Daniel Coyle: I'm Daniel Coyle. I write about the science of human potential. I'm the author of The Talent Code, The Culture Code, and my new book, Flourish. Today on Big Think, we're going to be talking about talent, highly successful groups, and thriving communities.

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Daniel Coyle: Chapter 1, where talent actually comes from.

We live at a really interesting moment in history. Unlike all of our ancestors, we live in this moment of peak individualism. And so whenever we see achievement, we focus on that individual. We focus on what makes them special. We focus on their habits, their behaviors. We just see them. But like all matters of focus, focus makes you a little bit blind. There's all kinds of other currents, connections, and more ecological powers that are making someone improve.

If you were to look at Hemingway and look at him through the lens of individualism, you would say, well, what makes you great and it would be about his hard work. It would be about his particular gift, his talent. And that's a very sexy story to tell. It's a very beautiful story to tell that he's sort of a magical person and that Steve Jobs is a magical person, that Michael Jordan is a magical person, and that Baryshnikov is a magical person. We get kind of addicted to looking through this individualistic lens.

But when we do that, we're blind to all the other forces that are actually truthfully generating that talent, generating that performance, generating that fulfillment. When you actually scratch the surface of a great performer, when you actually look into what made a Hemingway or a Jordan or a Baryshnikov, what you will invariably find is an elite environment, a bunch of relationships, a bunch of connection. Oh, Mr. Hemingway? He's a great writer. Well, who taught him to love words? What model served him as he began to develop? What kind of environment was he in?

And when you begin to take this environmental lens and put it on, it opens up new opportunities for leadership. It's really in the end about creating conditions where people can grow together. There's a great saying in the Dao De Jing, where there's a good leader, people say what a good leader that is. But where there's a great leader, people say we did it ourselves. That's not how we typically have thought about leadership in the past. We often focus on control. We often focus on results. We often focus on sort of treating people as if they're separate from others. But when we take this more ecological approach, it opens up opportunity. It opens up new ways to create more growth.

Daniel Coyle: So I spent 5 years visiting talent hotbeds all over the world, like places that produced impossible numbers of talented performers. A Russian tennis club that produced more top 25 players than the entire United States or Bulgarian chess club. And the places that I visited had these sort of common features in their environment that I saw over and over again.

The first thing is that they were kind of junky. I started to call them chicken wire Harvards. You know, you'd go to the music camp and there'd be like cinder blocks holding up the stairs and the camp hadn't been repaired in a long time. They didn't put their attention on creating a luxurious environment. They explicitly did not. They actually kept it very Spartan. An elite development environment is not one where every luxury is given to you. It's a place of work. It's a place of craft.

The second thing I noticed is that they really had a different relationship to mistakes. There's something called learning velocity. And the best story I know to get a handle on that is a story about Clarissa. Clarissa was a 15-year-old musician. And she was part of this study done by a psychologist named Gary McPherson. And McPherson tracked her study for months and he identified one segment, one brief segment, six-minute segment where she progressed more than she did in a month of normal practice.

And the question is, what did that look like? Well, Clarissa is sitting down. She's wearing a hoodie. She's got her clarinet and she's looking at the music really intently, looking at it just ferociously intently. And then she plays a little snatch of a song. It's called The Golden Wedding. And she plays the first couple bars. It's a jazzy little tune and then she makes a mistake and she stops. She feels that mistake and then she reads the notes again and she goes back and she hums it to herself and then she goes back and she plays a little bit further and she makes another mistake and she stops. If you picture what the wires of her brain are doing in that moment, she's reaching. She's sensing that failure and then reaching again.

And that's called deep practice. It's when you get to the edge of your ability to increase learning velocity, when you deliberately make mistakes in order to build skill. That's what deep practice is. And when I visited these talent hotbeds, they were all practicing like a bunch of Clarissas. They were all keenly focused on pushing themselves to the edge of their ability, sensing that mistake, and then reaching again. And deep practice is all about that moment of reach, that moment of reach where our learning velocity goes up.

And really it's a moment of reinterpreting what mistakes are. You know, we walk around thinking mistake is a verdict. Mistake is a sign: this isn't meant for me. But in fact, a mistake is information. It's information over where you should reach next. And that combination of this intense desire plus this intense reaching, it's like this engine, right? You've got this high motivation fuel reaching into this zone.

And when we think about who the fastest learners in the world are, well, for my money, the fastest learners in the world are probably like 12-year-old kids on their skateboards. They learn really, really fast. They get good really, really fast. Who are the slowest learners in the world? Well, maybe those same kids in their algebra class. What's happening in those cases if we look at them through a Clarissa lens in the skateboard? The skateboard is showing them—the environment of that skateboard is showing them where the mistakes are. They feel it. They feel that moment and they can correct and adjust. They can make mistakes and fix. In the algebra classroom, they're sort of sitting passively and knowledge is washing over them.

The learning velocity of certain environments—by tweaking the environment, you can massively impact the learning velocity. And that's the lesson of these talent hotbeds. They tweak the environment to create those reaches to improve learning velocity. Like for example, at that same music school, Meadowmount School of Music, they would take a sheet of music that they're learning—and this is a place where some of the top musicians on the planet have trained—they would take their sheet music and cut it into strips, each line, cut it up, and mix them up in a bowl, pull one out, play it, and try to learn bit by bit, chunk by chunk.

Daniel Coyle: One of the places that I saw that was really good at generating errors was Brazilian soccer. You know, there's a mystery: why does Brazil produce so many brilliant soccer players? And the answer to that mystery is usually, well, it's Brazil. It's warm and they play on the beach and it's really inviting and they love soccer. And that explanation makes a little bit of sense. But when you think about it more deeply, there's a lot of places that are warm. There's a lot of places that love soccer. And until the 50s, Brazil wasn't actually that good. They were beaten by Hungary in the World Cup, which is not exactly a beach nation.

So what happened to make Brazil good? They became addicted to this strange little game. It's called futebol de salão, soccer in the room. And it resembles soccer if you fed soccer amphetamines and shoved it in a phone booth. Like it's intensely fast. The space is about as big as a basketball court. The ball is small. Smaller center of gravity, five aside. Its passing lanes are very narrow. The game is very fast. There's no space. You have to make decisions right now. It forces you into the sweet spot over and over again. There's no room. The ball is small, difficult to control. So the vision that creates, the pressure that creates, it puts people into that zone of development, into that Clarissa spot.

Brazil is uniquely addicted to futebol de salão. There were until about 2009, I think there were 39 international championships and Brazil had won 38 of them. It's played all over the nation. And when you look at the biographies of great Brazilian players, they all spent a huge portion of their youth doing this, playing this game.

That's what surprised me about those talent hotbeds: that they were not making each other comfortable. They were tipping their environment so that they could get into that Clarissa zone so they could make more mistakes, so they could build more skill. And I call it the rule of 20%. If you're making mistakes about 20% of the time, you're probably in the sweet spot. If you're not making any mistakes, you are not learning. If you're making 80% mistakes, you're not in the sweet spot. That's pretty sour to be there. And the great irony of the sweet spot is that it feels kind of bitter. It's really hard to hang out making 80% success and 20% mistakes. It's hard. So, it takes that extra bit of focus. It takes that what they would call deliberate practice.

There was this embrace of struggle where the struggle was validated, the struggle was expected, the struggle was noble. I saw it really vividly at Spartak. Spartak is a tennis club outside of Moscow. It has produced more top 25 women players than the entire United States in the 1990s and the early 2000s. And when you get to Spartak, you start to wonder why, because it's like in the middle of this huge park and it's like an old Quonset hut. It looks like something ancient from World War II. And when I walked there, I felt like I had gone to the wrong place because it sort of looked kind of deserted.

There was a tiny door. I remember opening the door, but I didn't hear tennis balls. I kind of expected to hear tennis balls, but I didn't hear tennis balls. And the reason I didn't hear is that they were all swinging without the ball. They were all in a line, almost like dancers swinging slowly. And the teacher whose name was Larisa Preobrazhenskaya, she was 79 and this was her routine. She would not let them begin to compete until they had perfected the stroke. She was incredulous: how can you start to compete unless you build the stroke? And so what she was doing with that slow-motion practice, almost like dancers moving through the stroke, fixing their wrist, fixing their elbow, having them repeat it and repeat it until it was absolutely built and grooved, then they could go to compete. It really for me captured that sense of focus and...

