The Sum Of Their Parts

One of the things that fascinates me about the world we live in – a world so dominated by media and “reportage of real events” is the often complete divorce of reality and things people “know.”

Let me put this another way – when I was a kid, I would get up in the morning, go out back, tell what the weather was. The facts that mattered for my day: whether grandma would allow me to go get rabbit grass with her; how the cats were doing; if the fish monger had come, were all things I could ascertain. From those I deduced certain patterns, like, I could go grass-gathering with grandma if it weren’t raining. I could count on the fish monger on Tuesday. From that I could extrapolate larger patterns.

This is how our ancestors gathered information, I think, plus the elders of the tribe would say something like “Don’t pull tail of sleeping lion.” In every generation someone would, and it would get its reward, and they’d KNOW it was true.

Unfortunately we live in a complex and rich enough society that this is no longer true. Most of our perceptions of how things work come at two or three removes, starting with the school where the teachers get their perceptions from the people who taught him who often got them from some theorist who had a lovely idea that he didn’t allow facts to clutter.

And then there’s narrativium. Some concepts just work great for stories, even though they’re false. Like, the idea that criminals are victims or suffer from low self esteem. It allows for such a climatic turn around on the book.

The problem is we read it over and over again, and at some level start believing it. And then we try to apply it in reality, and it fails, and we keep trying. (Lack of self esteem creates neurotics and paranoiacs, not criminals.)

The other myth is team work. My own experience with group work is that in very rare occasions when each person takes the part of the project they’re best in and each of them is very good at it, it’s a thing of beauty. Most of the time, it’s sharing of ignorance and kowtowing to the biggest personality, not necessarily the best knowledge/ability.

But my son, Robert Hoyt, says it so much better than I could and relates it to writing believable teams:

Teamwork – by Robert Hoyt

As I made breakfast this morning, I was thinking about the nature of a team. More specifically, I was thinking about how teams are applied, or more to the point, misapplied, in fiction.

I’ll be honest, up front. Most everything people typically say about teams has always sounded entirely wrong to me. The idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts has an application, I’ll admit that. But for me, it isn’t here.

I say that because every team is dependent on the individual worth of the members. And the maximum amount of talent any one individual in the team has is, for all intents and purposes, the maximum amount of talent the team has in that area. One million dime-a-dozen modern artists, even united in such an efficient way that they could all have input without trampling each other, would still never touch a single Van Gogh or Da Vinci. All they can do is magnify their lack of ability to eleven.

I’m not saying that a team has equal effectiveness in dealing with something as each individual member of the team sent out one at a time. But that doesn’t say a thing about the strength of a team. The function of the team in this instance is rearranging existent strengths so they coincide. It is akin to parallel processing. It is not that any of the functions I called became any better because I spun them off to separate threads and calculated them simultaneously. The overall result is better because I arranged the functions themselves to do everything at the same time.

I realize this is a generalization, of course. Certainly, it depends on what the team’s goal is. Where each team member must act to maintain the safety of every other team member, and thus input from all the individuals is necessary for maximal efficiency of one individual, I understand how many would feel that the team is a source of strength. On the other hand, that requires qualification. The fact that they are in a team is not adding strength, it is distributing a task each member would otherwise have to devote a larger amount of mental space to across all the members. It thus frees up strength that would otherwise have been inefficiently used, because the task has been made partially redundant. Contrary to nearly every 80s underdog sports film, working effectively as a team will not remedy your problems if no one in the team has the necessary skill.

It was this thought, in turn, that lead me to the nature of a team in writing. It is often said that a team is a team because each of the people involved have a common goal. But that does not mean they all believe the goal worthwhile, necessarily, nor does it imply that they have common motives in seeking the goal. People may work towards a common goal because they were forced to, because they have no reason not to, because they had no other goal at the time, or because the goal is better than the alternative to achieving it.

With that comes the distinct theoretical possibility that every single member of a team is seeking a similar goal for different reasons. On the surface that may seem so obvious it doesn’t even bear mentioning, so let me illustrate the meaning of that a little further with an example.

