The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle Flashcards
(274 cards)
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CULTURE: from the Latin cultus, which means care.
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Why do certain groups add up to be greater than the sum of their parts, while others add up to be less?
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Your bet would be wrong. In dozens of trials, kindergartners built structures that averaged twenty-six inches tall, while business school students built structures that averaged less than ten inches.*1
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the wrong details. We focus on what we can see—individual skills. But individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.
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The business school students appear to be collaborating, but in fact they are engaged in a process psychologists call status management. They are figuring out where they fit into the larger picture: Who is in charge? Is it okay to criticize someone’s idea? What are the rules here? Their interactions appear smooth, but their underlying behavior is riddled with inefficiency, hesitation, and subtle competition. Instead of focusing on the task, they are navigating their uncertainty about one another.
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The actions of the kindergartners appear disorganized on the surface. But when you view them as a single entity, their behavior is efficient and effective. They are not competing for status. They stand shoulder to shoulder and work energetically together.
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The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way.
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(A strong culture increases net income 756 percent over eleven years, according to a Harvard study of more than two hundred companies.)
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This book takes a different approach. I spent the last four years visiting and researching eight of the world’s most successful groups, including a special-ops military unit, an inner-city school, a professional basketball team, a movie studio, a comedy troupe, a gang of jewel thieves, and others.*2 I found that their cultures are created by a specific set of skills.
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Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity. Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation. Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values.
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In the following pages, we’ll spend time inside some of the planet’s top-performing cultures and see what makes them tick.
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Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal.
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The other people in the room do not know it, but his mission is to sabotage the group’s performance.
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experiment being run by Will Felps, who studies organizational behavior at the University of South Wales in Australia. Felps has brought in Nick to portray three negative archetypes: the Jerk (an aggressive, defiant deviant), the Slacker (a withholder of effort), and the Downer (a depressive Eeyore type).
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Felps calls it the bad apple experiment.
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Nick is really good at being bad. In almost every group, his behavior reduces the quality of the group’s performance by 30 to 40 percent. The drop-off is consistent whether he plays the Jerk, the Slacker, or the Downer.
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Nick behaves like a jerk, and Jonathan reacts instantly with warmth, deflecting the negativity and making a potentially unstable situation feel solid and safe.
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The story of the good apples is surprising in two ways. First, we tend to think group performance depends on measurable abilities like intelligence, skill, and experience, not on a subtle pattern of small behaviors. Yet in this case those small behaviors made all the difference.
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Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.
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When you ask people inside highly successful groups to describe their relationship with one another, they all tend to choose the same word. This word is not friends or team or tribe or any other equally plausible term. The word they use is family.
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“I can’t explain it, but things just feel right. I’ve actually tried to quit a couple times, but I keep coming back to it. There’s no feeling like it. These guys are my brothers.” (Christopher Baldwin, U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six)
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a distinct pattern of interaction.
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• Close physical proximity, often in circles • Profuse amounts of eye contact • Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) • Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) • High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone • Few interruptions • Lots of questions • Intensive, active listening • Humor, laughter • Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.)
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On the third floor of a shiny modernistic building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a group of scientists is obsessed with understanding the inner workings of group chemistry. The MIT Human Dynamics Lab
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the proto-language that humans use to form safe connection. This language is made up of belonging cues.
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Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.
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Like any language, belonging cues can’t be reduced to an isolated moment but rather consist of a steady pulse of interactions within a social relationship. Their function is to answer the ancient, ever-present questions glowing in our brains: Are we safe here? What’s our future with these people? Are there dangers lurking?
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Belonging cues possess three basic qualities: 1. Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring 2. Individualization: They treat the person as unique and valued 3. Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue
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These cues add up to a message that can be described with a single phrase: You are safe here. They seek to notify our ever-vigilant brains that they can stop worrying about dangers and shift into connection mode, a condition called psychological safety.
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“As humans, we are very good at reading cues; we are incredibly attentive to interpersonal phenomena,” says Amy Edmondson, who studies psychological safety at Harvard. “We have a place in our brain that’s always worried about what people think of us, especially higher-ups.
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The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over.
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Pentland and Curhan found that the first five minutes of sociometric data strongly predicted the outcomes of the negotiations. In other words, the belonging cues sent in the initial moments of the interaction mattered more than anything they said.
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the content of the pitch didn’t matter as much as the set of cues with which the pitch was delivered and received. (When the angel investors viewed the plans on paper—looking only at informational content and ignoring social signals—they ranked them very differently.)
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Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors: 1. Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short. 2. Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. 3. Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader. 4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. 5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.
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Just hearing something said rarely results in a change in behavior. They’re just words. When we see people in our peer group play with an idea, our behavior changes. That’s how intelligence is created. That’s how culture is created.”
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People who work at Pixar are Pixarians, and people who work at Google are Googlers. It’s the same with Zappos (Zapponians), KIPP (KIPPsters),
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Overture did not win. The winner of this race turned out to be a small, young company called Google.
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His main leadership technique, if it could be called a technique, consisted of starting and sustaining big, energetic, no-holds-barred debates about how to build the best strategies, products, and ideas. To work at Google was to enter a giant, continuous wrestling match in which no person was considered above the fray.
