What do Pixar, Google and the San Antonio Spurs basketball team have in common?
The answer is that they all owe their extraordinary success to their team-building skills. In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle, New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code, goes inside some of the most effective organisations in the world and reveals their secrets. He not only explains what makes such groups tick, but also identifies the key factors that can generate team cohesion in any walk of life. He examines the verbal and physical cues that bring people together. He determines specific strategies that encourage collaboration and build trust. And he offers cautionary tales of toxic cultures and advises how to reform them, above all demonstrating the extraordinary achievements that result when we know how to cooperate effectively.
Combining cutting-edge science, on-the-ground insight and practical ideas for action, The Culture Code is a ground-breaking exploration of how the best groups operate that will change the way we think and work together.
DANIEL COYLE is the New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code, The Little Book of Talent, The Secret Race (with Tyler Hamilton), and other books. Winner (with Hamilton) of the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize, he is a contributing editor for Outside magazine, and also works as a special advisor to the Cleveland Indians. Coyle lives in Cleveland, Ohio, during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife, Jen, and their four children.
danielcoyle.com
Twitter: @danielcoyle
For Jen
CULTURE: from the Latin cultus, which means care.
Let’s start with a question, which might be the oldest question of all: Why do certain groups add up to be greater than the sum of their parts, while others add up to be less?
A few years ago the designer and engineer Peter Skillman held a competition to find out. Over several months, he assembled a series of four-person groups at Stanford, the University of California, the University of Tokyo, and several other places. He challenged each group to build the tallest possible structure using the following items:
The contest had one rule: The marshmallow had to end up on top. The fascinating part of the experiment, however, had less to do with the task than with the participants. Some of the teams consisted of business school students. The others consisted of kindergartners.
The business students got right to work. They began talking and thinking strategically. They examined the materials. They tossed ideas back and forth and asked thoughtful, savvy questions. They generated several options, then honed the most promising ideas. It was professional, rational, and intelligent. The process resulted in a decision to pursue one particular strategy. Then they divided up the tasks and started building.
The kindergartners took a different approach. They did not strategize. They did not analyze or share experiences. They did not ask questions, propose options, or hone ideas. In fact, they barely talked at all. They stood very close to one another. Their interactions were not smooth or organized. They abruptly grabbed materials from one another and started building, following no plan or strategy. When they spoke, they spoke in short bursts: “Here! No, here!” Their entire technique might be described as trying a bunch of stuff together.
If you had to bet which of the teams would win, it would not be a difficult choice. You would bet on the business school students, because they possess the intelligence, skills, and experience to do a superior job. This is the way we normally think about group performance. We presume skilled individuals will combine to produce skilled performance in the same way we presume two plus two will combine to produce four.
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.fn1
The result is hard to absorb because it feels like an illusion. We see smart, experienced business school students, and we find it difficult to imagine that they would combine to produce a poor performance. We see unsophisticated, inexperienced kindergartners, and we find it difficult to imagine that they would combine to produce a successful performance. But this illusion, like every illusion, happens because our instincts have led us to focus on the wrong details. We focus on what we can see—individual skills. But individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.
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. They spend so much time managing status that they fail to grasp the essence of the problem (the marshmallow is relatively heavy, and the spaghetti is hard to secure). As a result, their first efforts often collapse, and they run out of time.
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. They move quickly, spotting problems and offering help. They experiment, take risks, and notice outcomes, which guides them toward effective solutions.
The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.
This book is the story of how that method works.
Group culture is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. We sense its presence inside successful businesses, championship teams, and thriving families, and we sense when it’s absent or toxic. We can measure its impact on the bottom line. (A strong culture increases net income 765 percent over ten years, according to a Harvard study of more than two hundred companies.) Yet the inner workings of culture remain mysterious. We all want strong culture in our organizations, communities, and families. We all know that it works. We just don’t know quite how it works.
