Avengers assemble!

Background: My oldest son and daughter go to the same North Carolina middle school. The middle school Vice Principle asked me to give a talk to a group of top students and their parents on the topic of superpowers (strengths) and Kryptonite (weaknesses). I decided to focus on diverse teams who work together to solve big problems, using the Avengers as an accessible analogy.

Here is the text of my talk from March 23, 2018.

Hi everyone, it’s great to be with you this morning.

Your Vice Principal told me how you had done your superpowers and kryptonite surveys and I think that’s awesome. In my work at IBM, my job is to lead a diverse team of individually brilliant people and one of the first things I do when I’m thinking about hiring a new person is to ask them about their superpowers and weaknesses, both so I can understand what their individual performance might look like, but just as importantly — probably more importantly — how they will fit in the team dynamic and whether or not they will make the team better.

I’m guessing you’re not too interested in my stories of working in a large technology company, so instead, I’ll use an analogy to something with which you’re probably much more familiar and — for some of you — much more excited.

I want to talk about The Avengers and I want to make the argument that when you think about superpowers and weaknesses, the Avengers are a much better, and more interesting, model than any individual superhero.

First of all, who here has heard of The Avengers? Who are some of the members of The Avengers? If you have your hand up, yell out a couple of names.

Let me take a second to explain the concept of the Avengers for folks who might not be familiar with them and so that we’re all on the same page as I proceed with my argument.

The Avengers are a fictional group of superheroes who, in their fictional universe, work together to take on the big problems. While the Avengers originally came from comic books, they really entered the world’s consciousness when the Walt Disney company — the same folks who run DisneyWorld — started what is now referred to as The Marvel Cinematic Universe. This started in 2008 with the movie Iron Man and in subsequent movies introduced characters like the Incredible Hulk, Nick Fury, Thor, Black Widow, and Captain America. They rolled out these movies with a plan. In the first movies, they introduced a set of remarkable individuals — and introduced their fictional histories, how they came to have their superpowers, but also their weaknesses. After this first set of movies, they released the first Avengers movie, where the individual characters united to combat a challenge that none of them could have faced alone — a massive alien invasion.

After this first set of movies, called “phase 1,” Marvel came out with a next set of movies that introduced even more characters — good and bad — and the Avengers team got larger, more diverse, and more powerful, to take on their next big challenge — the Artificial Intelligence gone wrong called Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Right now they’re just finishing up phase 3 which introduced yet more superheroes like Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange and of course now Black Panther, leading up to next month’s Avengers: Infinity War, where they will face their biggest challenge yet, the alien superbaddie — Thanos.

If you’re not into the Avengers, I’m sure what I just said was a bunch of gobbledygook, but my intent was not to nerd out about fictional superheroes but rather to use them as an analogy for how I would like to think about your superpowers and weaknesses, and how you might make a bigger, and more positive contribution to the world.

When you watch an Avengers movie, at a high level, you know what’ll happen — the biggest baddie the world has ever seen will show up and threaten the earth, the Avengers will bicker with each other, but ultimately they’ll assemble, and through their combination of superpowers, they will beat the baddie. I obviously haven’t seen the new one that comes out next month, but I’ll bet that they repeat this same formula again. And you know what, it’s great, because it’s a great message to for viewers, especially younger, more impressionable viewers like yourself.

The reason it’s a great message is because it reminds us that we are at our best when we unite to take on the most important challenges and it reminds us that diversity of talent and perspective can be an incredible asset, if we seek to understand and respect each other’s superpowers and if we set aside our personal egos and local interests in order to achieve some greater good. Also, we all have weaknesses, but when we’re on a team with diverse strengths, we can collectively neutralize these weaknesses.

Now, let’s take a step back from the fictional universe of the Avengers and talk about the current state of our world, and our country. To start this I need to ask you a few questions. I’ll limit the scope to America, because I’m guessing many of you don’t yet have much perspective on the broader world.

Show of hands please [1]. In America right now, who thinks things are …

• Going great?
• Going terrible?
• Who thinks some things are great and other things are terrible at the same time?
• Who thinks it’s great for some people but not so much for others?

OK, now let’s add some historical perspective. Generally speaking, who thinks that right now things are significantly better than:

• 10 years ago
• 50 years ago
• 200 years ago

I’ve been reading a wonderful recent book by a Harvard professor named Steven Pinker called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. In this book, Pinker examines hard data and makes the case that, in general, we humans are far better off right now than we’ve ever been at any other time in our history. For example, in America, the average life expectancy is 25 years longer now than it was 100 years ago and even poor Americans have amazing technologies from smartphones to toilets, that the Kings of France and England lacked at the time of the American Revolution. It goes on — eradication of disease, access to food, reduction of war and other violent acts … by almost any empirical measure, things are great!