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Dean walked back to his desk and started trying to fix the AdWords engine. He did not ask permission or tell anyone; he simply dove in. On almost every level, his decision made no sense. He was ignoring the mountain of work on his desk in order to wrestle with a difficult problem that no one expected him to take on. He could have quit at any point, and no one would have known. But he did not quit.
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They did not manage their status or worry about who was in charge.
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Overture’s belonging scores would likely have been low. “It was a clusterfuck,” one employee told Wired magazine. Google didn’t win because it was smarter. It won because it was safer. *1
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Here’s the thing: Steve’s tip was not actually useful. It contained zero relevant information. All the changes in motivation and behavior you experienced afterward were due to the signal that you were connected to someone who cared about you.
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experiment that might be called Would You Give a Stranger Your Phone? It consists of two scenarios and a question. SCENARIO 1: You are standing in the rain at a train station. A stranger approaches and politely says, “Can I borrow your cellphone?” SCENARIO 2: You are standing in the rain at a train station. A stranger approaches and politely says, “I’m so sorry about the rain. Can I borrow your cellphone?” QUESTION: To which stranger are you more likely to respond?
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Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School performed the experiment, she discovered that the second scenario caused the response rate to jump 422 percent. Those six words—I’m so sorry about the rain—transformed people’s behavior.
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the power of belonging cues is a study by an Australian group that examined 772 patients who had been admitted to the hospital after a suicide attempt. In the months after their release, half received a series of postcards
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Over the next two years, members of the group that received the postcards were readmitted at half the rate of the control group. “A small signal can have a huge effect,”
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belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced—is
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Science has recently discovered, however, that the amygdala isn’t just about responding to danger—it also plays a vital role in building social connections. It works like this: When you receive a belonging cue, the amygdala switches roles and starts to use its immense unconscious neural horsepower to build and sustain your social bonds. It tracks members of your group, tunes in to their interactions, and sets the stage for meaningful engagement. In a heartbeat, it transforms from a growling guard dog into an energetic guide dog with a single-minded goal: to make sure you stay tightly connected with your people.
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Jay Van Bavel, social neuroscientist at New York University. “The moment you’re part of a group, the amygdala tunes in to who’s in that group and starts intensely tracking them. Because these people are valuable to you. They were strangers before, but they’re on your team now, and that changes the whole dynamic.
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Our social brains light up when they receive a steady accumulation of almost-invisible cues: We are close, we are safe, we share a future.
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Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.
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In the 1990s, sociologists James Baron and Michael Hannan analyzed the founding cultures of nearly two hundred technology start-ups in Silicon Valley. They found that most followed one of three basic models: the star model, the professional model, and the commitment model. The star model focused on finding and hiring the brightest people. The professional model focused on building the group around specific skill sets. The commitment model, on the other hand, focused on developing a group with shared values and strong emotional bonds. Of these, the commitment model consistently led to the highest rates of success. During the tech-bubble burst of 2000, the start-ups that used the commitment model survived at a vastly higher rate than the other two models, and achieved initial public offerings three times more often.
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For many years, historians assumed that the story of the Christmas Truce was exaggerated, an isolated instance that had been inflated by softheaded newspaper writers. But as they dug deeper, they found the opposite was true. The truce was far bigger than had been reported, involving tens of thousands of men along two-thirds of the British-held line. The interactions included eating, drinking, cooking, singing, playing soccer matches, exchanging photos, bartering, and burying the dead.*1 In the annals of history, there are few cases where all-out violence pivoted so swiftly and completely to familial warmth. The deeper question is how it happened.
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belonging cues.
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Ashworth details the physical closeness of the two sides. While the closeness brought violence, it also brought connection, through the smells of cooking and the sounds of voices, laughter, and songs. Soldiers on both sides became aware that they followed the same daily rhythms and routines of meals, resupply, and troop rotations.
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Those interactions sound casual, but in fact each involves an emotional exchange
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Each cue, by itself, would not have had much of an impact. But together, repeated day after day, they combined to create conditions that set the stage for a deeper connection.
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both sides understood, a shared burst of belief and identity.
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a nice place to work. It features competitive salaries and high-quality facilities. The company treats employees well, providing good food, transportation, and social activities. But in the late 2000s, WIPRO found itself facing a persistent problem: Its employees were leaving in droves, as many as 50 to 70 percent each year.
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they were given a fleece sweatshirt embroidered with their name alongside the company’s name.
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Seven months later the numbers came in, and Staats was, as he puts it, “completely shocked.” Trainees from group two were 250 percent more likely than those from group one and 157 percent more likely than those from the control group to still be working at WIPRO. The hour of training had transformed group two’s relationship with the company. They went from being noncommittal to being engaged on a far deeper level.
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The answer is belonging cues. The trainees in group one received zero signals that reduced the interpersonal distance between themselves and WIPRO. They received lots of information about WIPRO and star performers, plus a nice company sweatshirt, but nothing that altered that fundamental distance. The group two trainees, on the other hand, received a steady stream of individualized, future-oriented, amygdala-activating belonging cues. All these signals were small—a
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“It turns out that there are a whole bunch of effects that take place when we are pleased to be a part of a group, when we are part of creating an authentic structure for us to be more ourselves. All sorts of beneficial things play out from those first interactions.”
