no longer want to collaborate with each other.
Would a team be more viable if it
could undo those initial interactional missteps
and essentially try again, start over from scratch?
And just to be clear, team viability
here is the team's willingness to continue
collaborating into the future.
This is a commonly used concept in the teams and orgs
literature.
For in-person teams, we can never really answer,
would things have ended up differently
if the team had had a different start?
In online teams however, history could be reset with something
that we call 2-way pseudonym masking.
This is a collaboration environment
that lets each individual see themselves
as a consistent person.
But others see them through pseudonyms.
So ConventionalHorse is known to FastFrog as mightyPony
while FastFrog is known to ConventionalHorse
as littleSnake.
And they can use these names when they collaborate.
And our system automatically converts them
to the right name behind the scenes.
And they can go on to do whatever collaborative task
they need to.
With this, we can create new identities.
We can also do it repeatedly, creating parallel worlds.
These are independent teams with new team dynamics
but all with the same individuals creating the team.
With this system, we can ask a question like,
will the most viable team improve or regress to the mean?
To answer this, we'll reconvene teams, that is,
reestablish an earlier identity.
And what we'll do is start off with several parallel rounds
that have new identities each time.
And then we'll reconvene one of those rounds,
in particular, the one that had the highest
viability from that first set.
And just to be clear, in all these rounds,
we're measuring team viability in a survey
after the round completes.
So I'm going to talk about the best initial round,
the reconvened round, and then the median of the other rounds
being conducted.
And as I said, I'm going to be showing
this against team viability.
And we find that the high viability teams don't lose out
that viability when reconvened.
And they're distinct from the median round.
They're distinctly better, that is.
Just to be clear, this is with MTurk participants in 24 teams,
and they're performing an ad-writing task.
We've also excluded any teams that identify the manipulation
that we're doing.
Now we can push this a little further.
Does the least viable team also improve?
And does it ever beat the most viable one?
In other words, is doing a manipulation
like this even worth it?
So to look at this, we again have parallel rounds
and reconvened rounds.
But this time, we reconvene both the lowest
and the highest viability versions
from those parallel rounds.
So now we'll compare the initial highest,
and the later reconvened highest, and then
the initial lowest, and the later reconvened lowest team.
And we see that all the teams improve over time when they're
reconvened, but starting on the best foot was always better.
That is to say that the later highest and the initial highest
were statistically better than the later lowest.
We also show that neither discourse patterns,
nor a performance metric by running
the ads these teams produce on a real ad network,
show correlation with team viability.
What we've shown is that this parallel world intervention
can be used to reset teams so they start off
on their best foot.
And we show that although team viability tends to improve,
the most viable teams keep their advantage over the others.
So it's a worthwhile intervention when possible.
And with the system, we believe remote organizations
could extend this and form stronger teams
without needing to change resources they already have.
We also in the paper included recommendations and precautions
to avoid abuse of this mechanism.
Critically, our infrastructure is available for others
to use if they are interested.
I've been Mark Whiting, and I've been
talking about parallel worlds.
I'd like to thank all of our founders,
but in particular the incredible workers
of Amazon Mechanical Turk and my great collaborators.