The secrets of teamwork? No bias, openness and rationality, says Team-Insider

A few years ago, Google’s secret experimental wing embarked on a simple quest: to find out what makes a great team.

“X,” as the grand piano is called, in no way makes it sound like something out of a James Bond novel called “Project Aristotle,” which only added to the idea that it was all run by someone, the one Cat on a tropics patted island.

In fact, the experiment was conducted by one of Google’s People Analytics directors named Abeer Dubey, who after thousands of hours of research and a ton of company money spent bringing hundreds of different people together on different projects, concluded that, “We however, many had no evidence that a mix of particular personality types, skills, or backgrounds made any difference. “

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He found that the “who” on the team didn’t seem to matter, or at least they couldn’t determine who was good and who was bad.

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Daniel Ricciardo’s battle for “feel” at McLaren is a reminder that turning is a lot harder than sticking to F1

If they had taken the sport as the only example and looked at the best “team”, few would have argued if they had chosen the Mercedes F1 team, the reigning world champion of the last seven seasons.

It’s also a complex and diverse team. The company directly employs 1,000 people at its Brackley site, and 700 more work at its Brixworth plant and produce engines for Mercedes and Williams.

The actual material that makes the car run is being developed by a small team of around 40 people in the Petronas research wing in Italy and Malaysia, including Dr. Andrea Dolfi, Petronas’ Head of Research and Development for Fluid Technology Solutions (AGVS). He joined Petronas’ motorsport activity wing in 2013 – just before the start of seven consecutive championship wins. As such, he has a novel way of looking at one of the most successful teams in the world while looking at one of the most successful teams in the world while also having access to information and processes that no outsider can ever access. Dr. Dolfi describes motorsport activities as the “cherry on the cake” of what his wing of the company does as a whole.

“Motorsport is an exhibition space to promote our technical and scientific skills,” he says I.

“Together we cook some of the chemistry that we have researched and contribute to motorsport’s search for performance [organisation] that we support.

“My research topics are very different. Fluid technology solution means that we deal with all of the chemistry and chemical process involved with fluids in the oil and gas industry: gasoline lubricants, refinery intermediates, functional fluids. “

Motorsport may just be the cherry on the cake, but that doesn’t mean less work is required. Perhaps more, especially given that Team Petronas’ main sponsorship is estimated to be tens of millions of dollars annually.

“Motorsport is demanding in terms of time and work,” adds Dr. Dolfi added.

“Formula 1 never stops all year round. In and out of season, it continues to improve.

“It’s pretty resource efficient, but it has a good return on engineering understanding as we demonstrate some of our scientific formulation science.”

The difficulty is getting the majority of 2,000 people to work together properly: some in the UK, some in Italy, some farther away, everyone working to make the same two cars drive on one track in every corner the world that the F1 circus stopped this Sunday afternoon. What should a mechanic in Northamptonshire care for a theoretical chemist in Italy? But that was never a problem at Mercedes.

“Petronas has sponsored Formula 1 for more than 25 years,” says Dr. Dolfi.

“When we took over Mercedes in 2010, Petronas was in Formula 1, but didn’t achieve that much. [They could have said] ‘Who are these people?’. But what I liked [Mercedes] is that they weren’t biased. “We have to work with you, let’s work.”

“They haven’t clung to the past or what they know. They were very open-minded, both emotionally and rationally. It was like painting on a fresh whiteboard together and that worked pretty well! “

This is in line with what Dubey found from Google. Although he couldn’t identify the “who” of the projects, he was able to produce some of the “why”, and the central key to any successful team was psychological stability: the idea that everyone felt safe when taking risks to go to work without fear of embarrassment or punishment.

In Formula 1, this becomes clear when the regulations change, when those in power pass on thick bundles of technical regulations for the next season or the next seasons of sporting competition. Most recently, Dr. Dolfi is switching to more sustainable fuels, so-called biofuels.

The sport is actually already running on them, but authorities want to double the percentage of fuel that is sustainable ethanol in order to one day use 100 percent sustainable fuels.

And that’s the easy version.

The goal is sustainability, a word that means a lot to many people.

“Here we focus on environmental sustainability because you can make gold out of lead – just put some lead in a particle accelerator and bombard it until it has enough protons and neutrons to make gold. Of course, you get a piece of gold that is a little radioactive and very expensive. “

Dr. Dolfi’s argument is that Formula 1 was like making gold from lead in the 1990s. Little emphasis was placed on how expensive or harmful the cars could be while they were fast. Now budgets are falling and sea levels are rising.

“The key is to reduce CO2 emissions or keep CO2 as constant as possible,” he adds.

“Will 10 percent ethanol change the world in Formula 1? I do not believe that. Ninety-eight percent of emissions in F1 just fly the circus around the world and other logistical efforts. So if you have to do something sustainable, it should be the fuel that powers the aircraft that moves all of these people and cars around the world. “

In that regard, Mercedes is committed to reducing its carbon footprint by 50 percent from 2018 to 2022, and the level of trust between the company’s three wings has certainly helped minimize travel, which of course was impossible with the pandemic anyway. In fact, Brexit created bigger problems for the research team than Covid-19.

“I used to be able to move a lot of chemicals and liquids into the European Union and across the UK border, but now I have to pay import duties every time I receive or ship something and it stays with customs a little longer!”

However, there is no panic about the challenges. If technical regulations or problems arise on Dr. Landing on Dolfi’s desk, “we’ve got used to not worrying”. Just the tone of his voice when he calls Brackley often tells them everything they need to know about a particular project – or one of his signature allegories.

“To prepare a meal, you can go to a grocery store and use the same ingredients to make a low-quality or three-Michelin-starred fast food meal. So in between is our job. “

Whatever they fed the Mercedes car for the past 10 years, it worked. The real challenge lies in the next 10.