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Belonging cues have to do not with character or discipline but with building an environment that answers basic questions: Are we connected? Do we share a future? Are we safe?
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The title of Paine’s graph is “Gregg Popovich Is Impossible.”
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The Spurs consistently perform the thousand little unselfish behaviors—the extra pass, the alert defense, the tireless hustle—that puts the team’s interest above their own.*1 “Selfless,” LeBron James said. “Guys move, cut, pass, you’ve got a shot, you take it. But it’s all for the team and it’s never about the individual.” Playing against them, said Marcin Gortat of the Washington Wizards, “was like listening to Mozart.”
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So the Spurs are not simply selecting unselfish players or forcing them to play this way. Something is making their players—even those who were selfish elsewhere—behave unselfishly when they put on a Spurs jersey.
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approaches every relationship. He fills their cups.”
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assistant coach Chip Engelland. “He delivers two things over and over: He’ll tell you the truth, with no bullshit, and then he’ll love you to death.”
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uses these moments to connect us. He loves that we come from so many different places. That could pull us apart, but he makes sure that everybody feels connected and engaged to something bigger.”
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“We gotta hug ’em and hold ’em.”
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Pop is really intentional about making that connection happen.”
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One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be.
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“magical feedback.” Students who received it chose to revise their papers far more often than students who did not, and their performance improved significantly. The feedback was not complicated. In fact, it consisted of one simple phrase. I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.
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it contains three separate cues: 1. You are part of this group. 2. This group is special; we have high standards here. 3. I believe you can reach those standards.
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Players who passed the ball to a teammate who made a shot lost $6,116.69. Passing the ball instead of shooting is the equivalent of handing a teammate $28,161.24.
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He wanted to build an atmosphere of “fun and weirdness.” The site would deliver not just shoes but what Hsieh called “personal emotional connections,” both inside the company and out.
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It is easier to get into Harvard than to get a job at Zappos.
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He picks his words with care, and if there’s a pause in the conversation, he will wait with endless patience for you to fill it.
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Several people close to Hsieh describe him with the same metaphor: He’s like an alien of superior intelligence who came to Earth and figured out what makes human beings tick.
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“I try to help things happen organically,” he says. “If you set things up right, the connection happens.”
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It doesn’t go particularly smoothly, in part because he seems to regard conversation as a hopelessly rudimentary tool for communication.
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“He’s very smart, but the smartest thing about him is that he thinks sort of like an eight-year-old,” says Jeanne Markel, director of culture for the Downtown Project. “He keeps things really simple and positive when it comes to people.”
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Collisions—defined as serendipitous personal encounters—are, he believes, the lifeblood of any organization, the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion. He has set a goal of having one thousand “collisionable hours” per year for himself and a hundred thousand collisionable hours per acre for the Downtown Project. This metric is why he closed a side entrance to Zappos headquarters, funneling people through a single entrance.
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When an idea becomes part of a language, it becomes part of the default way of thinking.”
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his tools are grade school simple—Meet people, you’ll figure it out.
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The most successful projects were those driven by sets of individuals who formed what Allen called “clusters of high communicators.”
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What mattered most in creating a successful team had less to do with intelligence and experience and more to do with where the desks happened to be located. “Something as simple as visual contact is very, very important, more important than you might think,” Allen says. “If you can see the other person or even the area where they work, you’re reminded of them, and that brings a whole bunch of effects.”
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We were really surprised at how rapidly it decayed” when they moved to a different floor. “It turns out that vertical separation is a very serious thing. If you’re on a different floor in some organizations, you may as well be in a different country.”
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Allen plotted the frequency of interaction against distance, he ended up with a line that resembled a steep hill. It was nearly vertical at the top and flat at the bottom. It became known as the Allen Curve.*1
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The key characteristic of the Allen Curve is the sudden steepness that happens at the eight-meter mark. At distances of less than eight meters, communication frequency rises off the charts.
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Increase the distance to 50 meters, and communication ceases, as if a tap has been shut off. Decrease distance to 6 meters, and communication frequency skyrockets. In other words, proximity functions as a kind of connective drug. Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up.
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For the vast majority of human history, sustained proximity has been an indicator of belonging—after all, we don’t get consistently close to someone unless it’s mutually safe. Studies show that digital communications also obey the Allen Curve; we’re far more likely to text, email, and interact virtually with people who are physically close. (One study found that workers who shared a location emailed one another four times as often as workers who did not, and as a result they completed their projects 32 percent faster.)
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Closeness helps create efficiencies of connection.
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Hsieh has built a machine that transforms strangers into a tribe.
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One hundred and fifty feet also happens to be the rough distance at which we can no longer recognize a face with the naked eye.
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Creating safety is about dialing in to small, subtle moments and delivering targeted signals at key points.
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it’s important to avoid interruptions. The smoothness of turn taking, as we’ve seen, is a powerful indicator of cohesive group performance. Interruptions shatter the smooth interactions at the core of belonging.
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Creative sessions, for example, often contain bursts of interruptions. The key is to draw a distinction between interruptions born of mutual excitement and those rooted in lack of awareness and connection.
