Translator: Rachael Williams Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here as a human being for a change
instead of just a speaker.
An evolutionary biologist at Purdue University,
named William Muir, studied chickens.
He was particularly interested, as I think we all are, in productivity.
But the great thing about chickens
is it's really easy to measure productivity.
You just study the eggs and count them.
So, he was interested
in what could make the chickens more productive.
So he designed a really beautiful experiment.
First, because chickens live in groups, he just chose a pretty average flock,
and he just left it alone for six generations
to do what chickens do.
But then he created another flock, you might call it a super flock,
where he went around and he identified the individually most productive chickens,
and he put them into their own flock
and each generation he selected again the individually most productive chickens.
And when the experiment was done, he went and compared both flocks.
The first average flock was doing really well:
plump, fully feathered, egg production had increased dramatically.
The second flock: all but three were dead. They'd killed the rest.
And the conclusion Muir drew
was that the individually most productive had achieved their success
by suppressing the productivity of the rest.
Now, I've gone around the world telling this story,
and I look into peoples eyes, and I see a flicker of recognition.
(Laughter)
People have come up to me, and they've said,
"That's my company. That's my department."
"That's my country. That's my life."
All my life I've been told that the way to get ahead,
to have a great life, to have a great career, is to compete.
Compete to get into the best school, to get into the right company,
to get the right job, to get to the top.
And, to be honest, I'd never really found it very inspiring.
I've started and run software businesses. I've started and run media projects.
Because I simply love what I do. Because invention is a joy,
and because working alongside brilliant creative people
is its own reward.
But I've never really been very interested
in super chickens, or super flocks, or pecking orders, or super stars.
But for the last 50 years, in an epic misunderstanding of Darwin,
we've run many organizations and some societies
on the basis of Muir's experiment.
We've assumed that leaders were the individually most exceptional people,
the heroic soloists, the smartest guys and occasional gal in the room.
And the results have been exactly the same as Muir's experiment:
dysfunction, aggression, and waste.
If the only way the individually most successful people can succeed
is by suppressing the productivity of the people around them,
then we badly need to find a different way to work
and a richer way to live.
So if competition and individual excellence
isn't how you get maximal productivity from people, what is?
Well, that was a question that a team at MIT asked,
and they conducted a really interesting experiment
with human beings.
They brought hundreds of people in. They tested their IQ.
They put them into groups,
and they gave them high order design problems to solve.
And they found exactly what you would expect,
which is, of course,
some groups were much, much more successful than other ones.
But what was really interesting is that the really successful groups
were not the ones
that had one or two people in them with towering high IQs
and neither were they the groups that had the highest aggregate IQ.
Instead, the high achieving teams shared three characteristics.
The first was they manifested high degrees of social sensitivity to each other.
Now this is measured by something called a Reading the Mind in the Eyes test
which is broadly considered a test for empathy.
And the teams that had people that scored highly on this did better.
Secondly, the teams that did really well gave everybody roughly equal time.
Now this wasn't formal,
but when they reviewed the tapes of all the deliberations and discussions
that's what they discovered.
There were no passengers and neither did anyone dominate;
everybody contributed fully.
And thirdly, the high achieving groups had more women in them.
(Laughter)
Now this is kind of interesting--
(Applause) (Cheering)
This is kind of interesting, and I know some of these researchers
- I'm sure it wasn't quite what they were looking for! -
(Laughter)
but they don't know quite what it means
because typically, women score more highly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test,
so it may be that it was a doubling down on the empathy quotient,
or it may just be there were wider perspectives in the groups.
But what's really important about this
is that IQ, individual intelligence, didn't make a difference,
but personal connectedness did.
So what does this mean outside the lab, in the real world?
Well, it means that what happens between people really matters.
In the CIA, at Bell Labs, in banking, retail, and pharma
what all the research shows
is that what characterizes high achieving teams is helpfulness.
That the bonds of social sensitivity, mutual support, loyalty, and trust
make a gigantic difference.
An example:
Arup is one of the world's most successful engineering companies.
They were commissioned to build the equestrian center
for the Beijing Olympics.
The building had to receive 2,500 highly strung, rather neurotic racehorses
staggering off of long haul flights
jet-lagged, and feeling not their finest.
The question the engineers struggled with was what quantity of waste to cater for.
Now this is not what they teach you at engineering school,
and it's definitely not something you want to get wrong.
So he could have spent months talking to vets, doing lots of interviews
tweaking his spreadsheet, and then kind of praying he got it right.
Instead, he asked for help, and he solved the problem in a day
when he found the friend of a friend
who had worked on The Jockey Club in New York.
Arup thinks that the culture of helpfulness
is fundamental to their decades of success.
Helpfulness sounds really anemic until you read the research
which shows that it routinely outperforms individual intelligence.
Helpfulness is why the firm SAP thinks
they can answer any question in 17 minutes.
But there is not a single hi-tech company I work with today
that believes this is a technology problem.
What drives helpfulness
is people knowing each other and caring about each other.
And that sounds so obvious
that we think it's just going to happen, but it doesn't.
When I was running my first software business
in Boston, in the United States,
I hired lots of fantastically brilliant engineers,
fantastic CVs, incredible track records.
But we got stuck, and I didn't know why.
And gradually, I realised
that these brilliant people were all totally focused on their work.