Speaker: focus on building that happens in these places. They're not sort of rolling out the balls and saying go hit balls and see who's who has magical talent. They're saying wait a minute we have to start from the ground. We have to start from the most basic transfer of power from the most basic movement of your body and let's focus on that and struggle through that until we've got it. and they build it piece by piece by piece by piece.

Speaker: I mean, the rule of 10,000 hours has been both elevated and trashed in in recent years. And in some ways, I think we've landed on this sort of medium area where it's not a hard and fast rule. You can't just go do 10,000 hours of something and be world class. And yes, it depends on which skill you're trying to do. If you're doing high jump, um, genetics play a bigger role on that. If you're doing the 100 meter sprint, genetics play a bigger role on that. But for most skills, it's a pretty good rule of thumb to say you need to deep practice. You need to deep practice a lot and you need to build that circuitry.

Speaker: That's sort of a non-negotiable. You need to build that circuitry and that takes that takes time. So there's not a sort of a a a shortcut or a hack to get to this. spending time building those fundamentals, building those circuits, making those mistakes, reaching past where you currently are on the edge of your ability and doing that over and over again. That's what actually skill is built of.

Speaker: It's kind of a depressing message in some way to say, "Oh, yeah, there's not a there's not a shortcut." But on the other hand, what I see in the talent hotbeds is that it's an immensely liberating message. It's an immensely joyful message and it makes each repetition actually matter because each time you're going to a slightly further place. You made the mistake, you learned from the mistake, you grew. And so that growth is what repetition actually is.

Speaker: There was also this sense that um you could steal ideas. There wasn't a sense that everything was individual like that you had to figure out your way to do it. It was a sense you could borrow and beg and steal ideas from other people. And an elite environment is one where a person has the opportunity to learn from others to stare to stare and learn.

Speaker: That's really the first moment of deep practice when we look at a skill and say I want to do that and kind of fall in love with it. Fall in love with that baseball swing. Fall in love with that poem. Fall in love with that music. Fall in love with that dance move to really take it inside yourself. And that's that same pattern that I saw. A social environment where you can stare and learn. A place where you're not focused on yourself, but you're using other people's ideas. And a place where struggle is not just not just accepted, but validated and made noble.

Speaker: You know, one of the greatest mysteries in the world is why did the Renaissance happen? Why did the Renaissance happen in Italy at that time? And there's all kinds of reasons historians give. Oh, it happened, you know, because uh Florence was emptied out by the plague and because the Medici existed. But when all those all those reasons also happened in other places, why was it there?

Speaker: And what you find out when you dig into that is that Florence was where craft guilds evolved. A guild was a workshop where young people were brought in and taught the craft of mixing paint and carving stone and making fresco and preparing pigments. And they would get hundreds of reps, thousands of reps, thousands of hours spent learning about the fundamentals of their craft. Each one of those reps putting them into that zone of deep practice.

Speaker: That's the kind of environment that's an elite development environment. It's not one where they got put in a kind of a country club environment and given lessons from painters. It's ones where they were working every day with other people on real projects, you know, learning as they went. first as a young apprentice learning how to prepare the surface, then mixing the paints, learning how the medium worked, watching great masters at work, they're staring, they're struggling, and they're stealing. And that to me is an elite environment.

Speaker: And so as we look at our schools, as we look at our families, as we look at our work environments, the challenge to us is how do we create that environment where it is safe to stare, struggle and steal together uh for in a craft of getting better and create that kind of guild environment where we can dig in and and grow ourselves.

Speaker: I think the most mind-blowing thing that I see people astonished by is the compounding effect. If you improve 1% a day at piano, at public speaking, at dance, at at whatever you're trying to improve at, 1% a day for a year, by the end of that year, you're 37 times better than when you started. Compounding exponential growth is mindblowing.

Speaker: And so that's why I think we've all had experiences in our lives where we've had people around us who've just took ten off like rocket ships. Kids in our neighborhood who've grown up to be incredible musicians maybe or people we used to go to high school with who were very unimpressive who are now incredibly impressive in terms of their skill and their talent level. And that speaks really to all that potential that's that's that's right there waiting for you when you take off that individual focus. When you start looking at it through a more holistic kind of ecological lens, when you stop treating talent as a magical gift and start treating as something you can grow, the question this leads us to is how do you get that's a big project like growing that much skill spending that much time?

Speaker: It's not an easy thing to spend all that time at the edge of your ability. What makes someone do that? And the answer is ignition. We tend to think of motivation as this internal trait. And yes, it feels that way. But in fact, it's about this relationship, this interaction that we have with the culture around us. Motivation doesn't happen from the inside out. It always happens from the outside in. When we see someone that we want to become, when we see some vision of our future self, that is what unlocks motivation. Somebody who is sort of like a person on the horizon toward which we want to travel.

Speaker: And there's all kinds of fascinating experiments that that um that they've done to do this. One of my favorites is this birthday experiment. They have a class read a biography of a mathematician and it gives some information about the mathematician. It talks about where they were born, talks about how they developed, and at the end of it as part of the bio, they give the mathematician's birthday. But here's the twist. For half of the students, the birthday of the mathematician matched their actual birthday. The experimenters made it match.

Speaker: And then they gave everybody in that experiment a math test. Like, okay, you write about this mathematician. How hard will you work on the math test? And the peoples whose birthday matched worked three times as hard on the math test. There was an ins unsolvable problem on the math test. And they spent three times as much time working on that problem, which is kind of crazy because all it was was just this little moment like you and the math teacher are connected. This little guitar string inside them got plucked. like, "Oh, that math teacher is connected to me in some way." And that social connection unlocked energy.

Speaker: And that's how we're built. When we see something that we really connect with in our windshield, that we feel that guitar string get plucked, it unlocks energy. And that's that moment of ignition.

Speaker: You know, we typically think of talent hotbeds as being kind of magical places, but in fact, with many of them, you can go back in time and see the moment when they got lit, when they got ignited. If you're a Russian tennis player, it was when Anna Cornova went to the finals at Wimbledon. A girl from Spar from that same club showed up. She went all the way to the finals at Wimbledon. Next thing you know that there's more champions coming out of Spartac 5 years later.

Speaker: If you're a baseball player on the island of Kurissau, it's the moment Andrew Jones hit three home runs in a World Series in 1996. From that moment on, that that island began it. It's like that ultimate guitar string. They're all saying, "If they can do it, why can't I?"

Speaker: And that moment, which is, by the way, completely irrational, illogical, defies everything that we would know about individual development and talent. And yet because talent is actually this process through which we are using energy funneling energy into this deep practice to grow skills to grow circuitry. Um that's why that's powerful. It's like a lightning bolt that absolutely lights up a place where people can say if they can do it why can't I?

Speaker: Because motivation is this kind of remarkable kind of lightning bolt moment. A lot of times you can't force it to happen, but you you can increase the likelihood of it happening with a certain set of tools.

Speaker: One place I saw that did this really well was Pixar. You know, we all know Pixar is good at making movies. If you're a new employee at Pixar, on your first day, you come to an auditorium and you sit there and Ed Catmill tells you a couple things. He makes a very short speech. The speech goes like this. Whatever you did before, you're a movie maker now. We need you to help us make our films better. That's the end of the speech. It's a very short speech.

Speaker: And then they have these things where they'll bring everybody together and watch versions, rough versions of the Pixar films. The whole company, baristas come together, engineers, IT folks, and they watch them and they they ask for suggestions. Do you notice anything? Could be better. And I met an IT guy who had suggested a badge on the character in Up. They had some like funny message in his in his scout badges. There was a boy scout in the movie up and the IT guy had raised his hand and made a suggestion and they had put it in the movie.