So why doesn’t it feel that way sometimes? Why didn’t everyone’s hand shoot up when I asked if things were going great and if things were better now than they were in the past? I think there are a few reasons, some of them smaller and some of them bigger.

For one thing, the news — generally speaking — unfortunately tends to focus on spectacle of the day vs. more substantive analysis. There is an unfortunate saying “if it bleeds it leads” and that’s often true — this is why people are generally more fearful of airline travel even though a transcontinental flight from America to China is statistically far safer than driving from your home to school. Also some news companies and social media platforms cynically serve up a quite distorted view of the world to confirm people’s worst biases — the so-called “echo chamber” effect.

For another thing, we tend to look at the past with rose colored glasses — i.e. we think it was much better than it actually was. The baby boomer generation who was born after World War II in the late 1940s and early 1950s tend to look back on the 1950s as this golden era — a better time. But if you stoically look at the data, you’ll see that it was objectively much worse. As a simple example, one of my mom’s brothers died of an infection that was untreatable at the time but today would require a few days at one of our many fine local hospitals. And it was far worse to be a woman, or a person of color, since the dominant class — white guys — started with “all men are created equal” — which is already problematic as it excludes 50% of the population — and internalized it “all white guys are created equal, and rich white guys are more equal still.” Anyway, look at the data and you’ll see that things were objectively much worse.

So are things great today? By many objective measures, yes! So am I saying you can just take it easy, play video games, and send each other funny animations on your increasingly cool smart phones the rest of your lives? Of course not.

There remain big problems to solve and huge opportunities for America and for humanity. Global warming is real, and dangerous. Far too many people die of heart disease, and cancer, and far too many people die in auto accidents each year. People of your generation will need to grapple with the implications and consequences of increasing capable Artificial Intelligence or AI, that some researchers will surpass human-level intelligence in your lifetimes. And finally, as long as we are a single planet species, we are at severe risk of extinction, at least in the long-term.

You will not solve these problems by yourself. Sorry, you just won’t. People have a romantic notion of the lone genius — a Thomas Edison, a Steve Jobs, or an Elon Musk. While these people are certainly geniuses, they could not have done what they did individually — they built upon the foundations of their predecessors and they benefited from and contributed to a greater good by leading great teams. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the iPhone — a team of hundreds invented the iPhone — and they built upon literally hundreds of years of progress in metals, machining, electronics, networking, and software. These leaders are visionaries for sure, but more importantly, they inspire others to action and they know how to build great teams of talented and diverse individuals.

Which brings me back to the Avengers.

I encourage you to go back and watch the early Avengers movies, whether you’ve never seen them or haven’t seen them in a while. Notice that initially, the individuals who become the Avengers don’t actually like each other very much, and they each want to be “the hero” vs. a contributor to a team effort. How do they go from this to the Avengers? They unite and rally around a common cause — some big problem to solve, some great enemy to overcome — and in the process they realize that their different superpowers, used together as a team, are much greater than the sum of their individual talents.

So my challenge to you is that while at the same time you should certainly seek to understand and improve your own superpowers, you should also seek to understand the superpowers of others, and you should think about how you can join forces to solve big, societal problems that you could not possibly solve by yourself. When someone is different than you — especially if you find the difference frustrating or confusing — run TOWARDS this person, not away from them. Seek to understand WHY they behave differently than you — whether because of their personal biases (or yours), their family’s unique culture, or just their life experience. I guarantee you that initially this will feel much more difficult BUT… if you are going to contribute to solving our world’s big problems — not defeating supervillains like Ultron and Thanos, but rather solving problems like eliminating diseases, eliminating discrimination, coexisting with advanced AI, and making humanity a multi-planetary species — embracing diversity and becoming a member of the Avengers is not just cool, it’s what the world needs.

Thank you.

Footnotes

[1] Unsurprisingly, most kids raised their hands for the “some things are great, others are bad” and “things are great for some people and not so great for others.” Few hands went up for things being better now vs. 10 or 50 years ago, though a moderate number of hands went up for things being better now vs. 200 years ago. There was only a single child who raised her hands for “things are going great”–a five year-old there with her parents supporting her older sister. Afterwards, in my best Billy Madison voice, I told her “NEVER GROW UP!”

Bill Higgins is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM based in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.