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In any interaction, we have a natural tendency to try to hide our weaknesses and appear competent. If you want to create safety, this is exactly the wrong move. Instead, you should open up, show you make mistakes, and invite input with simple phrases like “This is just my two cents.” “Of course, I could be wrong here.” “What am I missing?” “What do you think?”
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“To create safety, leaders need to actively invite input,” Edmondson says.
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You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.”
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Overdo Thank-Yous: When you enter highly successful cultures, the number of thank-yous you hear seems slightly over the top.
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scientific support that it ignites cooperative behavior. In a study by Adam Grant and Francesco Gino, subjects were asked to help a fictitious student named “Eric” write a cover letter for a job application. After helping him, half of the participants received a thankful response from Eric; half received a neutral response. The subjects then received a request for help from “Steve,” a different student. Those who had received thanks from Eric chose to help Steve more than twice as often as those who had received the neutral response. In other words, a small thank-you caused people to behave far more generously to a completely different person. This is because thank-yous aren’t only expressions of gratitude; they’re crucial belonging cues that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.
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Deciding who’s in and who’s out is the most powerful signal any group sends, and successful groups approach their hiring accordingly.
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aligning team members’ schedules so they shared the same fifteen-minute coffee break every day. He also had the company buy nicer coffee machines and install them in more convenient gathering places. The effect was immediate: a 20 percent increase in productivity, and a reduction in turnover from 40 percent to 12 percent. Waber has also overseen interventions in company cafeterias: Merely replacing four-person tables with ten-person tables has boosted productivity by 10 percent. The lesson of all these studies is the same: Create spaces that maximize collisions.
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Their leaders do the menial work, cleaning and tidying the locker rooms—and along the way vividly model the team’s ethic of togetherness and teamwork.
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When we enter a new group, our brains decide quickly whether to connect.
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But the successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.
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laughter is not just laughter; it’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection.
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Amir Goldberg at Stanford showed that it was possible to predict how long employees stayed by how frequently their emails contained family references and swear words.
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The term the National Transportation Safety Board uses for this type of event is catastrophic failure. Airlines didn’t bother training pilots for catastrophic failure for two reasons. First, such failures are extremely rare—the odds of losing hydraulics and backups had been calculated at one in a billion. Second, they are invariably fatal.
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Notifications are the humblest and most primitive form of communication, the equivalent of a child’s finger-point:
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All of which underlines a strange truth. The crew of Flight 232 succeeded not because of their individual skills but because they were able to combine those skills into a greater intelligence. They demonstrated that a series of small, humble exchanges—Anybody have any ideas? Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you—can unlock a group’s ability to perform.
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A BrainTrust meeting is not fun. It is where directors are told that their characters lack heart, their storylines are confusing, and their jokes fall flat. But it’s also where those movies get better. “The BrainTrust is the most important thing we do by far,” said Pixar president Ed Catmull. “It depends on completely candid feedback.”
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At the Navy SEALs, such uncomfortable, candor-filled moments happen in the After-Action Review, or AAR. The AAR is a gathering that takes place immediately after each mission or training session:
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The fascinating thing is, however, these awkward, painful interactions generate the highly cohesive, trusting behavior necessary for smooth cooperation.
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Set B would make you and the stranger feel closer to each other—around 24 percent closer than Set A, according to experimenters.* While Set A allows you to stay in your comfort zone, Set B generates confession, discomfort, and authenticity that break down barriers between people and tip them into a deeper connection. While Set A generates information, Set B generates something more powerful: vulnerability.
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“People tend to think of vulnerability in a touchy-feely way, but that’s not what’s happening,” Polzer says. “It’s about sending a really clear signal that you have weaknesses, that you could use help.
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a vulnerability loop. A shared exchange of openness, it’s the most basic building block of cooperation and trust.
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Give-Some Game. It works like this: You and another person, whom you’ve never met, each get four tokens. Each token is worth a dollar if you keep it but two dollars if you give it to the other person. The game consists of one decision: How many tokens do you give the other person?
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That moment of vulnerability did not reduce willingness to cooperate but boosted it. The inverse was also true: Increasing people’s sense of power—that is, tweaking a situation to make them feel more invulnerable—dramatically diminished their willingness to cooperate.
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The link between vulnerability and cooperation applies not only to individuals but also to groups. In an experiment by David DeSteno of Northeastern University,
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But here’s the thing: They were equally cooperative with complete strangers. In other words, the feelings of trust and closeness sparked by the vulnerability loop were transferred in full strength to someone who simply happened to be in the room. The vulnerability loop, in other words, is contagious.
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Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.
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Eight hours, fifty-two minutes, and forty-one seconds later, it was over. The MIT team had found all ten balloons and had done so with the help of 4,665 people—or as DARPA organizer Peter Lee put it, “a huge amount of participation from shockingly little money.” Their primitive, last-minute, message-in-a-bottle method had defeated better-equipped attempts, creating a fast, deep wave of motivated teamwork and cooperation.
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What made the difference in cooperation, in other words, wasn’t how many people a person reached or how good their balloon-search technology was—it wasn’t really about a given individual at all. It was rather about how effectively people created relationships of mutual risk.
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science shows that when it comes to creating cooperation, vulnerability is not a risk but a psychological requirement.