Speaker: It's about creating a moment where you're inviting someone in inviting someone in to play a role of active contribution to that to that goal to that task to that larger thing. I saw it in Curaçao on the baseball field you know that's a place that has produced uncountable number of major leaguers after they produced just the one.

Speaker: I coach little league, so I was curious, how do they organize their practice? I organize my practice. There's just a coach and 12 players on the field in Curaçao. There's about a hundred players and they're divided up into groups and they have the older kids teaching them.

Speaker: Now, what a moment is that? Rather than looking at some old guy, they're being taught by older versions of themselves, kids who had been to the Little League World Series, kids who were on their way to maybe play in the major leagues. Think about that guitar string moment, that moment of being invited in to that struggle, to that contribution, to that growth process.

Speaker: They're really good at structuring environments to create that kind of that kind of invitation that Ed Catmull is offering and that those older players in Curaçao are offering. It's saying, "Here's a future vision of yourself. Here's something you can play a part in. Do you want to do that?" And and inviting people in. We tend to through that individualistic lens look

Speaker: at Pixar and Ed Catmull as being kind of magical. Well, that's just their little magic dust or whatever. But it's a playbook. I mean, it is an absolute playbook that you can with the right level of deep knowledge and sincerity and learning and growth apply that in other places. And they certainly did in Walt Disney when Walt Disney acquired them. Walt Disney was struggling. They hadn't produced a good movie in a long time, their animated division. And Ed Catmull started visiting there once a week and he moved the desks around. So people had to come walk by him and he created these brain trust meetings where they would get together just like with the earlier example where people are pointing out flaws together and pointing out things they could do better and next thing you know Disney has turned around their animated division entirely.

Speaker: Chapter 2, how great cultures are built. When I got to the edge of individual talent, what became apparent is that there were these places where people were coming together where 2 plus two was equaling 10, where groups who were able to by combining in a certain way create these entities. And when you combine individuals who are growing into an entity that is growing and learning, that's where you get something really powerful. And that's where we're talking about group culture. culture in our modern conception of it often gets used as like it's the vibe of a group or it's the feeling of being with the group or it's the identity of the group. I'd like to offer a different theory which that culture is a set of living relationships in pursuit of a shared goal. It's more of a functional definition of culture rather than focusing on the vibe or the feel. It focuses on sort of the core behaviors that allow a group to come together to become greater than the sum of their parts. There's three relationships that every human being has. It's your relationship to yourself. It's your relationship to others. And it's your relationship to the larger world. And in places where they have got this sense of thriving, this sense of connection, this sense of growth, those relationships are unique. The relationship to the self ends up being a relationship of growth. That you're not fixed. There's a belief that you can grow. There's a belief that you can change. There's a belief that you're not fixed. The relationship to others is really defined by curiosity and connection. They're not focused on the self. They're focused on connection. And connection creates energy. Connection creates possibility. And then their relationship with the world, their connection to the world tends to be one of contribution and creativity. They're looking to find something to contribute to, something to add. And so when you look at all of those thing, if you were to x-ray all those places that I visited, these places where people are truly thriving, whether it's a business or a sports team or a nonprofit or a school, what you'd find with that X-ray is those same core qualities. Real interest in personal growth, real interest in connection and curiosity with others, and a deep connection to creativity and contribution. Those interactions have got to feel and it kind of adds up to this kind of bubbling sort of aliveness that I think we've all experienced at some point in our lives. When we're around those kind of groups, we can feel it. That's not exactly an accident. You know, we evolved in community. We did not evolve as a set of rugged individuals rugging our way through time. We evolved connected to others in community and living communities, groups of people that can self-organize around problems and unlock hidden gifts and create something new that wasn't there before. So those feelings of personal growth, of curiosity and connection and of contributing to something better are deeply wired into us. That's the reason they feel so familiar.

Speaker: The thing that most people get wrong about culture is that they think it comes kind of from the inside out. They think that if you're in a certain group, like if you're in the Navy Seals, if you're in Pixar or if you're a Marine or something like that, that that culture is in your heart and your guts and in your DNA. It's their identity. And then when we think about that culture, all kind of words typically come to mind. Like we think about say cohesion and honesty and mission and purpose and values and integrity and trust and teamwork. And so when we talk about culture, it tends to be really mushy. It tends to be this really mushy thing. But when we look at culture through this functional lens, I think it's more accurate to look through by looking at a great team in motion. And of all the teams that I visited, one of the best ones that you could conceive of would be a flock of starlings connected, moving through obstacles like a flock of birds connected, moving as one through a forest. And what are they doing there? Well, there's sort of three main connections there. They're connected. That's number one. They're in the group. They're not out of the group. They're not going off and having a meeting. They're all in. The second thing they're doing is they're sharing information. They're moving together because they're seeing what others are doing and transparently responding with a shared awareness. And the third thing they're doing is they're handling direction. They're moving toward something. They're moving toward a north star. Not sort of this way or sorted that way, but moving all together. That's what's like to watch Pixar make a movie or to watch the Navy Seals in action or to watch a great sports team. They're connected. They're sharing information to create a shared consciousness and they're moving toward a goal. And that's the functional definition of culture. And be beneath that are some core behaviors that will allow you to do that.

Speaker: Behavior number one, building safety. Building safety is the absolute foundation. Nothing happens without connection. We're trying to accomplish hard things. We're trying to operate in a fast and fragmented world. And establishing that connection is not something you do third and fourth. It is absolutely the primal thing that needs to happen for any group to build a good culture. Safety is the greatest thing to study. And one of my favorite studies about safety comes from a guy named Peter Skillman. And Peter decided to study this through a contest. And the contest was super simple. Who can build the tallest tower with the following materials? 20 pieces of raw spaghetti, a yard of scotch tape, and a single standard size marshmallow. The only rule is marshmallow has to go on the top. And the interesting thing were the groups that Peter chose. He chose groups of CEOs, groups of lawyers, groups of MBA students, and groups of kindergarteners. And he gave them 15 minutes. Ready, set, go. And all the adult groups started the same way. They talked. They talked. They had someone would have an idea like, "Oh, I have an idea of how we could build it." And then they would improve on that idea. And then they would divide up into roles and they'd start to build according to their plan. And it looked awesome. It looked smart. It looked collaborative. It looked beautiful. Right? Kindergarteners didn't do that. Kindergarteners, they ate every marshmallow except for one. And then they just started jamming pieces together like hand overhand, no plan, total chaos. And if you had to bet your annual salary on which team would win, most of us would bet on one of the adult teams because that's our model of group performance. We focus on what we can see. And when we see like smooth, planned, elegant, cooperative behavior, we assume it's going to add up into good performance. And when we see chaos, we assume it's bad. But when we run the experiment, the kindergarteners win like every single time. Their towers average 28 lines in height, the NBA are seven, the lawyers are 14, and the CEOs are 21. They beat them over and over again. And it seems like an optical illusion. You think, do it again. Do it again. But it's not an optical illusion because it's not about how smart you are. It's about how safe you are. The adult groups are doing what humans can't help but do. Managing status. We manage our status. In every social group, we manage our status. It manifests as a whisper in our subconscious mind saying, "Is it okay to say that?" Like, "Who's in charge here? Are we being graded on this?" And that whisper slows down iteration. slows down creativity. It self-silences us, right? Kindergarteners are safer. Nobody's trying to be CEO of Spaghetti Incorporated. They're doing a complicated problem. And what better way to do it than to try stuff and see what happens and then fix that and then see what happens and then fix that. They don't win because they're smart. They win because they're safe. And so every great culture that I visited, I saw that same pattern where they weren't trying to be smart. They weren't trying to be like the adults. They were trying to be like the kindergarteners. They were trying to create situations where people could try stuff, fail, and learn and try stuff and get hand overhand, shoulder-to-shoulder, making mistakes together and adding up to more performance, to more experiments, to more learning.