They didn't even know who they were sitting next to.
And it was only really when we stopped working,
and we spent time, invested time, getting to know one another
that we got real momentum.
That was 20 years ago,
and today I'm visiting companies that have banned coffee cups on desks
because they specifically want people to hang out around the coffee machine
to talk to each other.
The Swedes even have a special word for this,
They call it "fika", which means more than a coffee break,
it means collective restoration.
There's a company in Maine, in the United States, called IDEXX
where they've covered their campus with vegetable gardens
on which the employees work.
- it's not a vegetable company, it's a hi-tech bio-pharma company -
because they want reasons for people to get to know people
that they don't automatically work with.
They think it makes the company smarter.
So some people look at this, and they think, "Have they all gone mad?"
But they haven't.
What they've done is they've cottoned on to the fact
that when you really hit difficulty - and you always will hit difficulty -
if you're doing any kind of breakthrough project that matters,
you will hit a moment when people struggle and are lost and confused, and need help,
and need to know who to ask for help, and need social support.
Companies don't have ideas, only people do.
And logos and mission statements don't motivate anybody.
What motivates people are the bonds, and loyalty, and trust
that they develop between each other.
It's the mortar not just the bricks that counts.
When you put all this together what you get is social capital.
The bonds of dependency, resilience, interdependency, and reliability
that makes communities resilient.
The term derives from a sociologist who studied communities
and identified why was it that some communities,
some towns and villages,
were much more resilient in times of crisis.
Social capital is what makes organizations creative.
And social capital is what makes them resilient.
Now what does that mean in real terms?
It means that time is everything
because social capital compounds with time.
So, for example, teams that work together longer get better.
Changing teams in and out all the time is disruptive.
It takes time to build trust,
and you need trust in order to be able to say safely what you think,
and to be willing to risk conflict.
It also means that time together really matters.
At MIT, Alex Pentland suggested to one company
that they just synchronize their coffee breaks
so that people would have time together.
What did he find?
It increased profits by £10 million
and employee engagement by 10%.
This is not about chumminess, and it is no charter for slackers.
People who work this way are often scratchy, impatient,
determined to think for themselves, because that is their contribution.
Conflict is frequent because candor is safe.
And that's how good ideas turn into great ideas.
Because no idea is born fully formed.
Instead, it's a bit like a baby: it comes out kind of messy and confused,
and needing the generous contribution,
support, and challenge from other people.
And that's what social capital supports.
This isn't the way we're used to thinking
about talent and creativity.
We're used to thinking about stars.
So I started to wonder, well, if we really care about working this way
does that mean there will be no more stars?
So I went to The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art,
and I sat in on auditions, and what I saw there really interested me.
Because the teachers there were not looking
for individual pyrotechnics.
They were looking for what happened between the students
because that's where all the drama is.
And then I talked to the producers of best selling albums,
and they said, "Oh sure, the industry's littered with superstars.
They just don't last very long.
It's the fantastic collaborators who have the great careers
because bringing out the best in other people
is how they find the best in themselves."
And when I visited firms renowned for their ingenuity and creativity,
I couldn't even see the stars
because everybody in those organizations mattered, and they knew they mattered.
And when I reflected back on my own career,
I thought how lucky I'd been to have such phenomenal people to work with,
and actually how much more we might get still from each other
if we all stopped trying to be super chickens.
(Laughter)
Once you appreciate how profoundly social work is
it changes everything.
Management by talent contest,
which is the way most organizations are still being run, has to go.
Forced ranking has to go.
We have to provide an environment
in which social capital is allowed, is encouraged, to grow.
Motivating people by money has to go too.
There is a vast literature now of research which shows that focus on money
specifically erodes the connections between people.
The more you think about money, the less you think about each other.
We have to accept that what motivates people is each other.
And we have to change fundamentally our notion of leaders
and what leadership looks like.
Get rid of the notion of the superman, the superwoman, the heroic soloist
and recognize that true leaders are those who create the conditions
in which individuals can do their most courageous thinking together.
We know that this works.
When the Montreal Protocol called for the elimination of CFCs,
the chlorofluorocarbons implicated in the hole in the ozone layer,
the risks were immense.
There were CFCs everywhere. It was a billion dollar business.
And nobody knew if a substitute could be found.
But one team that took up this challenge
adopted three really interesting principles.
Frank Maslin, the Head of engineering, said "There will be no stars on this team.
We need everybody. Everybody has a valid perspective."
"Secondly," he said, "We work to only one standard:
the best imaginable."
And thirdly, he told his boss, Geoff Tudhope, that he had to butt out.
Both men knew how disruptive power can be.
This didn't mean that Tudhope did nothing.
He sat in on meetings
to ensure that the team honored its own principles of participation,
and he gave the team the air cover they needed.
And it worked.
Two years ahead of every other company in the world
this team cracked the problem.
And to date, the Montreal Protocol is the single most successful
international environmental piece of legislation ever implemented.
There was a lot at stake then, and there's a lot at stake now.
And we won't solve the problems that we face
by waiting for individual supermen or superwomen.
Now we need everybody.
Because it is only when we recognize that everybody has talent,
that human creativity comes from the bonds between people,
then, and only then, will we liberate the energy,
the imagination, and the momentum we need to build the best beyond measure.
Thank you.
(Applause)