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Being vulnerable gets the static out of the way and lets us do the job together, without worrying or hesitating.
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good teams tend to do a lot of extreme stuff together,”
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Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built.
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Cooperation, as we’ll see, does not simply descend out of the blue. It is a group muscle that is built according to a specific pattern of repeated interaction, and that pattern is always the same: a circle of people engaged in the risky, occasionally painful, ultimately rewarding process of being vulnerable together.
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oppositional child. He was keenly aware of what people wanted of him and tended to do the reverse.
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First, Kauffman created Hell Week, a weeklong selection program
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Second, Kauffman decreed that every aspect of the training be team-based. Instead of operating solo, trainees were put into groups of six
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Third, Kauffman eliminated the hierarchical distinction between officer and enlisted man. In his program, everyone did the training, no matter their rank.
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a lot of officers will tell you what to do, but they won’t do it themselves.
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intense vulnerability along with deep interconnectedness.
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“We’re all about seeking the microevent,” Freeman says. “Every evolution is a lens to look for teamwork moments, and we believe that if you stitch together a lot of opportunities, you start to know who the good teammates will be. It comes out at the oddest times.
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“It’s more than just teamwork,” Freeman says. “You’ve left yourself wide open. Everybody on your team knows who you are, because you left it all on the table. And if you did well, it builds a level of trust that’s exponentially higher than anything you can get anywhere else.”
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All were influenced by the late comedy legend Del Close;
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UCB trained its comedians almost exclusively using a strange and difficult improv game called the Harold.
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It requires you to pay deep attention to what the UCB calls “game,” or the comic core of each scene, and to hold those threads in your mind, calling back previous connections as you build new ones.
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UCB was creating some of the most cohesive comic ensembles on the planet by spending a huge amount of time doing an activity that produced mostly pain and awkwardness.
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I’m really working on my reactions, trying to react to people in an authentic way and not with old habits.”
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When Del Close developed the Harold in the 1970s, he wrote down the following rules: 1. You are all supporting actors. 2. Always check your impulses. 3. Never enter a scene unless you are needed. 4. Save your fellow actor, don’t worry about the piece. 5. Your prime responsibility is to support. 6. Work at the top of your brains at all times. 7. Never underestimate or condescend to the audience. 8. No jokes. 9. Trust. Trust your fellow actors to support you; trust them to come through if you lay something heavy on them; trust yourself. 10. Avoid judging what is going down except in terms of whether it needs help, what can best follow, or how you can support it imaginatively if your support is called for. 11. LISTEN.
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JSO, Serbian special forces.
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One had been a member of Serbia’s national youth basketball team.
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documentary Smash & Grab.
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If what happened in the Balkans hadn’t happened, these people probably would have been entrepreneurs, lawyers, and journalists.”
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Each team was built around a set of well-defined roles. There was a zavodnik, a “seducer” who scouts the location (usually a woman); a magare, or muscle for getting the jewels; a jatak, who arranged logistics.
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He’s the best at creating great teams.
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as humans, we have an authority bias that’s incredibly strong and unconscious—if a superior tells you to do something, by God we tend to follow it, even when it’s wrong. Having one person tell other people what to do is not a reliable way to make good decisions.
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We’re trying to create leaders among leaders. And you can’t just tell people to do that. You have to create the conditions where they start to do it.”
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He steered away from giving orders and instead asked a lot of questions. Anybody have any ideas?
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One of the best things I’ve found to improve a team’s cohesion is to send them to do some hard, hard training. There’s something about hanging off a cliff together, and being wet and cold and miserable together, that makes a team come together.”
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After-Action Review, the truth-telling session we referenced in Chapter 7. AARs happen immediately after each mission and consist of a short meeting in which the team gathers to discuss and replay key decisions. AARs are led not by commanders but by enlisted men. There are no agendas, and no minutes are kept. The goal is to create a flat landscape without rank, where people can figure out what really happened and talk about mistakes—especially their own.
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You’re looking for that moment where people can say, ‘I screwed that up.’ In fact, I’d say those might be the most important four words any leader can say: I screwed that up.”
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The goal of an AAR is not to excavate truth for truth’s sake, or to assign credit and blame, but rather to build a shared mental model that can be applied to future missions.
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they succeeded because they understood that being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable.
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“The real courage is seeing the truth and speaking the truth to each other. People never want to be the person who says, ‘Wait a second, what’s really going on here?’ But inside the squadron, that is the culture, and that’s why we’re successful.”
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two important qualities. The first was warmth. He had a knack for making people feel cared for; every contemporary description paints him as “fatherly.” The second quality was a relentless curiosity. In a landscape made up of diverse scientific domains, he combined breadth and depth of knowledge with a desire to seek connections. “Nyquist was full of ideas, full of questions,”
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(The best way to find the Nyquist is usually to ask people: If I could get a sense of the way your culture works by meeting just one person, who would that person be?)
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successful cultures as engines of human cooperation,
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“Socially, I’m not the chattiest person,” Givechi says. “I love stories, but I’m not the person in the middle of the room telling the story. I’m the person on the side listening and asking questions. They’re usually questions that might seem obvious or simple or unnecessary. But I love asking them because I’m trying to understand what’s really going on.”
