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The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

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The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

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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.

(A strong culture increases net income 756 percent over eleven years, according to a Harvard study of more than two hundred companies.)

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.

Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.

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.

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.

Safety is not mere emotional weather but rather the foundation on which strong culture is built.

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: • Close physical proximity, often in circles • Profuse amounts of eye contact • Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) • Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) • High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone • Few interruptions • Lots of questions • Intensive, active listening • Humor, laughter • Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.)

Belonging cues possess three basic qualities: 1. Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring 2. Individualization: They treat the person as unique and valued 3. Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue 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.

Overall Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors: 1. Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short. 2. Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. 3. Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader. 4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. 5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.

Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.

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.

“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.”*2

feels like it happens from the inside out, but in fact it happens from the outside in. Our social brains light up when they receive a steady accumulation of almost-invisible cues: We are close, we are safe, we share a future.

Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.

You we will hate with a lasting hate, We will never forgo our hate, Hate by water and hate by land, Hate of the head and hate of the hand, Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown, Hate of seventy millions choking down. We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe and one alone— ENGLAND!

Hulse and Ferguson, like so many others, were astounded. But it was not really astounding. At the point when the British and the Germans stepped out onto that field, they had already been in conversation for a long time, both sides sending volleys of belonging cues that lit up their amygdalas with a simple message: We are the same. We are safe. I’ll go halfway if you will. And so they did.*2

The group two trainees, on the other hand, received a steady stream of individualized, future-oriented, amygdala-activating belonging cues. All these signals were small—a personal question about their best times at work, an exercise that revealed their individual skills, a sweatshirt embroidered with their name. These signals didn’t take much time to deliver, but they made a huge difference because they created a foundation of psychological safety that built connection and identity.

“It’s so easy to be insulated when you’re a professional athlete,” Buford says. “Pop uses these moments to connect us. He loves that we come from so many different places. That could pull us apart, but he makes sure that everybody feels connected and engaged to something bigger.”

“Food and wine aren’t just food and wine,” Buford says. “They’re his vehicle to make and sustain a connection, and Pop is really intentional about making that connection happen.”

One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be. Larry Page created one of these moments when he posted his “These ads suck” note in the Google kitchen.

I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.

Yet they are powerful because they deliver a burst of belonging cues. Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues: 1. You are part of this group. 2. This group is special; we have high standards here. 3. I believe you can reach those standards. These signals provide a clear message that lights up the unconscious brain: Here is a safe place to give effort. They also give us insight into the reason Popovich’s methods are effective. His communications consist of three types of belonging cues. • Personal, up-close connection (body language, attention, and behavior that translates as I care about you) • Performance feedback (relentless coaching and criticism that translates as We have high standards here) • Big-picture perspective (larger conversations about politics, history, and food that translate as Life is bigger than basketball) Popovich toggles among the three signals to connect his team the way a skilled director uses a camera. First he zooms in close, creating an individualized connection. Then he operates in the middle distance, showing players the truth about their performance. Then he pans out to show the larger context in which their interaction is taking place. Alone, each of these signals would have a limited effect. But together they create a steady stream of magical feedback.

You are part of this group. This group is special. I believe you can reach those standards.

It is easier to get into Harvard than to get a job at Zappos.

Collisions—defined as serendipitous personal encounters—are, he believes, the lifeblood of any organization, the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion.

My job is to architect the greenhouse. This is a useful insight into how Hsieh creates belonging because it implies a process. “I probably say the word collision a thousand times a day,” Hsieh says.

When an idea becomes part of a language, it becomes part of the default way of thinking.”

The most successful projects were those driven by sets of individuals who formed what Allen called “clusters of high communicators.” The chemistry and cohesion within these clusters resembled that between Larry Page and Jeff Dean at Google. They had a knack for navigating complex problems with dazzling speed.

The distance between their desks.

But the more he explored the data, the clearer the answer became. What mattered most in creating a successful team had less to do with intelligence and experience and more to do with where the desks happened to be located.

