ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the importance of bringing together individuals from a multitude of backgrounds and experiences. The need for dissimilarity highlights a tension between the need for a unity of purpose and a multiplicity of perspectives. To explore this tension, this chapter introduces research and conclusions from Shane Snow’s book, Dream Teams: Working Together without Falling Apart. The chapter briefly examines Snow’s four-step process to building successful teams. Such an examination provides additional insight into the benefits of creating a culture of dissimilar individuals, a potential road map for implementation, and examples of how dissimilar individuals incorporate other aspects of organizational resilience to achieve success. The best solutions to the most devilish problems will only emerge with crews of dissimilar individuals running parallel experiments. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why narrowly focused experts fail when facing novel situations, and the need for crews of dissimilar people to experiment with alternate solutions.