The reason may be based in the way we think about culture. We tend to think about it as a group trait, like DNA. Strong, well-established cultures like those of Google, Disney, and the Navy SEALs feel so singular and distinctive that they seem fixed, somehow predestined. In this way of thinking, culture is a possession determined by fate. Some groups have the gift of strong culture; others don’t.
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.fn2 I found that their cultures are created by a specific set of skills. These skills, which tap into the power of our social brains to create interactions exactly like the ones used by the kindergartners building the spaghetti tower, form the structure of this book. 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. The three skills work together from the bottom up, first building group connection and then channeling it into action. Each part of the book is structured like a tour: We’ll first explore how each skill works, and then we’ll go into the field to spend time with groups and leaders who use these methods every day. Each part will end with a collection of concrete suggestions on applying these skills to your group.
In the following pages, we’ll spend time inside some of the planet’s top-performing cultures and see what makes them tick. We’ll take a look inside the machinery of the brain and see how trust and belonging are built. Along the way, we’ll see that being smart is overrated, that showing fallibility is crucial, and that being nice is not nearly as important as you might think. Above all, we’ll see how leaders of high-performing cultures navigate the challenges of achieving excellence in a fast-changing world. While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it’s not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.
Meet Nick, a handsome, dark-haired man in his twenties seated comfortably in a wood-paneled conference room in Seattle with three other people. To outward appearances, he is an ordinary participant in an ordinary meeting. This appearance, however, is deceiving. The other people in the room do not know it, but his mission is to sabotage the group’s performance.
Nick is the key element of an 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). Nick plays these roles inside forty four-person groups tasked with constructing a marketing plan for a start-up. In effect, Felps injects him into the various groups the way a biologist might inject a virus into a body: to see how the system responds. Felps calls it the bad apple experiment.
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.
“When Nick is the Downer, everybody comes into the meeting really energized. He acts quiet and tired and at some point puts his head down on his desk,” Felps says. “And then as the time goes by, they all start to behave that way, tired and quiet and low energy. By the end, there are three others with their heads down on their desks like him, all with their arms folded.”
When Nick plays the Slacker, a similar pattern occurs. “The group quickly picks up on his vibe,” Felps says. “They get done with the project very quickly, and they do a half-assed job. What’s interesting, though, is that when you ask them about it afterward, they’re very positive on the surface. They say, ‘We did a good job, we enjoyed it.’ But it isn’t true. They’d picked up on the attitude that this project really didn’t matter, that it wasn’t worth their time or energy. I’d gone in expecting that someone in the group would get upset with the Slacker or the Downer. But nobody did. They were like, ‘Okay, if that’s how it is, then we’ll be Slackers and Downers too.’”
Except for one group.
“It’s the outlier group,” Felps says. “They first came to my attention when Nick mentioned that there was one group that felt really different to him. This group performed well no matter what he did. Nick said it was mostly because of one guy. You can see this guy is causing Nick to get almost infuriated—his negative moves aren’t working like they had in the other groups, because this guy could find a way to flip it and engage everyone and get people moving toward the goal.”
We’ll call this person Jonathan. He is a thin, curly-haired young man with a quiet, steady voice and an easy smile. Despite the bad apple’s efforts, Jonathan’s group is attentive and energetic, and they produce high-quality results. The more fascinating part, from Felps’s view, is that at first glance, Jonathan doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all.
“A lot of it is really simple stuff that is almost invisible at first,” Felps says. “Nick would start being a jerk, and [Jonathan] would lean forward, use body language, laugh and smile, never in a contemptuous way, but in a way that takes the danger out of the room and defuses the situation. It doesn’t seem all that different at first. But when you look more closely, it causes some incredible things to happen.”
Over and over Felps examines the video of Jonathan’s moves, analyzing them as if they were a tennis serve or a dance step. They follow a pattern: Nick behaves like a jerk, and Jonathan reacts instantly with warmth, deflecting the negativity and making a potentially unstable situation feel solid and safe. Then Jonathan pivots and asks a simple question that draws the others out, and he listens intently and responds. Energy levels increase; people open up and share ideas, building chains of insight and cooperation that move the group swiftly and steadily toward its goal.
