Talent Density

There was too much that came up today at AVA to provide a reasonable summary. But one conversation after my friendly debate with Lewis has really stuck with me. I was speaking to an entrepreneur after the talk about the problems caused by high conflict people. But high conflict personalities are just one part of a broader problem:

How does one build talent density in a grassroots movement?

Talent density is the idea that, at least for certain hard problems, the average talent of your team matters more than the total amount of talent you can throw at the problem. A 10-person team of extremely committed/competent people might do better than a 100-person team with the same 10 people. This is most obviously true of some of the 90 people you add are high conflict people. Some of the most successful companies in history — Apple, Netflix, Anthropic — are great believers in the concept of talent density. Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to say, “A teamers want to work with other A teamers.” And Anthropic, the top AI company, is particularly brutal; their CEO has stated he’d rather have just 100 great team members, than 100 great remember plus 900 average ones. He makes it seem as if people of mere average talent have no value!

But the truth is that I have seen the power of talent density, too. When a team is filled with extremely high performers, there are feedback loops that can go exponential very quickly. In contrast, even a single slacker, downer, or jerk can drag down an entire team’s ability to create impact. There is some research showing that a single negative team member of this sort is equivalent to wiping out two of your superstars. The inverse is true of high performers. They can create positive feedback loops that drive the entire team to incredible heights. One of the reasons for DxE’s early successes was a unique combination of people who were all “off the distribution” talented in various ways that are essential to great grassroots organizing.

But this runs right into another very important principle of social movements: numbers matter, and it doesn’t matter if those numbers come from “elites” or ordinary people. Research on this question is robust, and partly for this reason, I paid little attention to talent or talent density in my first decade or so of activism.

That was probably a mistake. Talent, and in particular leadership ability, is essential to building large numbers. You cannot sustain the scale of a large movement without significant talent. But how does one sustain that talent when scaling up without causing decreases in talent density? I see a few possible solutions:

• Tiered organizing. Building ladders of engagement that allow grassroots activists to “level up” to higher levels based on achievement of certain objectives.

• Bifurcated organizing. Splitting a professional organization, with high talent density, from the grassroots community, focused on numbers and with fewer barriers to entry.

• Representation. Having the “elites” in a social movement selected by some form of representation, e.g., voting.

• Diversified organizing. Trying to find at least one skill set that every activist is “off the distribution” in, and allocating their skills to that team in a diversified strategy.

All of these strategies are worth trying. It’s also worth testing whether talent density actually matters. While there are anecdotal accounts by the leaders of many successful organizations, I’m not aware of a great experimental test. So for now, it’s just a hypothesis — but one that might explain both the successes and failures of so much that has been done (or not done) in animal rights.