Do you know what’s the best strategy for playing solitaire? Balance your piles of cards.
When you have a choice between piles to reveal the next down-facing card, you should pick from the largest pile. It has been a while since I played solitaire, but the rule got stuck in my head. We all have many different piles in our lives, formed by our jobs, families, and hobbies. To succeed in the long run, we need to pay attention to all the piles, and specifically to the bigger ones. Every time we have a deadline at work, we give that pile more attention, which is ok for a while as long as we don’t forget to shift the balance later because we want to win the whole game, not just empty one of the piles.
Now, imagine that our piles represent blocks of different opinions. It may seem tempting to only work with opinions resembling your own. That way you may seem efficient in the short run but will be doomed in the long run because diversity is important for success. Diverse teams create the most innovative ideas and solutions. When you run an organization, a project or a meeting, don’t forget all the different perspectives, otherwise, in the long run, you may end up in a local minimum.
I love my diverse team at Ericsson Research. AI Research is composed of researchers based in Sweden, India, USA, Brazil, and Hungary. We have forgotten why physical co-location was so important and instead do virtual co-location. Working on the same data sets, within the same environments through the same tools and on the same projects is way more important than physical closeness. If only we could do something about the time difference…
On the other hand, when we in Europe come to work, we can build on the results from our Indian colleagues, and when we go home, we hand over to our colleagues in The Americas, so that cross-continental projects can deliver results around the clock. Diversity has a great social aspect to it as well. Our diversity is something that we all have in common, and something that we gladly discuss with each other.
Now to my biggest passion – technology. Working with Artificial Intelligence is fun – it’s broad and deep and can be applied to so many things. And one of the things that fascinate me most is that AI technology is inspired by humans and nature. This means that whatever humans found to be successful in their lives and in evolutionary processes can be used when creating new algorithms. Diversity, inclusion, balance, and flexibility are very important here as well, with respect to data and knowledge, and diverse, organizations are for sure better equipped for creating responsible algorithms. In the era of big data, let’s make sure we don’t discriminate the small data.
This blog was written by me and initially published here: https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/3/balance-for-better
Elena Fersman 