“Basically, [Jonathan] makes it safe, then turns to the other people and asks, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’” Felps says. “Sometimes he even asks Nick questions like, ‘How would you do that?’ Most of all he radiates an idea that is something like, Hey, this is all really comfortable and engaging, and I’m curious about what everybody else has to say. It was amazing how such simple, small behaviors kept everybody engaged and on task.” Even Nick, almost against his will, found himself being helpful.
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.
The second surprise is that Jonathan succeeds without taking any of the actions we normally associate with a strong leader. He doesn’t take charge or tell anyone what to do. He doesn’t strategize, motivate, or lay out a vision. He doesn’t perform so much as create conditions for others to perform, constructing an environment whose key feature is crystal clear: We are solidly connected. Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.
We don’t normally think of safety as being so important. We consider safety to be the equivalent of an emotional weather system—noticeable but hardly a difference maker. But what we see here gives us a window into a powerful idea. Safety is not mere emotional weather but rather the foundation on which strong culture is built. The deeper questions are, Where does it come from? And how do you go about building it?
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. What’s more, they tend to describe the feeling of those relationships in the same way.fn1
“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)
“It’s not rational. Nobody who’s purely rational about it does the kinds of things that happen here. There’s a teamwork that goes way beyond team and overlaps into the rest of people’s lives.” (Joe Negron, KIPP charter schools)
“It’s a rush, knowing that you can take a huge risk and these people will be there to support you no matter what. We are addicted to that feeling.” (Nate Dern, Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe)
“We are all about being a familial group, because it allows you to take more risks, give each other permission, and have moments of vulnerability that you could never have in a more normal setting.” (Duane Bray, IDEO design)
When I visited these groups, I noticed a distinct pattern of interaction. The pattern was located not in the big things but in little moments of social connection. These interactions were consistent whether the group was a military unit or a movie studio or an inner-city school. I made a list:
One more thing: I found that spending time inside these groups was almost physically addictive. I would extend my reporting trips, inventing excuses to stick around for another day or two. I found myself daydreaming about changing occupations so I could apply for a job with them. There was something irresistible about being around these groups that made me crave more connection.
The term we use to describe this kind of interaction is chemistry. When you encounter a group with good chemistry, you know it instantly. It’s a paradoxical, powerful sensation, a combination of excitement and deep comfort that sparks mysteriously with certain special groups and not with others. There’s no way to predict it or control it.
Or is there?
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 is a humble set of offices surrounded by a riot of workshops and offices that contain, among other things, a British telephone booth, a mannequin wearing pants made of aluminum foil, and what appears to be a miniature roller coaster suspended from the ceiling. The lab is run by Alex (Sandy) Pentland, a soft-spoken computer science professor with bright eyes, a bushy gray beard, and the easygoing assuredness of a country doctor. Pentland started out his career studying satellite photos of beaver dens, establishing a research method that never really changed: using technology to reveal hidden patterns of behavior.
“Human signaling looks like other animal signaling,” Pentland says as we sit down at a coffee table in his small homey office. “You can measure interest levels, who the alpha is, who’s cooperating, who’s mimicking, who’s in synchrony. We have these communication channels, and we do it without thinking about it. For instance, if I lean a few inches closer to you, we might begin mirroring.”
Pentland leans closer, raises his bushy eyebrows, and opens his eyes wider. It’s a little disconcerting when I find myself doing it too, almost against my will. He smiles reassuringly and leans back. “It only works if we’re close enough to physically touch.”
Pentland introduces me to a scientist named Oren Lederman, who, as it happens, is in the midst of analyzing a group working on the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge. We walk down the hall to Lederman’s office to look at the video. The group consists of three engineers and a lawyer, and their tower is coming together nicely. “This group’s performance is probably better than the MBAs but not as good as the kindergartners,” Lederman says. “They don’t talk as much, which helps.”