Speaker: And the way safety gets delivered in human groups, if you're not a kindergartener, is through belonging cues. Belonging cues are simple, clear behaviors, not just words. behaviors that send a signal. I care. I see you. We share a future. We are connected. Tell you a story about how those work. There was a there's a company named Wipro. They were a call center. And like many call centers, they struggled with retention. It's a hard job. People would leave. And so Wipro responded by improving benefits, by improving the campus, uh the call center environment, by boosting salary. None of it worked. People kept leaving until they did a 1-hour experiment. And the experiment was really simple. They took two groups of new hires, group A and group B. Group A received a 1-hour session where they learned the history of Whipro. They met a star performer and at the end they got a fleece shirt with whipro written on it. Group B, similar 1 hour except they flipped it. In group B, the session wasn't about whipro. The session was about the trainee. They asked the trainee, "Hey, tell us what happens on your best day." Like, on your best day, what's it like? Now, describe your worst day. Like, tell me what your worst day is like. And then they said, "All right, thought experiment. We're on a desert island. We're marooned for a month. What skills do you bring to our survival?" And at the end, group B got a sweatshirt, but instead of saying Wipro, it had the trainee name on it. Then they let the clock spin 6 months. Retention in group B went up 300%. Not because of some magic chemistry, not because they had something happen from the inside out, but because they had received a crystal clear set of belonging cues. Simple signals that say, "Hey, I see you. Uh, we're connected. We share a future. I care." And those signals are what allow you to relax and what allow you to connect and what allow you to bring your full self to the situation. One of the places you can learn most is by going to places that are the opposite

Speaker: ...of safe environment that is exactly the opposite of what the kindergarteners are producing or what's happening in Wipro. And one such example is the Minutemen missiles, the nuclear officers that are spread across the upper Midwest. And their job is to take care of the Minutemen missiles that are ready for launch, to have the possibility of launch always over their head, to always be perfectly disciplined and drilled to execute their performance.

Speaker: But for years those crews were some of the worst performing in the Air Force. There was cheating on the test. There were all kinds of drug scandals. It was one of the worst performing crews. They were losing missiles. In fact, they lost track of one nuclear missile. And each time they would have a mistake, they would make the classic mistake of trying to control people more, trying to put more controls in, more carrots, more sticks, force compliance.

Speaker: And they're making the classic leadership mistake is the more you control, the worse you lead. That's a pattern that we've seen throughout the history of command and control. And when they got a new set of leaders in, they sort of flipped it similar to the Wipro example where instead of being pushing pushing pushing and transmitting, they actually set about building community, building a culture from the ground up, creating psychological safety, creating methods of feedback that brought problems to the surface rather than pushing them out of sight. We're tempted to think, "Oh, those are some bad apples that are the problem." But in fact, it's a bad environment. And the more you try to control, the worse you lead.

Speaker: The cool thing about building safety is that like many of these changes to flip an environment, you know, they're very subtle and small. It's a small signal. And a couple of my favorites. There's the two-line email. It's an email you send to people you work with, and it has two lines. This is an idea from Laszlo Bock, who ran HR at Google for some time. You ask him, "What's one thing you'd like me to keep doing? And what's one thing you'd like me to stop doing?"

Speaker: Two lines. Very simple, very powerful signal. I'm curious. Teach me. Help me. We're going to be working together for a while here. I want to get better. And what you find is when you send that email, it's a bit contagious. More people will send that email out. It'll become sort of a cascade.

Speaker: Another big one that's really simple is it was taught to me by a Navy Seal commander. He pointed out that your face is like a door. It's got two settings. It can be open or it can be closed. We kind of know what closed looks like, right? We got our brow is down. Our jaw is set. We're determined. We've got kind of that Clint Eastwood. We're transmitting some message to someone.

Speaker: Open. This is your frontalis muscle. And it's probably the most important muscle on your body when it comes to communicating curiosity, connection, you know, energy, excitement, enthusiasm. This muscle, it doesn't really have much of an evolutionary function. Has a tremendous social function. It might be the most important muscle you have, especially in a world where we're on Zoom calls more than ever.

Speaker: The last idea would say, "Embrace the messenger." We're often told that we should not shoot the messenger. That's a pretty low bar. I think what I see great leaders doing when they're be given bad news, they actually celebrate that moment and they celebrate the person who brought them that bad news. It's not enough just not to shoot them, to actually say, "I know this is bad news and thank goodness you brought it to me." It's almost like this is the moment where we're going to learn together. This is a moment where we're actually going to grow, where actually are facing a truth together.

Speaker: I was at a meeting recently with a major league baseball team. They were about to make a big decision to hire a new manager. And at the last minute, there was one person in the room who brought a passionate argument against that. absolutely derailed the meeting, stopped the action from happening, and it was a really awkward finish to the meeting because everyone thought we were headed in this direction.

Speaker: The first thing the leader did, the president did after that was go straight over to the person who had made the objection and thank him for it. The person had derailed the whole decision process. The person had stopped what everyone thought was going to happen from happening. And the president said, "Thank you." And it really had an impact on everybody in that room. You know, it's not enough not to shoot the messenger to actually say thank you is is really an incredible cultural signal.

Speaker: The second skill of building culture is sharing vulnerability. Now that we've established this foundation of safety, how are we going to face the truth together? How are we going to build a shared consciousness? And the way to do that is to create these moments of openness. And they feel really weird.

Speaker: My favorite experiment with this is something called the two-minute experiment. You take a bunch of people, you divide them into two groups, and they each pick a partner, turn to the person next to them, pick a partner. Group A gets to pick a question, and the questions are very kind of fact-based. It would say, "Talk about your favorite pop star or talk about the last pet you owned." Group A talks about those questions.

Speaker: Group B gets a different set of questions. Questions are a little more personal. The questions are like, "When was the last time you cried?" Or, "Is there something you've always dreamed of doing? Why haven't you done it?" Questions like that. So, group B talks about those questions.

Speaker: And what you find when you do this is the energy level on the two sides of the room is radically different. Group A is talking normally, exchanging facts and information. Group B, they're turning toward each other. Their voices are getting raised. They're leaning in. They're laughing. They're animated. There's a device called a sociometer that captures the texture of social interactions. And if you had a sociometer on each side, they'd be radically radically different. The energy on this level is completely different.

Speaker: The question is why? Why does that little personal question, when was the last time you cried? When is there something you've always dreamed of doing, why haven't you done it? You cannot answer those questions without creating a moment of openness, without creating a moment of genuine openness and disclosure, without connecting.

Speaker: And that openness is what creates connection, what creates energy, and what ultimately creates relationships and trust, which is kind of crazy because we're always taught and trained that we have to build up trust before we can be vulnerable. The science shows we've got it exactly backwards. Moments of vulnerability, when shared, create trust, ignite connection, ignite relationship. In the original experiment, two strangers who were in group B and began to talk about those deep questions got married. So, you got to be careful who you do these questions with.

Speaker: And what's fascinating about cultures is that they don't treat those moments of vulnerability as something just organically happens. They actually engineer them. They treat them more like a calisthenic. We're going to circle up and we're going to talk about the truth. We're going to see what's going on here. We're going to share and create a shared consciousness around these hard things we're doing together. Like a calisthenic, it burns. It hurts, right? And like a calisthenic, it makes you better.

Speaker: One of the guys who is the best at explaining this was a man named Dave Cooper. Dave Cooper commanded the troops that got Bin Laden. And when I had breakfast with him, he said, "The four most important words a leader can say are, 'I screwed that up.'" Why is that? That's kind of a remarkable thing for a great leader of kind of an invincible group to say, but when you look at it through the lens of vulnerability, what that is, it's an invitation to say, "Yeah, we're all going to talk about those things together."

Speaker: The SEALs are really good at it. They've operationalized it into what they call an AAR, afteraction review. Whenever they do a mission or finish a training run, the first thing they do before eating, before sleeping, is they circle up and they ask three tough questions. What went well? What didn't go well? And what are we going to do differently? Really simple questions, really powerful questions.

Speaker: But in that conversation, people are saying, "I screwed up. I think you screwed up. What I think that was ter I think that was right." and they have this conversation of real vulnerability where they create a shared awareness of what they're actually trying to do and get a little bit better. It's almost like groups are sort of they get stronger the same way our bodies get stronger, which is by enduring these moments of kind of a test, right? We get stronger when we do hard things together and groups get stronger when they do hard emotional things together.