We were really surprised at how rapidly it decayed” when they moved to a different floor. “It turns out that vertical separation is a very serious thing. If you’re on a different floor in some organizations, you may as well be in a different country.”

The key characteristic of the Allen Curve is the sudden steepness that happens at the eight-meter mark. At distances of less than eight meters, communication frequency rises off the charts.

Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up.

(One study found that workers who shared a location emailed one another four times as often as workers who did not, and as a result they completed their projects 32 percent faster.)

Creating safety is about dialing in to small, subtle moments and delivering targeted signals at key points.

Relatedly, it’s important to avoid interruptions. The smoothness of turn taking, as we’ve seen, is a powerful indicator of cohesive group performance. Interruptions shatter the smooth interactions at the core of belonging.

Of course, not all interruptions are negative: Creative sessions, for example, often contain bursts of interruptions. The key is to draw a distinction between interruptions born of mutual excitement and those rooted in lack of awareness and connection.

Spotlight Your Fallibility Early On—Especially If You’re a Leader: In any interaction, we have a natural tendency to try to hide our weaknesses and appear competent. If you want to create safety, this is exactly the wrong move. Instead, you should open up, show you make mistakes, and invite input with simple phrases like “This is just my two cents.” “Of course, I could be wrong here.” “What am I missing?” “What do you think?”

“To create safety, leaders need to actively invite input,” Edmondson says. “It’s really hard for people to raise their hand and say, ‘I have something tentative to say.’ And it’s equally hard for people not to answer a genuine question from a leader who asks for their opinion or their help.”

Embrace the Messenger: One of the most vital moments for creating safety is when a group shares bad news or gives tough feedback. In these moments, it’s important not simply to tolerate the difficult news but to embrace it. “You know the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” Edmondson says. “In fact, it’s not enough to not shoot them. You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.”*1

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Overdo Thank-Yous: When you enter highly successful cultures, the number of thank-yous you hear seems slightly over the top. At the end of each basketball season, for example, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich takes each of his star players aside and thanks them for allowing him to coach them. Those are his exact words: Thank you for allowing me to coach you.

This is because thank-yous aren’t only expressions of gratitude; they’re crucial belonging cues that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.

Here is the unheralded person who makes our success possible.

Be Painstaking in the Hiring Process: Deciding who’s in and who’s out is the most powerful signal any group sends, and successful groups approach their hiring accordingly.

Eliminate Bad Apples: The groups I studied had extremely low tolerance for bad apple behavior and, perhaps more important, were skilled at naming those behaviors. The leaders of the New Zealand All-Blacks, the rugby squad that ranks as one of the most successful teams on the planet, achieve this through a rule that simply states “No Dickheads.” It’s simple, and that’s why it’s effective.

Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces: The groups I visited were uniformly obsessed with design as a lever for cohesion and interaction. I saw it in Pixar’s Steve Jobs–designed atrium,

Create spaces that maximize collisions.

“We used to hire out our food service to a contractor,” said Ed Catmull, president and cofounder of Pixar (of whom we’ll hear more in Chapter 16). “We didn’t consider making food to be our core business. But when you hire it out, that food service company wants to make money, and the only way they can make money is to decrease the quality of the food or the service. They’re not bad or greedy people; it’s a structural problem. That’s why we decided to take it over ourselves and give our people high-quality food at a reasonable price. Now we have really good food and people stay here instead of leaving, and they have the kind of conversations and encounters that help our business. It’s pretty simple. We realized that food really is part of our core business.”

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice: Ensuring that everyone has a voice is easy to talk about but hard to accomplish. This is why many successful groups use simple mechanisms that encourage, spotlight, and value full-group contribution.

This is what I would call a muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group. Picking up trash is one example, but the same kinds of behaviors exist around allocating parking places (egalitarian, with no special spots reserved for leaders), picking up checks at meals (the leaders do it every time), and providing for equity in salaries, particularly for start-ups. These actions are powerful not just because they are moral or generous but also because they send a larger signal: We are all in this together.

We are together now.