This is not just Lederman’s opinion—it is fact. As we speak, a river of data from the group’s performance is rolling across his computer screen, including the percentage of time each person spends talking, the energy levels of their voices, their speaking rates, the smoothness of turn taking, the number of interruptions, and the amount each person’s vocal pattern mimics the others. Lederman has captured this data using a small red plastic device the size of a credit card that contains a microphone, GPS, and an array of other sensors.
The device is called a sociometer. It samples the data five times per second and wirelessly streams it to a server, where it is rendered into a series of graphs. These graphs, Pentland informs me, are only the tip of the data iceberg. If they desire, Lederman and Pentland can equip the sociometers to capture proximity and the percentage of time each participant engages in face-to-face contact.
All in all, it is the kind of real-time, deep-dive data that you could imagine being used to measure presidential polling results or a golf swing. But this is a different kind of game. The sociometer captures the proto-language that humans use to form safe connection. This language is made up of belonging cues.
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. 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?
“Modern society is an incredibly recent phenomenon,” Pentland says. “For hundreds of thousands of years, we needed ways to develop cohesion because we depended so much on each other. We used signals long before we used language, and our unconscious brains are incredibly attuned to certain types of behaviors.”
Belonging cues possess three basic qualities:
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.
“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. As far as our brain is concerned, if our social system rejects us, we could die. Given that our sense of danger is so natural and automatic, organizations have to do some pretty special things to overcome that natural trigger.”
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. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build. The dynamic evokes the words of Texas politician Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
It’s useful to look at the bad apple experiment in this light. Nick was able to disrupt the chemistry of the groups merely by sending a few cues of nonbelonging. His behavior was a powerful signal to the group—We are not safe—which immediately caused the group’s performance to fall apart. Jonathan, on the other hand, delivered a steady pulse of subtle behaviors that signaled safety. He connected individually, listened intently, and signaled the importance of the relationship. He was a wellspring of belonging cues, and the group responded accordingly.
In recent years, Pentland and his team have used sociometers to capture the interactions of hundreds of groups in post-op wards, call centers, banks, salary negotiations, and business pitch sessions. In each study, they discovered the same pattern: It’s possible to predict performance by ignoring all the informational content in the exchange and focusing on a handful of belonging cues.
For example, Pentland and Jared Curhan used sociometers to analyze forty-six simulated negotiations between pairs of business students who played the role of employee and boss. The task was to negotiate the terms for a new position, including salary, company car, vacation, and health benefits. 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.
Another experiment analyzed a competition in which entrepreneurs pitched business ideas to a group of executives. Each participant presented their plan to the group; the group then selected and ranked the most promising plans for recommendation to an outside group of angel investors. Pentland found that the sociometers—which tracked only the cues exchanged by presenter and audience and ignored all the informational content—predicted the rankings with nearly perfect accuracy. In other words, 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.)
“The executives [listening to the pitches] thought they were evaluating the plans based on rational measures, such as: How original is this idea? How does it fit the current market? How well developed is this plan?” Pentland wrote. “While listening to the pitches, though, another part of their brain was registering other crucial information, such as: How much does this person believe in this idea? How confident are they when speaking? How determined are they to make this work? And the second set of information—information that the business executives didn’t even know they were assessing—is what influenced their choice of business plans to the greatest degree.”
“This is a different way of thinking about human beings,” Pentland says. “Individuals aren’t really individuals. They’re more like musicians in a jazz quartet, forming a web of unconscious actions and reactions to complement the others in the group. You don’t look at the informational content of the messages; you look at patterns that show how the message is being sent. Those patterns contain many signals that tell us about the relationship and what’s really going on beneath the surface.”
Overall Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors:
These factors ignore every individual skill and attribute we associate with high-performing groups, and replace them with behaviors we would normally consider so primitive as to be trivial. And yet when it comes to predicting team performance, Pentland and his colleagues have calculated nothing is more powerful.
“Collective intelligence is not that different in some ways than apes in a forest,” Pentland says. “One [ape] is enthusiastic, and that signal recruits others, and they jump in and start doing stuff together. That’s the way group intelligence works, and this is what people don’t get. 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.”