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It’s not about decisiveness—it’s about discovery. For me, that has to do with asking the right questions the right way.”
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“She doesn’t present an agenda, but of course there is an agenda behind that, and it’s gentle guiding. And one of the biggest tools in her toolbox is time. She’ll spend so much time, being patient and continuing to have conversations and making sure the conversations are progressing in a good direction.”
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Watching Givechi listen is like watching a skilled athlete in action. She listens chiefly with her eyes, which have a Geiger-counter-like sensitivity to changes in mood and expression. She detects small changes and responds to them swiftly. If you convey a scintilla of tension about a subject, she will mark it and follow up with a question designed to gently explore the reasons for that tension.
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She uses the idea of dance to describe the skills she employs with IDEO’s design teams: to find the music, support her partner, and follow the rhythm.
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• The one thing that excites me about this particular opportunity is • I confess, the one thing I’m not so excited about with this particular opportunity is • On this project, I’d really like to get better at
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The interesting thing about Givechi’s questions is how transcendently simple they are. They have less to do with design than with connecting to deeper emotions: fear, ambition, motivation.
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Roshi has the ability to pause completely, to stop what must be going on in her head, to focus completely on the person and the question at hand, and to see where that question is leading. She isn’t trying to drag you somewhere, ever. She’s truly seeing you from your position, and that’s her power.”
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“She doesn’t let things stay unclear, even when they’re uncomfortable. Especially when they’re uncomfortable.”
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“What these healers all had in common was that they were brilliant listeners.
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“Concordances happen when one person can react in an authentic way to the emotion being projected in the room,” Marci says. “It’s about understanding in an empathic way, then doing something in terms of gesture, comment, or expression that creates a connection.”
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the most important moments in conversation happen when one person is actively, intently listening.
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“It’s not an accident that concordance happens when there’s one person talking and the other person listening,” Marci says. “It’s very hard to be empathic when you’re talking. Talking is really complicated, because you’re thinking and planning what you’re going to say, and you tend to get stuck in your own head. But not when you’re listening. When you’re really listening, you lose time. There’s no sense of yourself, because it’s not about you. It’s all about this task—to connect completely to that person.”
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I’m not certain if I suggested the change or if she did. As Givechi would say, we surfaced it together.
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*2 Robert Bales, one of the first scientists to study group communication, discovered that while questions comprise only 6 percent of verbal interactions, they generate 60 percent of ensuing discussions.
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Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains.
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Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often:
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group cooperation is created by small, frequently repeated moments of vulnerability.
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Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask their people three questions: • What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do? • What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? • What can I do to make you more effective?
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Overcommunicate Expectations: The successful groups I visited did not presume that cooperation would happen on its own. Instead, they were explicit and persistent about sending big, clear signals that established those expectations, modeled cooperation, and aligned language and roles to maximize helping behavior.
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Deliver the Negative Stuff in Person:
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two critical moments that happen early in a group’s life. They are: 1. The first vulnerability 2. The first disagreement These small moments are doorways to two possible group paths: Are we about appearing strong or about exploring the landscape together? Are we about winning interactions, or about learning together? “At those moments, people either dig in and become defensive and start justifying, and a lot of tension gets created,”
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Listen Like a Trampoline:
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the most effective listeners do four things: 1. They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported 2. They take a helping, cooperative stance 3. They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions 4. They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths
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As Zenger and Folkman put it, the most effective listeners behave like trampolines. They aren’t passive sponges. They are active responders, absorbing what the other person gives, supporting them, and adding energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude.
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Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions.
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Candor-Generating Practices like AARs, BrainTrusts, and Red Teaming:
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One good AAR structure is to use five questions: 1. What were our intended results? 2. What were our actual results? 3. What caused our results? 4. What will we do the same next time? 5. What will we do differently?
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Some teams also use a Before-Action Review, which is built around a similar set of questions: 1. What are our intended results? 2. What challenges can we anticipate? 3. What have we or others learned from similar situations? 4. What will make us successful this time?
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A key rule of BrainTrusts is that the team is not allowed to suggest solutions, only to highlight problems.
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Red Teaming is a military-derived method for testing strategies; you create a “red team” to come up with ideas to disrupt or defeat your proposed plan.
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Aim for Candor; Avoid Brutal Honesty:
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By aiming for candor—feedback that is smaller, more targeted, less personal, less judgmental, and equally impactful—it’s easier to maintain a sense of safety and belonging in the group.
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Embrace the Discomfort: One of the most difficult things about creating habits of vulnerability is that it requires a group to endure two discomforts: emotional pain and a sense of inefficiency.
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Align Language with Action: Many highly cooperative groups use language to reinforce their interdependence. For example, navy pilots returning to aircraft carriers do not “land” but are “recovered.” IDEO doesn’t have “project managers”—it has “design community leaders.”
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Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development: While it seems natural to hold these two conversations together, in fact it’s more effective to keep performance review and professional development separate. Performance evaluation tends to be a high-risk, inevitably judgmental interaction, often with salary-related consequences. Development, on the other hand, is about identifying strengths and providing support and opportunities for growth.