Speaker: places that really do this well, they tend to focus on small group conversation. They'll do just like the seals do with an AR. They circle up and they talk about what happened. And you see that same pattern of taking action and then doing something that's difficult for most groups to do to pause and really assess and connect. And those assessments often are not led by the leader. They're often led by people who are lower on the totem pole.

Speaker: Why is vulnerability so important? You know, that's a good question. Can't we just sort of build safety and do stuff and figure that the purpose of creating a safe environment is not just to make people feel safe. It's to give people the courage to speak out. There was a great moment in the NBA finals back in 2015. The Golden State Warriors were losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers that nobody could defend LeBron. And so the Golden State Warriors had a meeting and they were saying, "How can we defend LeBron?" and the video intern at the meeting raised his hand with a suggestion and it turned out to be a really smart idea and they used it and they defended LeBron better and they won the series.

Speaker: The interesting part of that story is not the moment the video intern shares the idea. It's the million moments before that gave him permission to raise his hand. It's the how many little interactions did he have with the players, with the coaching staff that he felt courage enough to raise his hand and share that idea. Those moments are where safety and vulnerability really start to play. The purpose of safety is to let people be vulnerable. So, you can't have one without the other.

Speaker: And that's why they're so powerful together because that moment of safety, that moment of connection lets you reach with courage and step into uncertainty like that video intern did, which makes you feel more connected. And that's what great culture is. Those moments of feeling so connected that you can speak out and that deepens your connection. We started with safety, the foundational skill, then vulnerability, which creates action. And now we've got a question, how do we figure out our direction? And that's the third skill, establishing purpose. We see purpose sort of written in mission statements and we see it on

Speaker: ...the walls and we see it as these big statements, these big north stars we're moving toward. What I find in high performing groups is that they're much more skilled at creating the lowercase P purpose. What's our purpose as this team right now in this space? A lot of them will have these moments where they will come together and talk about why they're doing the task right now.

Speaker: I've seen groups call it a process called teaming. The teaming process begins with coming together and talking about the why. Talking about what's our ideal end state here and why does this matter? Getting personal about what we're energized by and what we're deenergized by. And that moment of bringing the team together to talk about that stuff lets them create their own sense of purpose for this project.

Speaker: They're not doing it for the, you know, that big pie in the sky long distance thing. They're doing it for each other and they're doing it to solve a problem together. And often times on the best teams, the purpose often can end up being each other, the relationships on the team. If you talk to great teams about why they do things, they will inevitably talk about doing it to be a teammate, to be a great teammate, to support the people next to them. There's something about turning toward hard problems with people we like and admire that is addictive. And I think great cultures tap into that feeling, that energy we get. There's nothing like turning toward hard problems with people that we admire. And so finding spaces where people can create those kind of cohesive teams is really an important part of purpose.

Speaker: The other thing about creating purpose is that you can't talk about it too much. I went into my research thinking that purpose would be something kind of in people's heart and they wouldn't necessarily talk about it very much. But what I found was the opposite. And a lot of the high performing cultures that I visited, they would talk about it all the time. You know, at Pixar, they would always talk about the culture. The Navy Seals are always talking about "the only easy day was yesterday," and "we shoot, move, and communicate," and "we're the quiet professionals." Like, they actually can't shut up about how quiet they are.

Speaker: I'm reminded of a study they did where they asked CEOs, "How many people can name the top three priorities of your organization?" And they thought about it and they estimated. They estimated 64% could name the top three priorities and then they surveyed the people it turned out to be 3%. 3%. So we routinely overrate the clarity factor. And so I think one of the reasons that these cheesy mantras, these cheesy repetitions always are brought in is because they stick in your head and because they work and because they make it vivid in times where we're constantly being pulled different directions. Having a good cheesy saying like "quiet professional" works.

Speaker: One of the best stories about that that I know has to do with Danny Meyer. Danny Meyer opened a restaurant in New York. He now runs Shake Shack. He's opened 22 restaurants. He's sort of the Pixar of the restaurant world, I would say. He opened his first restaurant, it was successful. He opened his second restaurant and they both started to fail because he couldn't be in both places.

Speaker: When he was in the room, you knew what proficiency was. Everyone looked at him. Everyone knew how to behave. Everyone knew what mattered. But when he couldn't be in both restaurants, they both started to fail. And that's where he did something really smart when it comes to building a culture of proficiency. He closed both restaurants and went on a retreat, and he started building what he called a mantra map which was distilling all the key behaviors of his culture into a series of catchphrases.

Speaker: They were really kind of cheesy catchphrases. It was like "the excellence reflex." "Mistakes are waves. Servers are surfers of those waves." "The road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled." "Loving problems." Those were all the kind of mantras and those seem kind of cheesy at first, right? Excellence reflex, loving problems, athletic hospitality.

Speaker: But I was having breakfast with Danny Meyer one day in one of his restaurants and in the corner of the restaurant, somebody dropped a tray of glasses on the floor and Danny Meyer stopped talking to me and he started looking in the corner and I said, "What are you looking for?"

Speaker: And he said, "One of two things is about to happen. Either this restaurant's going to come together and they're going to clean up this mess together and the energy level is going to go up or there's going to be some hint of anger and blame, resentment, and the energy level is going to drop. Litmus test." As it happened, they came together, it went up, and it really put a spotlight on how genius his mantra map is.

Speaker: Culture doesn't happen when things are smooth. Culture happens when there's a moment of adversity. And when there's a moment of adversity, it is very helpful to have a compass. It is very helpful to have a map of mantras: athletic hospitality, loving problems, the road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled. That's not cheesy. That's genius. And so building that kind of language, language is immensely powerful when it comes to sending a lighthouse beam of clarity around proficiency. And so getting your team together and building your own mantra map ends up being one of the most powerful things you can do because you already know what challenges you are going to face. It's not a mystery. If you're a trauma team, if you're a high school teacher, if you're a tech worker, you know what those challenges are going to be. So why not anticipate that? Why not talk about the kinds of responses you think you should have? Why not create a mantra with your team?

Speaker: The other thing you do is storytelling. Stories are so powerful. Stories are the most powerful drug ever created. Stories stick in your head 22 times better than data does. And so when there is a story to be told, treating that as a little nugget, as a little piece of gold, as a little radio station you can broadcast into your group. I know a lot of tech groups that they'll do an end of the week gathering and it's called a CSWD meeting: Cool stuff we do. And they're just sharing cool ideas that they've heard. Cool stuff we do. Let's have a CSWD meeting. Simple stories that can be shared and that can help people navigate. Stories are navigational tools.

Speaker: Another one are symbols. Symbols are important. Symbols capture things that can't be captured in words. There's a reason that every belief system in the world uses symbols because they're powerful. If you walk in to the headquarters of the San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful NBA organizations on the planet over the last 30 years, you walk in and you see a rock and a hammer sitting there behind glass case. Just a big rock and a big old hammer.

Speaker: It comes from a story that the coach Gregg Popovich saw years ago. It was about a granite quarryman who's pounding on a rock with a sledgehammer and someone comes along and says, "Why do you keep pounding that rock?" And he said, "When the rock splits, I will not know if it is the last blow or all the blows that came before that did it." That's a story that he tells in the group.

Speaker: And he makes that story come alive every time the players come in. Every time they leave, what do they see? What's the mantra at the San Antonio Spurs? Pound the rock. So, these things—turning our behaviors into language that can be shared, that can be spotlighted, that can be celebrated. And not just good stories, by the way. The bad stories matter, too. Telling stories about the disasters that happened, about the mistakes people made, that is perhaps even more powerful in helping us navigate. Because when it comes to navigating, knowing where to go is really good. And knowing where not to go is even better.

Speaker: So as you build safety at the bottom, that's the connective function. Safety. Do I belong? Do I have a place here? Do I have a future? Do we care about each other? Upon that, we add sharing vulnerability. Are we telling the truth? Do we have a shared consciousness? Are we hiding and avoiding or are we facing problems together? And then finally, how do we handle direction? We do that with a really clear northstar of purpose. So cultures are these living feedback spirals that are moving in search of some north star. So it's a set of living relationships establishing safety, sharing vulnerability, and moving toward that purpose.