Embrace Fun: This obvious one is still worth mentioning, because laughter is not just laughter; it’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection.

Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you—can unlock a group’s ability to perform. The key, as we’re about to learn, involves the willingness to perform a certain behavior that goes against our every instinct: sharing vulnerability.

A BrainTrust meeting is not fun. It is where directors are told that their characters lack heart, their storylines are confusing, and their jokes fall flat. But it’s also where those movies get better. “The BrainTrust is the most important thing we do by far,” said Pixar president Ed Catmull. “It depends on completely candid feedback.”

Where did we fail? What did each of us do, and why did we do it? What will we do differently next time? AARs can be raw, painful, and filled with pulses of emotion and uncertainty. “They’re not real fun,” said Christopher Baldwin, a former operator with SEAL Team Six. “They can get tense at times. I’ve never seen people fistfight, but it can get close. Still, it’s probably the most crucial thing we do together, aside from the missions themselves, because that’s where we figure out what really happened and how to get better.”

“So here’s how we’ll know if you had a good day,” Reinhardt continued. “If you ask for help ten times, then we’ll know it was good. If you try to do it all alone…” His voice trailed off, the implication clear—It will be a catastrophe.

The fascinating thing is, however, these awkward, painful interactions generate the highly cohesive, trusting behavior necessary for smooth cooperation.

The second difference is that Set B would make you and the stranger feel closer to each other—around 24 percent closer than Set A, according to experimenters.* While Set A allows you to stay in your comfort zone, Set B generates confession, discomfort, and authenticity that break down barriers between people and tip them into a deeper connection. While Set A generates information, Set B generates something more powerful: vulnerability.

At some level, we intuitively know that vulnerability tends to spark cooperation and trust. But we may not realize how powerfully and reliably this process works, particularly when it comes to group interactions.

“People tend to think of vulnerability in a touchy-feely way, but that’s not what’s happening,” Polzer says. “It’s about sending a really clear signal that you have weaknesses, that you could use help. And if that behavior becomes a model for others, then you can set the insecurities aside and get to work, start to trust each other and help each other. If you never have that vulnerable moment, on the other hand, then people will try to cover up their weaknesses, and every little microtask becomes a place where insecurities manifest themselves.”

Person A sends a signal of vulnerability. 2. Person B detects this signal. 3. Person B responds by signaling their own vulnerability. 4. Person A detects this signal. 5. A norm is established; closeness and trust increase.

The vulnerability loop, in other words, is contagious.

“We feel like trust is stable, but every single moment your brain is tracking your environment, and running a calculation whether you can trust the people around you and bond with them,” says DeSteno. “Trust comes down to context. And what drives it is the sense that you’re vulnerable, that you need others and can’t do it on your own.” Normally, we think about trust and vulnerability the way we think about standing on solid ground and leaping into the unknown: first we build trust, then we leap. But science is showing us that we’ve got it backward. Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.

Hey, I’m doing this crazy balloon-hunting project and I need your help.

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

The mechanism of cooperation can be summed up as follows: Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built. This idea is useful because it gives us a glimpse inside the machinery of teamwork. Cooperation, as we’ll see, does not simply descend out of the blue. It is a group muscle that is built according to a specific pattern of repeated interaction, and that pattern is always the same: a circle of people engaged in the risky, occasionally painful, ultimately rewarding process of being vulnerable together.

“That night put me on a different path,” Cooper says. “From that moment on, I realized that I needed to figure out ways to help the group function more effectively. The problem here is that, as humans, we have an authority bias that’s incredibly strong and unconscious—if a superior tells you to do something, by God we tend to follow it, even when it’s wrong. Having one person tell other people what to do is not a reliable way to make good decisions. So how do you create conditions where that doesn’t happen, where you develop a hive mind? How do you develop ways to challenge each other, ask the right questions, and never defer to authority? We’re trying to create leaders among leaders. And you can’t just tell people to do that. You have to create the conditions where they start to do it.”

“Human nature is constantly working against us,” he says. “You have to get around those barriers, and they never go away.”