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Use Flash Mentoring: One of the best techniques I’ve seen for creating cooperation in a group is flash mentoring. It is exactly like traditional mentoring—you pick someone you want to learn from and shadow them—except that instead of months or years, it lasts a few hours.
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Make the Leader Occasionally Disappear: Several leaders of successful groups have the habit of leaving the group alone at key moments.
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Dave Cooper to name the single trait that his best-performing SEAL teams shared, he said, “The best teams tended to be the ones I wasn’t that involved with, especially when it came to training. They would disappear and not rely on me at all. They were better at figuring out what they needed to do themselves than I could ever be.”
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One news service calculated that the Tylenol poisonings generated the widest U.S. news coverage since the assassination of President Kennedy.
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successful groups, I noticed that whenever they communicated anything about their purpose or their values, they were as subtle as a punch in the nose.
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These groups, who by all rights should know what they stand for, devote a surprising amount of time telling their own story, reminding each other precisely what they stand for—then repeating it ad infinitum.
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murmuration, and it’s one of the most beautiful and uncanny sights in nature: a living cloud that swirls and changes shape at the speed of thought, forming giant hourglasses, spirals,
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a 2007 study by a team of theoretical physicists from the University of Rome, is that the starlings’ cohesion is built on relentless attention to a small set of signals. Basically, each starling tracks the six or seven birds closest to it, sending and receiving cues of direction, speed, acceleration, and distance.
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High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal. They provide the two simple locators that every navigation process requires: Here is where we are and Here is where we want to go.
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Step 1: Think about a realistic goal that you’d like to achieve. It could be anything: Become skilled at a sport, rededicate yourself to a relationship, lose a few pounds, get a new job. Spend a few seconds reflecting on that goal and imagining that it’s come true. Picture a future where you’ve achieved it. Got it? Step 2: Take a few seconds and picture the obstacles between you and that goal as vividly as possible. Don’t gloss over the negatives, but try to see them as they truly are. For example, if you were trying to lose weight, you might picture those moments of weakness when you smell warm cookies, and you decide to eat one (or three).
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mental contrasting,
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motivation is not a possession but rather the result of a two-part process of channeling your attention: Here’s where you’re at and Here’s where you want to go.
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The deeper neurological truth is that stories do not cloak reality but create it, triggering cascades of perception and motivation.
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When we hear a fact, a few isolated areas of our brain light up, translating words and meanings. When we hear a story, however, our brain lights up like Las Vegas, tracing the chains of cause, effect, and meaning. Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.
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the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition was complete baloney. In fact, the “high-potentials” had been selected at random. The real subject of the test was not the students but the narratives that drive the relationship between the teachers and the students.
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replacing one story—These are average kids—with a new one—These are special kids, destined to succeed—served as a locator beacon that reoriented the teachers, creating a cascade of behaviors that guided the student toward that future. It didn’t matter that the story was false, or that the children were, in fact, randomly selected.
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Rosenthal classified the changes into four categories. 1. Warmth (the teachers were kinder, more attentive, and more connective) 2. Input (the teachers provided more material for learning) 3. Response-opportunity (the teachers called on the students more often, and listened more carefully) 4. Feedback (the teachers provided more, especially when the student made a mistake)
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They created a high-purpose environment, flooded the zone with signals that linked the present effort to a meaningful future, and used a single story to orient motivation the way that a magnetic field orients a compass needle to true north: This is why we work. Here is where you should put your energy.
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English hooligans embodied the working-class aggression known as the English Disease.
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His idea was that it was possible to stop crowd violence by changing the signals the police were transmitting. In his view, riot gear and armored cars were cues that activated hooligan behavior in fans who might otherwise behave normally. (Ninety-five percent of the people arrested for soccer violence, his research showed, had no prior history of disorderly conduct.) Stott believed that the key to policing riots was to essentially stop policing riots.
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One of the best measures of any group’s culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.
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teams that had high success and teams that had low success. It wasn’t a bell curve; it was more like a split screen.
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2. Roles: Successful teams were explicitly told by the team leader why their individual and collective skills were important for the team’s success, and why it was important for them to perform as a team. Unsuccessful teams were not.
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3. Rehearsal: Successful teams did elaborate dry runs of the procedure, preparing in detail, explaining the new protocols, and talking about communication. Unsuccessful teams took minimal steps to prepare.
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4. Explicit encouragement to speak up: Successful teams were told by team leaders to speak up if they saw a problem; they were actively coached through the feedback process. The leaders of unsuccessful teams did little coaching, and as a result team members were hesitant to speak up.
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5. Active reflection: Between surgeries, successful teams went over performance, discussed future cases, and suggested improvements.
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Note what factors are not on this list: experience, surgeon status, and organizational support. These qualities mattered far less than the simple, steady pulse of real-time signals that channeled attention toward the larger goal.
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flood the environment with narrative links between what they were doing now and what it meant.
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What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation.
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high-purpose environments work. They are about sending not so much one big signal as a handful of steady, ultra-clear signals that are aligned with a shared goal. They are less about being inspiring than about being consistent.
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two basic challenges facing any group: consistency and innovation.
