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By Root 387 0

of movies this is an unusual story. But in Kasparov versus the World this kind of occurrence wasn’t a lucky one-off, it was the essence of the way the World Team played. There was no preplanned, static division of labor, as in a conventional organization. Instead, there was a dynamic division of labor, in which every player on the World Team had the opportunity, at least in principle, to be involved in every move.

Let me make more precise what I mean by a dynamic division of labor. It’s a division of labor where all participants in a collaboration can respond to the problems at hand, as they arise. Zacary Brown saw ASSET’s problem, and realized he could solve it. Yasha followed along the World Team’s progress, and realized he had a special insight at move 26. And all participants in the Polymath Project could follow the rapidly evolving conversation, and jump in whenever they had a special insight. In conventional offline organizations, such flexible responses are usually only possible in small groups, if at all. In larger groups different group members focus on their own preassigned areas of responsibility. Online tools change this, making it possible for large groups to harness each participant’s special areas of microexpertise, just-in-time as the need for that expertise arises. That’s what I mean by a dynamic division of labor. Ideally, as we saw earlier, this will lead to designed serendipity. But even when that doesn’t happen, the dynamic division of labor is still strikingly different from the conventional static division of labor.

None of this is to deny the value of a static division of labor. We’ve achieved enormous improvements in our ability to manufacture goods by improving the static division of labor—think of Henry Ford’s assembly line, or even Adam Smith’s hypothetical pin factory. But while such a division of labor is well suited to the manufacture of goods, using a predictable and repetitive process, it’s been less useful in solving hard creative problems. The reason is that in creative work it’s often the unplanned and unexpected insights and connections that matter the most. In many cases, what makes a creative insight important is precisely the fact that it combines ideas that previously were thought to be unrelated. The more unrelated, the more important the connection—recall the astounding connectionnstein and Grossmann made between gravity and Riemannian geometry. Because of this, the greatest creative work can’t be planned as part of a conventional static division of labor. No one could have predicted that Kasparov versus the World would unfold the way it did, and so it wasn’t possible to anticipate that Krush’s special microexpertise would be needed to cope with the position that occurred at move 10. And it certainly wasn’t possible to anticipate the need for Yasha on move 26. It was only possible to do that division of labor dynamically, as the situation arose.

The reason this all matters is that for hard creative problems, until recently we’ve had to rely on the genius of individuals and small groups, and lucky occasional serendipitous interactions. This limits the range of expertise that can be brought to bear. Even in a task such as movie making, with its reputation for being free-wheeling, the major creative decisions are mostly made by a small number of people. Now, it should be said that modern organizations aren’t completely wed to the static assembly-line style of doing things. They often achieve a dynamic division of labor on a small scale, with small groups working in creative teams. That happens, for instance, in movie productions, and it also happens in many other creative organizations, including celebrated organizations such as Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, or the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Management techniques such as Total Quality Management and lean manufacturing incorporate ideas that help enable a more dynamic division of labor—a famous example is the way Toyota delegates to factory workers great responsibility for finding and fixing manufacturing