What are you—a Frog 🐸 or a Bird 🦜? And why do you need both?

What are you—a Frog 🐸 or a Bird 🦜? And why do you need both?

This sounds like a silly question to most readers, assuming you identify as human. But it’s actually an important one.

This concept goes back to mathematician Freeman Dyson and his essay “Birds and Frogs” [1]. In his own words:

“Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time. […] Mathematics needs both birds and frogs.”

While Dyson was talking about mathematicians, this concept applies widely to many fields of work and, consequently, to team composition. We tend to diversify teams mostly by gender, geographic background, tenure, and sometimes education — at least that is the pattern in the teams I have seen. But we seldom explicitly ensure we have the right balance between frogs and birds. I believe this should be another diversity goal.

That said, my read — a working heuristic, not an established trait model — is that most people possess both traits—frog and bird—with one coming more naturally than the other. At Amazon, we have leadership principles that echo the same two modes [2]:

• “Dive Deep” and
• “Think Big.” Both are important (hence their inclusion in our principles), but there’s inherent tension between them. I find it difficult to do both simultaneously, and in my experience good team composition helps tremendously.

I think I’m naturally a bird. I can dive deep into the mud when required, but I’m often pleasantly surprised by what the frogs around me discover down there. Amazing value.

What about you—frog or bird? How is your team composed?

[1] Freeman Dyson, “Birds and Frogs”, Notices of the AMS 56(2), February 2009 — https://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf [2] Amazon Leadership Principles — https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles

#AWS #teamcomposition #AmazonLeadershipPrinciples #AwsomeVoices

• Leadership