Speaker: Chapter 3, flourishing and the hidden rules of human connection. We know that it's possible to perform at a really high level and still have an empty life. We see those examples all around us. It's possible to climb mountains and you get to the top and you just see more mountains. It got me interested in extending those ideas, looking at the environments, looking at the interactions of places that were creating joy, fulfillment, connection, deep places of flourishing. What does it mean to flourish? It's joyful, meaningful growth shared.

Speaker: That was the piece that when you look at the scientific definition of flourishing that surprised me the most. Joyful, meaningful growth. Okay, I got that. Shared. Shared. That struck me by surprise at first. But the more you look around and when you begin to investigate the phenomenon of flourishing, people who are experiencing joyful, meaningful growth, what you find out is that all flourishing is mutual. We become our best selves in and through our relationships with other people. There's nobody flourishing in a cave in Switzerland by themselves. There are no rugged individualists flourishing. We need other people to do it.

Speaker: When we look at it through that lens, it gives us some insight into two basic things. The first is that, hey, this is a team sport. It's not about me. It's about the space in between us. And the second insight is that we're pre-built to do it. We're pre-built for this. Our ancestors did not get here by being rugged individuals. They got here through their ability to form and thrive through community. And so because we become our best selves in and through other people. This idea that it's joyful, meaningful growth that is shared, it really puts the question on what's that sharing consist of? What does it look like? How do we do it in our own lives? And how do we do it in this individualistic era that we're living in?

Speaker: We get a great look into that by looking at an example of unlikely flourishing that happened in the bottom of a Chilean mine in 2010. 33 miners were trapped with very little hope of rescue thousand feet below the surface with 100 million tons of rock on top of them. They spent 16 days in darkness not knowing if they were going to live or die. They emerged like brothers. They emerged with this incredible bond.

Speaker: The question is how did that happen? How did they get through this period of time, these 16 days with no idea? The early stories that came out of the mine had to do with charismatic leaders who led the way and who told people what to do and who organized the group. But some studies that came later showed the truth. What brought the group together were not charismatic leaders. It was when they circled up, surrendered control, and opened up to each other.

The first moment happened shortly after they were trapped. They circled up and the leader of the group, a stern supervisor named Luis Urzua, walked to the center of the group. He had a white helmet on, a supervisor's helmet. He took off his helmet and he said, "There are no bosses and no employees anymore." Which stopped everybody. This wasn't a statement of leadership. It was a question. He was posing this question to the group, creating this space.

Few minutes later, there was another moment where they were counting heads and they ended to be 33 minors. And one of the minors, many of them were Catholic, said, "That's the same age as Jesus when he was crucified. Maybe there's something bigger waiting for us outside." Another question, not a statement, not a direction, not a we need to do this, a question. And what brought that group together was that moment of creating space when the group could let go of control, circle up and actually grapple with the situation that they were in.

And what that moment did, what those questions did was they sparked engagement. The people started self-organizing into groups. One of them organizing the sleeping space, one of them organizing their meager stash of food. They developed these rituals around food each time, taking a little sharing a little scrap of canned tuna and they would sort of everyone would be served and they would wait until everybody's ready and they would say a prayer and they would eat it together.

They developed these rituals around playing games in the dark together. They developed a guardian angels program where when one would sleep, the other would kind of watch over them. They developed this sort of confessional. When someone would make a mistake, they'd have an opportunity to confess that mistake to the group. They developed an entire little civilization in the worst environment you could imagine. They were able to come together so that when they were rescued, I mean, there was no question that they were thriving. When they were asked to go up in the final rescue elevator, they kept deferring to others saying, "No, you go first. No, you go first."

The transformative power of community doesn't get created by people with answers. They get created by people who create space who create questions and then who create space for people to explore those questions together to step into uncertainty together. All this stuff when you talk about it sounds a little soft. It sounds a little kumbaya but the fact is over and over again we see the same pattern. Leaders places that are able to create that space where people can make meaning together and then people can build community together. step into that uncertainty and build something new. That's the process of flourishing.

Seen this way, like flourishing isn't some magic thing that happens to certain lucky people. It's much more like a skill. And like any skill, it's got two practices, two pillars. The first is making meaning. How do we stop and see what matters? How do we stop and make meaning together? The second one is building community. How to create something new together? How do we connect in ways and turn to make something better together? That's what community is. When people turn toward each other to make their situation better.

So those two actions, the first is like a pause that creates energy. The second is action. So the first they work together kind of like a heartbeat you could say. You stop, you see what matters, you make meaning together, you have a deep connection, you connect deeply. Then let's try something. Let's do some messy project together. let's take something on. And that is the kind of ultimate thread of human community throughout time. Circling up, coming together, finding meaning, and then using that energy toward making their situation better. And that's what community is in a nutshell. And that's the heartbeat beneath it.

There's this neighborhood in Paris. It was like any other neighborhood. It was kind of you know little people buried in their phones, upper middle class, people busy all the time. There's a journalist there named Patrick Bernard who got obsessed with this question. He's like, "Does it have to be this way?" And as a journalist, he decided to do an experiment. He rented 80 tables to create the longest table in Paris. He closed off a street, got permission to close off a street, and then invited everyone for a potluck. Bring your own dish. It's going to happen on this day. longest lunch table in Paris.

His neighbors thought he was kind of nuts and his neighbors called him a teddy bear kisser, which is sort of like saying, "You're a naive soul. Bisounours," they call it. "Oh, you're a teddy bear kisser. This will never work." Of course, people are distant. It's Paris. People are snobbish, you know. Get over it. There wasn't a lot of optimism going into it. But when the day came, the whole neighborhood showed up. The kids started turning the cones into like giant megaphones. People were came playing instruments. People brought their own food. It was this immense celebration.

And then Bernard did the next thing. He had them selforganize into groups. He had them self-organized into interest groups. Like if you're into biking, here's where the biking group's going to meet. If you're into cheese, here's the cheese group. If you're into history, here's the history group. If you're into dogs, here's the dog walking group. And those groups gathered with only two rules. First is no negativity, no politics. And the second rule is you have to gather around a joy device. a joy device, meaning coffee, alcohol, food. You have to gather around something, small groups.

And you go in that neighborhood today and it feels like you're in a village. There was an older woman who broke her wrist. She got 15 offers of help to take care of groceries. When an older person goes into the hospital, there's a group of people that selforganized to water their plants and take care of their dogs together. It feels like you're in a different place. It feels like you're in a village. What happened? It's the same people. What happened was he tipped the environment to create this sense of meaning and presence.

That table is not just a table. That table like any ritual is this pause where you can actually connect and actually bring your gift to the circle. Those kind of moments which produce nothing useful. You know that table produced nothing that you could measure and that's why it worked because you're putting people in a different attentional state.

We walk around in the modern world focused with kind of this narrow task attention turned on where we're looking at things and figuring out how to get from A to B to C to D. Moments like that and tables like that and environments like that, just like with the Chilean miners, they're open questions. They're spaces that allow us to step into uncertainty alongside other people and create meaning together. And that's how we're pre-wired to behave. That's where meaning comes from. The meaning in our own life happens when we stop, when we widen our attention, when we surrender control, and when we connect. And so creating environments where that connection can happen is the key move.

We're taught our brains are these problem-solving devices. That's true. They're good at solving little problems and analyzing. They're also good at creating relationships. And so creating spaces where those relationships can take root and grow is really the key move. All of these places are like little green houses. They're a little disorganized and they're they're that's where that aliveness comes from because you're not quite sure what's going to happen.

It's almost like walking up to that potluck and you're not sure what's going to happen. Are people going to like my dish? Am I going to like theirs? Who's going to sit next to me? Who what's going on over there? This atmosphere of aliveness and uncertainty is the exact opposite of the algorithmic world in which so much of the modern world is built on where it's about frictionless certainty. What's happening over here is friction-y uncertainty and that's why it's powerful. That's how relationships get built. They don't get built over here. This is just function. But over here you've got this sense of openness, reciprocal openness and connection that creates actual relationships. And that's how we're built to make relationships.

