The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

Allen decided to dig deeper, measuring frequency of interactions against distance.

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.”

With or without elevators?

It became known as the Allen Curve.

The key characteristic of the Allen Curve is the sudden steepness that happens at the eight-meter mark.

proximity functions as a kind of connective drug. Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up.

all, we don’t get consistently close to someone unless it’s mutually safe.

The Allen Curve echoes another famous social metric, the Dunbar Number, which reflects the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom we can have a stable social relationship (around 150). They would seem to underline the same truth: Our social brains are built to focus and respond to a relatively small number of people located within a finite distance of us.

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.

draw a distinction between interruptions born of mutual excitement and those rooted in lack of awareness and connection.

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?”

Preview Future Connection:

sneak-previewing future relationships, making small but telling connections between now and a vision of the future.

Overdo Thank-Yous:

it has less to do with thanks than affirming the relationship.

it ignites cooperative behavior.

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.

Be Painstaking in the Hiring Process

Eliminate Bad Apples:

Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces:

Create spaces that maximize collisions.

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice:

muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group.

laughter is not just laughter; it’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection.

Toyota’s use of the andon, a cord that any employee can use to stop the assembly line when they spot a problem.

sharing vulnerability.

apprehensive.

Increasing people’s sense of power—that is, tweaking a situation to make them feel more invulnerable—dramatically diminished their willingness to cooperate.

In an experiment by David DeSteno of Northeastern University, participants were asked to perform a long, tedious task on a computer that was rigged to crash just as they were completing it. Then one of their fellow participants (who was actually a confederate of the researchers) would walk over, notice the problem, and generously spend time “fixing” the computer, thereby rescuing the participant from having to reload the data. Afterward the participants played the Give-Some Game. As you might expect, the subjects were significantly more cooperative with the person who fixed their computer. But here’s the thing: They were equally cooperative with complete strangers.

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.

“Trust comes down to context. And what drives it is the sense that you’re vulnerable, that you need others and can’t do it on your own.”

How would you go about finding ten large red balloons deployed at secret locations throughout the United States?

The Red Balloon Challenge, which DARPA announced on October 29, 2009,

when it comes to creating cooperation, vulnerability is not a risk but a psychological requirement.

“What are groups really for?” Polzer asks. “The idea is that we can combine our strengths and use our skills in a complementary way. Being vulnerable gets the static out of the way and lets us do the job together, without worrying or hesitating. It lets us work as one unit.”

Failure Wall that Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation built, a whiteboard where people could share moments where they’d fallen short.

Or the 'Fuck-Up Nights' meetings.

good teams tend to do a lot of extreme stuff together,”

“A constant stream of vulnerability gives them a much richer, more reliable estimate on what their trustworthiness is, and brings them closer, so they can take still more risks. It builds on itself.”

Cooperation,

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.

the Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness also includes four minutes of silent gazing into each other’s eyes. The original experiment was done with seventy-one pairs of strangers, and one pair ended up marrying.

Kauffman. Kauffman was born in 1911, the only son of the legendary navy admiral James “Stormy” Kauffman. He was what modern psychologists would term an oppositional

intense vulnerability along with deep interconnectedness.

with the proper timing, the task is simple;

a physically weaker team that’s working in sync can succeed in Log PT, while a bigger, stronger group can fall apart, physically and mentally.

the point where vulnerability meets interconnection. You are in immense pain, inches from your teammates, close enough to feel their breath on the back of your neck. When a teammate falters or makes a wrong move, you can feel it, and you know that they can feel it when you do the same. It adds up to a choice. You can focus on yourself, or you can focus on the team and the task.

Trainees must keep track of one another at all times; there is no greater sin than losing track of someone.

“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.

let’s say they’re running late and the instructors are going to hammer them. Does somebody just urge everyone to hurry up and take off running? Or do they stop and say, ‘Look, we’re gonna get hammered for being late anyway, so let’s take a minute and get our gear tight, so when we show up we’re a hundred percent ready.’ There’s something about that second guy that we want. We want to be with him because he’s not thinking about himself; he’s thinking of the team.”

Lorne Michaels,

operated within the comedy ecosystem like an orchid collector: seeking, locating, and gathering the best species.