He started with small things. A new team member who called him by his title was quickly corrected: “You can call me Coop, Dave, or Fuckface, it’s your choice.” When Cooper gave his opinion, he was careful to attach phrases that provided a platform for someone to question him, like “Now let’s see if someone can poke holes in this” or “Tell me what’s wrong with this idea.” He steered away from giving orders and instead asked a lot of questions. Anybody have any ideas?

Cooper began to develop tools. “There’re things you can do,” he says. “Spending time together outside, hanging out—those help. One of the best things I’ve found to improve a team’s cohesion is to send them to do some hard, hard training. There’s something about hanging off a cliff together, and being wet and cold and miserable together, that makes a team come together.”

“It’s got to be safe to talk,” Cooper says. “Rank switched off, humility switched on. You’re looking for that moment where people can say, ‘I screwed that up.’ In fact, I’d say those might be the most important four words any leader can say: I screwed that up.”

The goal of an AAR is not to excavate truth for truth’s sake, or to assign credit and blame, but rather to build a shared mental model that can be applied to future missions.

But they succeeded because they understood that being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable.

“When we talk about courage, we think it’s going against an enemy with a machine gun,” Cooper says. “The real courage is seeing the truth and speaking the truth to each other. People never want to be the person who says, ‘Wait a second, what’s really going on here?’ But inside the squadron, that is the culture, and that’s why we’re successful.”

Nyquist by all accounts possessed two important qualities. The first was warmth. He had a knack for making people feel cared for; every contemporary description paints him as “fatherly.” The second quality was a relentless curiosity. In a landscape made up of diverse scientific domains, he combined breadth and depth of knowledge with a desire to seek connections. “Nyquist was full of ideas, full of questions,” Bell Labs engineer Chapin Cutler recalls. “He drew people out, got them thinking.”

“Socially, I’m not the chattiest person,” Givechi says. “I love stories, but I’m not the person in the middle of the room telling the story. I’m the person on the side listening and asking questions. They’re usually questions that might seem obvious or simple or unnecessary. But I love asking them because I’m trying to understand what’s really going on.”

When you talk to Givechi’s colleagues, they point out a paradox: She is at once soft and hard, empathetic but also persistent. “There’s an underlying toughness to Roshi,” says Lawrence Abrahamson, an IDEO design director. “She doesn’t present an agenda, but of course there is an agenda behind that, and it’s gentle guiding. And one of the biggest tools in her toolbox is time. She’ll spend so much time, being patient and continuing to have conversations and making sure the conversations are progressing in a good direction.”

For example, here are a few: • The one thing that excites me about this particular opportunity is                         • I confess, the one thing I’m not so excited about with this particular opportunity is                         • On this project, I’d really like to get better at

The interesting thing about Givechi’s questions is how transcendently simple they are. They have less to do with design than with connecting to deeper emotions: fear, ambition, motivation. It’s easy to imagine that in different hands, these questions could fall flat and fail to ignite conversation. This is because the real power of the interaction is located in the two-way emotional signaling that creates an atmosphere of connection that surrounds the conversation.

“The word empathy sounds so soft and nice, but that’s not what’s really going on,” says Njoki Gitahi, a senior communication designer. “What Roshi does requires a critical understanding of what makes people tick, and what makes people tick isn’t always being nice to them. Part of it is that she knows people so well that she understands what they need. Sometimes what they need is support and praise. But sometimes what they need is a little knock on the chin, a reminder that they need to work harder, a nudge to try new things. That’s what she gives.”

He is demonstrating that the most important moments in conversation happen when one person is actively, intently listening.

Meyer delivered the message—I was scared—with steadiness, confidence, and comfort that underlined the deeper message: It’s safe to tell the truth here. His vulnerability isn’t weakness; it’s his strength.

Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask their people three questions: • What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do? • What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? • What can I do to make you more effective?