They’re just words. This is not how we normally think. Normally, we think words matter; we think that group performance correlates with its members’ verbal intelligence and their ability to construct and communicate complex ideas. But that assumption is wrong. Words are noise. Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.
In the early 2000s, some of the best minds in America were competing quietly in a race. The goal was to build a software engine that connected Internet user searches with targeted advertisements, an esoteric-sounding task that would potentially unlock a multibillion-dollar market. The question was which company would win.
The overwhelming favorite was Overture, a well-funded Los Angeles outfit led by a brilliant entrepreneur named Bill Gross. Gross had pioneered the field of Internet advertising. He had invented the pay-per-click advertising model, written the code, and built Overture into a thriving business that was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, as well as a recent initial public offering valued at one billion dollars. In other words, the contest between Overture and its competitors appeared to be a profound mismatch. The market had placed a billion-dollar bet on Overture for the same reason that you would have bet on the MBA students to defeat the kindergartners in the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge: because Overture possessed the intelligence, experience, and resources to win.
But Overture did not win. The winner of this race turned out to be a small, young company called Google. What’s more, it’s possible to isolate the moment that turned the race in its favor. On May 24, 2002, in Google’s kitchen at 2400 Bayshore Parkway in Mountain View, California, Google founder Larry Page pinned a note to the wall. The note contained three words:
In the traditional business world, it was not considered normal to leave notes like this in the company kitchen. However, Page was not a traditional businessperson. For starters, he looked like a seventh-grader, with large, watchful eyes, a bowl haircut, and a tendency to speak in abrupt machine-gun bursts. 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.
This approach extended to the raucous all-employee street hockey games in the parking lot (“No one held back when fighting the founders for the puck,” recalled one player) and to the all-company Friday forums, where anyone could challenge the founders with any question under the sun, no matter how controversial—and vice versa. Like the hockey games, the Friday forums often turned into collision-filled affairs.
On the day Page pinned his note to the kitchen wall, Google’s competition with Overture was not going well. The project, which Google called the AdWords engine, was struggling to accomplish the basic task of matching search terms to appropriate ads. For example, if you typed in a search for a Kawasaki H1B motorcycle, you’d receive ads from lawyers offering help with your H-1B foreign visa application—precisely the kinds of failures that could doom the project. So Page printed out examples of these failures, scrawled his three-word verdict in capital letters, and pinned the whole mess to the kitchen bulletin board. Then he left.
Jeff Dean was one of the last people in Google’s office to see Page’s note. A quiet, skinny engineer from Minnesota, Dean was in most ways Page’s opposite: smiley, sociable, unfailingly polite, and known around the office for his love of cappuccinos. Dean had no immediate motive to care about the AdWords problem. He worked in Search, which was a different area of the company, and he was more than busy navigating his own urgent problems. But at some point that Friday afternoon, Dean walked over to the kitchen to make a cappuccino and spotted Page’s note. He flipped through the attached pages—and as he did, a thought flickered through his mind, a hazy memory of a similar problem he’d encountered a while back.
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. In fact, he came in on Saturday and worked on the AdWords problem for several hours. On Sunday night, he had dinner with his family and put his two young children to bed. Around nine P.M., he drove back to the office, made another cappuccino, and worked through the night. At 5:05 A.M. on Monday, he sent out an email outlining a proposed fix. Then he drove home, climbed into bed, and went to sleep.
It worked. Dean’s fix unlocked the problem, instantly boosting the engine’s accuracy scores by double digits. On the strength of that improvement and subsequent others it inspired, AdWords swiftly came to dominate the pay-per-click market. Overture’s effort, hamstrung by infighting and bureaucracy, faltered. In the year following Dean’s fix, Google’s profits went from $6 million to $99 million. By 2014, the AdWords engine was producing $160 million per day, and advertising was providing 90 percent of Google’s revenues. The success of the AdWords engine, author Stephen Levy wrote, was “sudden, transforming, decisive, and, for Google’s investors and employees, glorious.… It became the lifeblood of Google, funding every new idea and innovation the company conceived of thereafter.”