This year, we've all seen the New England Patriots go from being 4 and 13 last year to going to the Super Bowl this year on that team. They have incredible relationships. They've talked about it all year. And the question is, how'd they do that? Well, the answer is on the first day of practice, their new coach, Mike Vrabel, didn't practice. Didn't practice. He didn't do the utilitarian thing. It made sense to practice, but he didn't. He did this thing that didn't make sense, which is called the four H's exercise.

You get into small groups. You circle up just like that French table. You circle up and you get into these four topics. Who's your hero? What's your history? Where you from? How'd you get here? What's your heartbreak? And give me a hope. What's your hope for the coming year? Super simple exercise. Doesn't take long. 15 minutes the most. But at the end of that exercise, what you've created is you've taken these relationships that were transactional and you've opened them up. You've energized him. You've created this deep connection.

And we often talk about that as if it's just like this chemistry thing like, "Oh, we had a good relationship. We had a good talk." It's like, "Well, yeah, and those things can be engineered. Those environments can be created. Those questions aren't actually questions. They're spaces for people to actually step forward and connect."

When we look at our attention systems, and I'm using the plural there, it is attention systems. We typically think we just have one attention system, but when you look at the neurology of this, we have two attention systems. We have task attention, which sees the world narrowly as something to control. It evolved for as the way that we spot food, categorize it, and grab it. If your ancestors are going to survive, they need to be able to do that. You need to see something and control it.

But you also need to pay attention to the wider world, which is why we have the second attention system, which is relational attention. It's much broader. It catches the nuances of things. It's how we connect to other people, to groups. It's how we we sense narrative. It's how we sense all the things that aren't narrow and controlled. And so that moment of surrender and control, that moment of stepping into uncertainty and saying, "Oh yeah, I'll share with you my heartbreak." Is that moment where our relational attention is being lit up like a lamp.

It's where all of a sudden we're going from this to this. And that's what relationships are made of. Those moments where you feel connection, where you feel real, illogical, irrational, non-informational, just like meaning. It's like that guitar string inside you gets plucked a little bit and you feel a vibration. Flourishing groups are really, really good at creating those moments. They don't treat them as accidental. They treat them as part of the daily fabric

Speaker A: ...of life to get together and create those moments. And one of the people on the planet I think who is the best at it was Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers of the television show fame. You know, his show was almost cancelled a year after it was on and they couldn't get a new sponsor and they announced that the show was going to be ending. And it's never happened in the history of PBS that angry mothers come to PBS stations and picket and protest. In Los Angeles, 3,000 people showed up to support Mr. Rogers. How did he create that deep connection that because of that support, the show has continued? He's become the icon. All he did on that show was create this attentional architecture where he's continually stopping, creating space. Every time he spoke a word, he would pause and wait as if the other person, the kid on the other end of the television, was talking to them. Continual awareness. He had a little exercise that he did in front of the crowd at the Emmy Awards in the late '90s, and it was a very simple exercise. It lasted 10 seconds.

Fred Rogers: All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take along with me 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are? Those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life. 10 seconds of silence. I'll watch the time.

Speaker A: And the whole crowd is weeping at the end. These people are all glamour glitzy at the top of their profession. And every bit of eyeliner in that room was running.

Fred Rogers: Whomever you've been thinking about, how pleased they must be to know the difference you feel they've made.

Speaker A: 10 seconds he was able to awaken and nurture the relationships that are in their lives waiting to be awakened. And so that's what those groups are good at doing. And it sounds soft. It sounds kind of, you know, kumbaya, and yet it's the most elemental part, the most fundamental part of building what human beings are born to build, which is community.

Why do rituals exist? There was an author a while back who wrote a book about rituals and he offered readers if they could find any human group that did not do rituals, they would get the price of the book back. He has received no such offers because every human group has rituals. We are absolutely built for them. What is a ritual except a space where the usual laws of cause and effect do not apply? A ritual is something that says, "I'm going to light this candle. It's going to make me work better at my desk today." A ritual is a piece of a good luck charm or something like that. They don't actually have a cause and effect. They only work through this sense of presence. They only work through this sense of illogical connection. When we see communities and cultures, a lot of them are using ritual to that exact effect.

Why Iceland, for example, has some of the closest community cultures on the planet? Well, they also happen to have these rituals where they all take a hot spring bath once a week all together, the whole community together. They will come together in those rituals. There's other ways they could get clean. There's other ways they could achieve those same goals, but taking the time to do that ritual is what helps bring them together.

In the modern world, we focus a lot on habits to automate our lives. Habits to make things go quicker and more efficiently so we don't have to think. That's how habits are built, so that we can automate. Rituals are so we animate our lives. So we can actually slow down and pay a deeper form of attention, whatever that ritual might be. Maybe that ritual is prayer, maybe that ritual is a good luck charm, maybe that ritual is something else. But finding rituals slow us down and they infuse—rather than automating our lives, they infuse our lives with a new kind of animation.

Speaker A: Building community happens through a process that I call group flow. Group flow is the process through which a group comes together to navigate problems and to self-organize into new shapes and patterns. It operates like anything according to two rules. The first rule is the rule of the beautiful mess, and the second rule is the rule of surprise.

The rule of the beautiful mess says that disorder is not the obstacle, it's the doorway. Now when I visited these places, I kept encountering the same scene. They would deliberately design messes. The New Zealand All Blacks, one of the best rugby teams in the world, they have a certain period of their season, a certain period of their week where they will let the players run practice. This isn't the smoothest way to do it, right? The smoothest way to run practice is to have coaches run practice. That's not how they do it. It creates all kinds of unpredictability, all kinds of messes. But what does it also create? It allows them to self-organize into these problems. It allows them to create new patterns. It gives them a sense of deep agency and ownership.

I saw the same pattern. There was an art teacher named Linda Barry, and she would often pair one of her master's art students with a four-year-old. That's how she would design it. Was it predictable? No. Was it neatly designed? No. It was messy. Having a four-year-old work with a master student is a mess. But what happens in that mess? The master student rediscovers the joy of creating art. The four-year-old discovers the power of what they're doing. It's an incredible moment. It's the same as what the All Blacks were doing. They're purposely creating a little bit of chaos so that life is not like a machine, but that it's more like a pickup basketball game.

And that's the rule of the beautiful mess. You have to create some disorder to create group flow. You have to create some disorder to actually create community. Community is not about staying ordered. Community is about creating and building together. And the model of a pickup basketball game is actually very powerful because there's three factors that you need to have with group flow:

• You need to have a clear horizon. You need to have a basket that you're shooting for. You need to have a clear gradient that you're moving down.
• You need to have some really clear guard rails, sort of like places where you can go and you can't go.
• And you need to have agency. You need to give people freedom to navigate.

And so those factors, that sense of ownership, that sense of agency, that sense of horizon is what we see in group flow. And it turns leadership less into the question of how do I tell them what to do, how do I know the answer, into a question of: what can you design that lets people use their gifts? That lets people self-organize through a problem together in ways that generate new possibilities and new solutions.

Speaker A: We get a really vivid example of the power of that in a story of Building 20. Building 20 was built on the campus of MIT in 1942. It was designed for the purpose of creating the radar technology that would go on to win World War II. But after World War II was over, it was left abandoned and different groups sort of moved into it kind of haphazardly.

The building was kind of junky. It's plywood walls, exterior plumbing. There were no real facilities. It was freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer. No one really wanted to go there except people who didn't quite fit in. But over time, different groups came in there. And it turned out that this place turned out to be what was called the magical incubator of MIT. Some of the first video games were created there. The first completely soundproof chamber was created there. Some really important black hole research was created there. Noam Chomsky did some important linguistic research there. It became this incredibly fertile place.