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Each year around a thousand new restaurants open in New York City. All are launched with optimism, confidence, and high hopes for success. Five years later eight hundred of them have vanished without a trace, for various reasons that are, in essence, the same reason. A successful restaurant, like a successful Antarctic expedition, depends on ceaseless proficiency. Good food is not enough. Good location is not enough. Good service, training, branding, leadership, adaptability, and luck are not enough. Survival depends on putting all of it together, night after night. If you fail, you disappear.
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when he answers, that answer has nothing to do with his knowledge and everything to do with you.
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“They are creating uplifting energy that has nothing to do with the task and everything to do with each other and what comes next. It’s not really that different from an ant colony or a beehive. Every action adds on to the others.”
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He hired midwesterners to increase friendliness.
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each of them functions as a small narrative in itself, providing a vivid mental model for solving the routine problems the staff faced.
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By themselves, these phrases are unremarkable. But together, endlessly repeated and modeled through behavior, they create a larger conceptual framework that connects with the group’s identity and expresses its core purpose:
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Meyer became more intentional about embedding his catchphrases and stating priorities in training, staff meetings, and all communications. He pushed his leaders to seek opportunities to use and model the key behaviors. He began to treat his role as that of a culture broadcaster.
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“You have priorities, whether you name them or not,” he says. “If you want to grow, you’d better name them, and you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities.”
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three key practices: selection of employees based on emotional capabilities, respectful treatment of employees, and management through a simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviors benefiting customers.”
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the Credo challenge. Creating engagement around a clear, simple set of priorities can function as a lighthouse, orienting behavior and providing a path toward a goal.
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Slime molds are ancient, bloblike organisms made up of thousands of individual amoebae. Most of the time slime molds are passive, sedate, and wholly unremarkable. But when food becomes scarce, the thousands of amoebae begin to work together in a beautiful and intelligent way.
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The slime mold shows us that it’s possible for groups to solve extremely complex problems using a few rules of thumb.”
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The trick is not just to send the signal but to create engagement around it.
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“The most powerful thing about all those phrases is the way Danny embodies them,” says Coraine. “What he’s exceptional at is realizing that people are looking at him every second, and he’s delivering those messages every second, every day. He’s like a powerful Wi-Fi signal. Some people send three bars, but Danny is at ten bars, and he never goes below nine.”
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Pixar’s creativity happens. “All the movies are bad at first,” he says. “Some are beyond bad. Frozen and Big Hero 6, for instance, were unmitigated disasters.
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When most people tell stories about their successful creative endeavors, those stories often go like this: The project started out as a complete disaster, but then at the last moment, somehow we managed to rescue it
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all creative projects are cognitive puzzles involving thousands of choices and thousands of potential ideas, and you almost never get the right answer right away.
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Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices.
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Catmull has learned to focus less on the ideas than on people—specifically, on providing teams with tools and support to locate paths, make hard choices, and navigate the arduous process together. “There’s a tendency in our business, as in all businesses, to value the idea as opposed to the person or a team of people,” he says. “But that’s not accurate. Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right,
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a team of Pixar’s top storytellers provides regular, vigorously candid, and painful feedback on films in development.
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Face toward the problems.
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B-level work is bad for your soul.
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Catmull, however, wasn’t as quick to celebrate, knowing that real change wasn’t going to happen overnight. “It takes time,” he says. “You have to go through some failures and some screw-ups, and survive them, and support each other through them. And then after that happens, you really begin to trust one another.”
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physically distant from the parent group, nonhierarchical, and given maximum autonomy.
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a surprising fact about successful cultures: many were forged in moments of crisis.
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The difference with successful cultures seems to be that they use the crisis to crystallize their purpose. When leaders of those groups reflect on those failures now, they express gratitude
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Most successful groups end up with a small handful of priorities (five or fewer), and many, not coincidentally, end up placing their in-group relationships—how they treat one another—at the top of the list.
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many successful groups realize: Their greatest project is building and sustaining the group itself. If they get their own relationships right, everything else will follow.
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Be Ten Times as Clear About Your Priorities as You Think You Should Be:
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Inc. magazine asked executives at six hundred companies to estimate the percentage of their workforce who could name the company’s top three priorities. The executives predicted that 64 percent would be able to name them. When Inc. then asked employees to name the priorities, only 2 percent could do so.
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Leaders are inherently biased to presume that everyone in the group sees things as they do, when in fact they don’t. This is why it’s necessary to drastically overcommunicate priorities.
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Figure Out Where Your Group Aims for Proficiency and Where It Aims for Creativity: Every group skill can be sorted into one of two basic types: skills of proficiency and skills of creativity. Skills of proficiency are about doing a task the same way, every single time.
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Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before.
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Embrace the Use of Catchphrases:
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Measure What Really Matters:
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Use Artifacts:
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Their environments are richly embedded with artifacts that embody their purpose and identity.
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Focus on Bar-Setting Behaviors:
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build purpose around spotlighting a small, effortful behavior.
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We adopted a “What Worked Well/Even Better If” format for the feedback sessions: first celebrating the story’s positives, then offering ideas for improvement.
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most effective stories consist of characters struggling with huge problems, the bigger, the better.
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“Every story should have VOW: voice, obstacles, and wanting. The bigger the problem, the better the story.
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You guys are creative athletes—you have to help each other get better.”
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle
