[Music]
I'm ten years old and I'm focused on a
really simple question, actually obsessed
with a question, how do I get really
really really really good at baseball?
Good enough to play for (I had
thoughtfully narrowed it down to two
teams) the St. Louis Cardinals, because
they won all the time, and the Cleveland
Indians, because they never won.
I kept striking out when I got to the
high school age, I couldn't play that
well and so I decided, I made a decision,
if I couldn't be a great performer I
would study great performers. I grew up
to be a journalist and a researcher and
my job essentially is to travel the
world and look at great performers and
see what makes them tick. Look at the
science of great performance. I married a
girl from Ohio and moved to Cleveland
about ten years ago and one day my
telephone rang and it was the Cleveland
Indians, they finally called and they
were in a bad spot they had been, had
one of the worst records in baseball the
last five years and they were looking to
bring in new ideas and they had read
some of my work and they said ‘we want to
bring you in’ and one thing led to
another and I took a position as an
advisor to the Cleveland Indians. And
then something even more surprising
happened, Cleveland started winning. For the
last five years we have the best record
in the American League.
We have spent four hundred million
dollars less than our rivals. We’re a
small-market team that is adding up to
more than the sum of our parts. Being on
the front lines and watching that rocket
ship take off, watching that
transformation sent me on a journey to
go around the world and look at great
Groups, high performing groups. Groups
like Pixar, groups like Navy SEAL Team
Six. What is culture? How do we get better
at culture? Well, you want to have values,
you have leadership, you want to have
Trust, you want to have teamwork and
integrity and mission and purpose and
honesty and integrity and cohesion.
All this is in fact true, but it's
useless as a tool. It's not a good tool.
Culture is by far the most important
force in our community, in our families,
in our organizations and our way of
thinking about it is medieval. So I want
to give you a new way of thinking about
this space and it starts with a group
that maybe you've already known, maybe
you've already met these, this group.
These are starlings, but this actually
captures what it's like to watch a Navy
SEAL team on a mission. This is actually
embodies what it's like to watch Pixar
make a movie. This embodies what good
groups do; they move at speed,
information flowing through the entire
group, solving problems in real-time. And
the funny thing is starlings have brains
as big as a grain of rice, they're not
paying attention to values or mission or
Purpose. What they are doing instead is
doing the thing that all good groups
do - paying keen attention to signals
of connection. They're paying keen
attention to signals that share
information with each other. They're
sharing accurate information and signals
of direction. You are not so different.
There’s a deep human grammar of
connection that we all are connected to.
Not it's a language, it's a language not
of words but of signals, signals that
connect us, signals through which we
share information, and signals through
which we determine direction. This is the
model for thinking about this space of
Culture. How do human beings connect? Well,
we connect through safety, we build
safety when we get a signal of safety, we
Connect. How do we share information? How
do we share accurate information in
Groups? We share vulnerability, we open up
to each other and tell each other the
Truth. How do we determine direction? How
do humans determine what direction their
group should go, whether that group is a
family, a sports team, an organization or
a community? It's a story, that story
tells us what direction to go. This is a
functional map of how culture works.
There’s a moment in group life where
connection either happens or it doesn't.
You’re in a group, everyone's excited
about a project and people buy in, we
call that buy-in, because people are
literally investing in the group, feeling
connected and we know what that feeling
feels like, it's a wonderful feeling.
Sometimes it happens in a fake way
people seem bought in but then push
comes to shove and they're not quite
bought in, they're not quite there. It’s a
really mysterious moment in group life,
what makes people feel that connection
in their guts? There's a man named Peter
Skillman who's an engineer who dug into
this question and the way he decided to
explore that question was through a
Contest. Simple contest, it was who could
build the tallest tower with the
following materials; 20 pieces of raw
spaghetti, a yard of tape and a single
standard sized marshmallow. Only rule,
marshmallow goes on top.
He had teams of four, teams of CEOs, teams
of lawyers, teams of MBAs, and teams of
Kindergartners. Ready, set,
go! And all the adult groups start the
same way they circle up and they begin
to talk. They make a plan and then they
improve on that plan, they have more
talking, they improve on that plan, then
they divide up in roles and then they
start to build, and it looks gorgeous. It
looks smooth, it looks cooperative, it
looks like the embodiment of perfect
human cooperation. The kindergartners, not
so much. They basically start eating a
lot of marshmallows and then they haphazardly
start jamming stuff together
and taping and it looks like complete
chaos, and if you had to bet your life
savings which group would win, most of us
would pick an adult group, no question,
because that's the way our mental model
of group performance works. Our mental
model focuses on what we can see and
what we see, when we see intelligent,
cooperative, experienced individuals
working together we assume they will
combine into an intelligent group. When
we see chaotic children jamming things
together we assume it is going to be a
chaotic group. There's tower height in
Inches, there are the MBAs (nobody was
gonna bet on them anyway), there are the
Lawyers, they do a bit better, there are
the CEOs, do a bit better, but nobody
touches the kindergartens. They win every
time and it's not even close and it
seems like an optical illusion and it's
because our mental model does not take
into account the two most important
factors of group performance; status
management and safety. The adults look
like they're cooperating, in fact they
are managing status with each other.
While they're talking there's a whisper
in the back of their heads ‘who's in
charge here’, ‘where do I fit in’, ‘is it okay
to say that?’. The kindergarteners work
together and because they work faster
and because they don't care and they're
not worried about who is in charge
they're able to iterate, ideate and innovate
more rapidly. What gives you better
feedback than your tower falling down?
Perfect feedback, how to fix it, let's fix
it together. Safety is not just some
atmospheric feeling, it is the core of
good group performance. It is by far the
most important factor it makes you
Smarter, that moment of connection.