Yet that was not the strange part of the story. Because inside Google, there remained one key person for whom this incident didn’t mean much—for whom the events of that historic weekend registered so faintly that he barely remembered it. That person happened to be Jeff Dean.
One day in 2013, Google adviser Jonathan Rosenberg approached Dean for a book he was co-writing about Google. Rosenberg wanted to get Dean’s version of the story, so he started in—I want to talk to you about the AdWords engine, Larry’s note, the kitchen—naturally expecting Dean to pick up on the cue and launch into a reminiscence. But Dean didn’t do that. Instead, he just stared at Rosenberg with a pleasantly blank expression. Rosenberg, slightly confused, kept going, filling in detail after detail. Only then did Dean’s face dawn with the light of recognition—oh yeah!
This is not the response you would expect Dean to have. It is roughly the equivalent of Michael Jordan forgetting that he won six NBA titles. But that was how Dean felt and how he still feels today.
“I mean, I remember that it happened,” Dean told me. “But to be completely honest, it didn’t register strongly in my memory because it didn’t feel like that big of a deal. It didn’t feel special or different. It was normal. That kind of thing happened all the time.”
It was normal. Google personnel were interacting exactly as the kindergartners in the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge interacted. They did not manage their status or worry about who was in charge. Their small building produced high levels of proximity and face-to-face interaction. Page’s technique of igniting whole-group debates around solving tough problems sent a powerful signal of identity and connection, as did the no-holds-barred hockey games and wide-open Friday forums. (Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure.) They communicated in short, direct bursts. (Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.) Google was a hothouse of belonging cues; its people worked shoulder to shoulder and safely connected, immersed in their projects. Overture, despite its head start and their billion-dollar war chest, was handicapped by bureaucracy. Decision making involved innumerable meetings and discussions about technical, tactical, and strategic matters; everything had to be approved by multiple committees. 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.fn1
Let’s take a closer look at how belonging cues function in your brain. Say I give you a moderately tricky puzzle where the goal is to arrange colors and shapes on a map. You can work on it as long as you like. After explaining the task, I leave you to your work. Two minutes later I pop back in and hand you a slip of paper with a handwritten note. I tell you that the note is from a fellow participant named Steve, whom you’ve never met. “Steve did the puzzle earlier and wanted to share a tip with you,” I say. You read the tip and get back to work. And that’s when everything changes.
Without trying, you start working harder on the puzzle. Areas deep in your brain begin to light up. You are more motivated—twice as much. You work more than 50 percent longer, with significantly more energy and enjoyment. What’s more, the glow endures. Two weeks later, you are inclined to take on similar challenges. In essence, that slip of paper changes you into a smarter, more attuned version of yourself.
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.
We get another example of how belonging cues work in an 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?
At first glance, there’s not a lot of difference between the two scenarios. Both strangers are making an identical request that involves a significant leap of trust. Besides, the more important factor here would seem to have less to do with them than with you; namely your natural disposition toward handing a valuable possession to a stranger. All in all, a reasonable person might predict that the two approaches would yield roughly equal response rates.
A reasonable person would be wrong. When 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. They functioned exactly the way Steve’s tip did in the puzzle experiment. They were an unmistakable signal: This is a safe place to connect. You hand over your cellphone—and create a connection—without thinking.
“These are massive effects,” says Dr. Gregory Walton of Stanford, who performed the Steve’s tip experiment and others. “These are little cues that signal a relationship, and they totally transform the way people relate, how they feel, and how they behave.”fn2
One of his most vivid examples of 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 that read as follows:
Dear ______
It has been a short time since you were here at Newcastle Mater Hospital, and we hope things are going well for you. If you wish to drop us a note, we would be happy to hear from you.
Best wishes, [signature]
Over the next two years, members of the group that received the postcards were readmitted at half the rate of the control group.