In the Wizard of Oz, you might be tempted to say that there are four different motivations driving the main characters to seek the assistance of the wizard. If you think about it, however, you’ll realize there are actually two, at most. Despite the different manifestations, the tin man, the scarecrow, and the lion are all driven by a conscious desire to fulfill some personality defect from the beginning. Dorothy is a little more complicated. She is more or less an archetypical Campbellian hero, and her express quest is to return home. In order to do that, however, she must complete her secret quest, which is, like the others, to overcome a personal lack. In this case, it is something that she demonstrated at the beginning of the book but is unwilling to even recognize: she is prone to running away from her problems rather than facing them. In some sense (and probably this is why I’ve never liked the story much), her awkward traveling companions are far more self-aware than she is. On the other hand, her quest is distinguished from the others because the trait she seeks she must actively develop, while the others already have the traits they desire and lack only awareness.

But in reality, the extreme unity of purpose in the Wizard of Oz is very much an exception. Especially because different team members cultivate different skills and, often, have different personalities that drove them to cultivate those skills, the idea that they would all have a common motivation in seeking a goal is almost absurd.

Again, to provide an example, even something as bland as a typical RPG quest to destroy a great evil can entice a plethora of heroes with myriad motivations. A person may seek to destroy a great evil because it hurts other people, and they therefore are morally opposed. A similar motivation that leads to a totally different dynamic is the person who does it because it has hurt them, or someone they love, and they are seeking revenge. It could be threatening to cause them harm, and they are going on the defensive. Or perhaps the evil is hoarding something valuable, and someone is along because they want a cut. Maybe a person is fighting because another person is fighting, and they have an intrinsic trust of that person and their judgment. Or perhaps the motivation is much larger, and the character’s problem is political, or philosophical. A character may even fight because the great evil is unwanted competition. And the list goes on.

All these motivations could be paired with an infinite array of different characters and personalities. The personal challenges that characters face along the way, and their ultimate quests, will vary according to these factors and many others. And here I’m admittedly taking a page from Dwight V. Swain: these goals may be real or imagined, and it is not necessarily the case – indeed, it is very rarely the case – that this is the true problem they must face. Almost any other goal could be the true obstacle they must overcome to complete their quest, otherwise known as their “secret” goal. A hero may be using his righteous anger at evil in general to mask the desire for revenge to a personal slight.

With that in mind, I’ll admit to a low tolerance for a team of cookie cutter heroes off to save the world because they all dislike evil. My problem with it, and the whole reason I’m writing this article, is that it treats a team as a character, rather than as a group of characters. Not only does it read as strange and two dimensional, but it ignores a world of possibilities for character interactions as characters debate and discuss the relative merits of their personal motivations, or bump heads because these motivations lead to different approaches to solving obstacles.

That’s why, certainly from a writing standpoint, I ultimately feel justified in asserting that a good team is not the fodder of Nike ads. A good team is not made by people with the same motivations all taking the same preset approaches. A good team is not a character in its own right that supersedes all the personalities that constitute it. A good team is, at its heart, an organization of individuals who all have distinct and valuable contributions, and needs to be treated as such. The best teams are groups of characters that bring different motivations, and therefore approaches and values, to a problem. This both provides the philosophical meat of a story and simultaneously prevents redundancy among characters, making the contributions of each character more necessary. And that helps keep your story interesting, as well as giving your reader something to think about when they finish reading.

So can a team be greater than the sum of its parts? Well, yes and no. The ability to bring different strengths and weaknesses will get all the characters farther than any individual could have gone. In that sense, the team is more than the sum of its parts. But in order to make it more meaningful than a predetermined “Chekov’s Team”, the team can’t start that way. A team has to start as slightly less than the sum of its parts. They are more interesting, their success is more meaningful, and the individual character growth more believable, when there is always the tiniest bit of friction between the characters and who they are.

In other words, for a team to be greater than the sum of its parts, all the parts have to be a little too big to begin with. By the end of the story, when they’ve all had their rough edges knocked off by each other, every character will be exactly as big as they can possibly be while still remaining in a team. In the end, that will make them a stronger and more capable team than a team of like-minded yes men who set off on a quest together. And thus, they will be better able to take advantage of those benefits a team provides.

Crossposted at According To Hoyt