And the question is why? Why that place as opposed to a nicer, neater building underneath the aegis of a clear departmental structure? And the answer is it was a beautiful mess. The people there had to self-organize. They had to self-organize for their lunches. They had to self-organize for their morning meetings and they'd bring people together from different disciplines to share what they had learned. They had a sense of joy and exploration. They wrote an opera together, the people of MIT. There was a sense that they were sort of the black sheep. They taught each other how to swim, the ones who didn't know how to swim. There was an engineering student who once wandered down the hall to the acoustics lab and started messing around, and that became Bose Electronics. It became this incredibly fertile place.

Why? Because the same thing is happening as in the New Zealand All Blacks practice. The same thing is happening as in Linda Barry's art class. Creating the conditions where people can self-organize. Not where they're obeying something else. Not where they're being coerced, but where they can notice things, where they can build relationships, and where they can experiment and try stuff together. And that's how growth really happens.

Speaker A: The rule of surprise is really simple: if you know it's going to happen, you're doing it wrong. If you know what's going to happen, then you are operating a machine. But if you're actually trying to flourish, if you're actually trying to create something new, you shouldn't know what's going to happen.

A beautiful example of that: there was a neighborhood in the Netherlands, and it was a very sort of rundown old neighborhood. And there were two guys who used to sit on their stoops in front of the neighborhood. Their names were Patrick and Linder. They were handymen who didn't really have a job. But one day they got a little bit bored and for some reason they looked at their street and it didn't have any flowers on it. So they decided to build a flower box. They pried up the bricks of their street. They arranged it as a flower box. They plunked in some flowers, and then their neighbors noticed and their neighbors said, "Could you build that for me?" And then they taught other people how to build it. And pretty soon there's a hundred flower boxes on these streets.

And then somebody notices that and they say, "Oh, we're in a knitting club. Why don't we knit a really long scarf to go around the lampposts of all the neighborhood?" And then someone else noticed an empty lot: "Oh, why don't we build a playground on this empty lot?"

And then there was some debate over refugees. Some communities in the Netherlands were rejecting them, and this neighborhood wanted to accept them. And so around the refugee house that they donated for the cause, they wrapped a scarf and they said, "What better signal to our new neighbors of welcoming than to give them a hand-knitted scarf that we all made."

The neighborhood was revived, and no one could have identified a plan by which that happened. That happened because one thing led to another. Each thing generated a new pattern that everyone could notice and respond to. The flowers—everyone sees that, and then that leads to the scarves, and that leads to the playground, and that leads... and that's how growth actually happens.

Mathematicians call them attractors. They're when you change the energy of a system, it generates new patterns.

Speaker: And so those new patterns are what flourishing groups are really skilled at creating. And I think it spotlights something even deeper. We tend to think of groups as these fixed things. We tend to think of groups and communities, but in fact in practice they operate more like rivers. What's happening in these cases of this neighborhood? What's happening in these cases of like building 20 is that the energy and the relationships are being sort of funneled and moved towards some horizon. And just like when you tilt a river, you get new patterns swirling up. People aren't machines. As a group, we operate more like rivers. And as parents and as business leaders and as teachers, one of the most powerful things we can do is create that gradient, meaning spotlight a north star someplace we're going to create a clear space for exploration sort of this and not that we're only going to explore in here and then give people agency to do whatever they want.

Speaker: That's what happens in conditions like building 20. There was clear boundaries. We're in this building. There was clear gradient. Invent something new. Try to create something that's never been created before. And then there was total agency. When somebody wanted to create something new in their lab or enlarge their lab, they got out their saw and they cut a hole in the wall. When they wanted to run wire, they ran it themselves. When they wanted to do something, they didn't have to ask permission. And so this combination of agency, guard rails, and horizon is a really powerful toolkit for tilting the river of an organization.

Speaker: And that's where the rule of surprise comes in because if you know what's going to happen, if you're predicting it and controlling it, then people aren't really free. You don't really have that kind of exploration that does lead to something new. The rule of surprise changes the way you think about the future. We tend to think about the future as if it is kind of this fixed destination that we're going toward. The future is going to be the future. But over and over I keep encountering places and if we reflect on our own life I think we still see this pattern that the future we're creating is a result of a series of explorations that we're making.

Speaker: We're creating our own future in a deep way in the same way those people in building 20 in the same way that that rugby team in the same way that that neighborhood in the Netherlands did. Making these explorations, stopping, noticing what happened and building on those things. That's how community gets built. It's when people turn toward each other and they say, "How can we make this better?" and they try something. That's the moment. That's the moment that happened on that street in Paris, creating conditions where people can turn toward each other and say, "How can we make this better?"

Speaker: When we think about our relationship to the future, I think we sometimes take a fearful stance. We're sort of hoping things work out and it sort of feels like a gamble. But I think the lesson that these flourishing communities teach us is that the future isn't something that's fixed. It's something you're in conversation with. You can't control it, but you can nudge it and you can influence it and you can change it in profound ways by turning toward the people next to you and asking, "What can we do to make this better?"

Speaker: After studying all these groups, there's some really clear differences. It becomes very stark between groups that become more than the sum of their parts and are able to create flourishing and groups that become less. I think of it in mostly in three different categories. The first one is a sense of fun. The groups that add up to more that really flourish are places where there is a presence of joy and delight. Delight for no reason. Delight just in the mere presence of each other. Delight in the failures. Delight in the imperfections.

Speaker: The second thing they have is this sense of forgiveness. There's this sense of imperfection is okay. You know, there's a saying that my kids taught me recently. The saying is annoyance is the price of community. And I love that because I saw that at these places. They weren't doing things the most efficient way. You know, there's probably more efficient ways to organize people than Patrick Bernard did with that long table. And there's definitely more efficient ways to organize laboratories than MIT did. But it ain't about being organized. It ain't about being efficient. These inefficiencies are just evidence that we're human beings.

Speaker: And they're evidence, you know, everyone is a little bit annoying. And that friction, our modern world treats it as something that is almost sort of toxic and should be removed from everything, but actually welcoming that friction and forgiving that friction. Being forgiving that annoyance and knowing that we're also annoying. And the third thing that I saw was that there's sort of a lack of fear. There's this security that they have within their community. The security that these groups have that allows them to make these daring explorations. There's a saying that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. And that's what these places embody. This idea that when you have that deep connection, that deep meaningful connection with people that you can make these kind of fearless moves.

Speaker: You know, in moments of adversity, we're often told, you know, oh, everything will be okay. Everything will be okay. But in these flourishing groups, I heard a different message. I heard a message that was more like nothing's going to be perfect and you'll never be alone. That was the message that you would hear in those groups. The security of that attachment, the deep connected meaning of that attachment. It's not about saying everything's going to be great. It's about saying nothing's going to be great actually and that's okay cuz we're going to be together. That to me embodies the sort of the mindset and kind of the heartset of of flourishing communities.

Speaker: I think if there's one key takeaway from all of this, I can tell you one thing. It does not show a straight line story. I keep telling the story of these sort of messy spirals, spirals upward, these spirals that these communities, these individuals are making, high performing cultures are making and different communities are making. If we're going to have tools to navigate that shape, and I think if you take a pen out on a blank piece of paper and map the story of your own life, you won't be drawing a straight line. You'll be drawing a very squiggly sort of spiral hopefully upward, but there's going to be all kinds of turns where you're going to be going the wrong direction and you're going to realize it. You're going to fix it and then you'll be going the wrong direction again. And then you realize it, you're going to fix it.

Speaker: And it's a story of resilience and reinvention. And that's what natural systems are really good at. You know, if you look out your window at a tree or a vine or moss or a mushroom, living systems are really really good at resilience and reinvention. I think it shows when by identifying that in our own life and kind of letting go of the straight line story, the straight line illusion that every day is going to be a clear A to B, that our life or our career, our relationships are going to be A to B.

Speaker: It's seeing this twisted curving spiral and thinking about what tools are going to help me navigate that with other people. What relationships are going to help me navigate that with other people? What thoughts are going to help me navigate with that other people? What modes of attention are going to help me navigate that with other people? It's a deeper, bigger, and I think a better story than kind of the story of straight lines. It's messier. It's more challenging in some ways. It's slower. It's more frustrating and it's also more authentically human and I think richer and more rewarding in the end.