One of the best methods for handling negative news is that of Joe Maddon, the coach of the Chicago Cubs and avowed oenophile. In his office, Maddon keeps a glass bowl filled with slips of paper, each inscribed with the name of an expensive wine. When a player violates a team rule, Maddon asks them to draw a slip of paper out of the bowl, purchase that wine, and uncork it with their manager. In other words, Maddon links the act of discipline to the act of reconnection.

When Forming New Groups, Focus on Two Critical Moments: Jeff Polzer, the Harvard Business School professor who studies organizational behavior (see Chapter 8), traces any group’s cooperation norms to two critical moments that happen early in a group’s life. They are: 1. The first vulnerability 2. The first disagreement These small moments are doorways to two possible group paths: Are we about appearing strong or about exploring the landscape together? Are we about winning interactions, or about learning together?

They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported 2. They take a helping, cooperative stance 3. They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions 4. They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths

As Zenger and Folkman put it, the most effective listeners behave like trampolines. They aren’t passive sponges. They are active responders, absorbing what the other person gives, supporting them, and adding energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude.

Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions.

It’s not that suggestions are off limits; rather they should be made only after you establish what Givechi calls “a scaffold of thoughtfulness.” The scaffold underlies the conversation, supporting the risks and vulnerabilities. With the scaffold, people will be supported in taking the risks that cooperation requires. Without it, the conversation collapses.

Use Candor-Generating Practices like AARs, BrainTrusts, and Red Teaming: While AARs were originally built for the military environment, the tool can be applied to other domains. One good AAR structure is to use five questions: 1. What were our intended results? 2. What were our actual results? 3. What caused our results? 4. What will we do the same next time? 5. What will we do differently? Some teams also use a Before-Action Review, which is built around a similar set of questions: 1. What are our intended results? 2. What challenges can we anticipate? 3. What have we or others learned from similar situations? 4. What will make us successful this time?

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A key rule of BrainTrusts is that the team is not allowed to suggest solutions, only to highlight problems. This rule maintains the project leaders’ ownership of the task, and helps prevent them from assuming a passive, order-taking role.

Red Teaming is a military-derived method for testing strategies; you create a “red team” to come up with ideas to disrupt or defeat your proposed plan. The key is to select a red team that is not wedded to the existing plan in any way, and to give them freedom to think in new ways that the planners might not have anticipated.

AARs, BrainTrusts, and Red Teams each generate the same underlying action: to build the habit of opening up vulnerabilities so that the group can better understand what works, what doesn’t work, and how to get better.

Align Language with Action: Many highly cooperative groups use language to reinforce their interdependence. For example, navy pilots returning to aircraft carriers do not “land” but are “recovered.” IDEO doesn’t have “project managers”—it has “design community leaders.” Groups at Pixar do not offer “notes” on early versions of films; they “plus” them by offering solutions to problems.

Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development: While it seems natural to hold these two conversations together, in fact it’s more effective to keep performance review and professional development separate. Performance evaluation tends to be a high-risk, inevitably judgmental interaction, often with salary-related consequences. Development, on the other hand, is about identifying strengths and providing support and opportunities for growth. Linking them into one conversation muddies the waters. Relatedly, many groups have moved away from ranking workers and shifted to more of a coaching model, where people receive frequent feedback designed to provide them with both a vivid performance snapshot and a path for improvement.

And then something unexpected happened. Tylenol’s market share, after dropping to zero after the attacks, began a slow climb back to previous levels and continued to grow; one pundit termed it “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” In ensuing years, Tylenol’s response has become the gold standard for handling corporate crisis.

On the surface, the story of the Tylenol crisis is about a large group responding to disaster with extraordinary cohesion and focus. But beneath that story lies a curious fact: The key to Johnson & Johnson’s extraordinary behavior can be located in a mundane one-page document. The 311 words of the Credo oriented the thinking and behavior of thousands of people as they navigated a complex landscape of choices. The deeper question is: How can a handful of simple, forthright sentences make such a difference in a group’s behavior?

In the first two sections of this book we’ve focused on safety and vulnerability. We’ve seen how small signals—You are safe, We share risk here—connect people and enable them to work together as a single entity. But now it’s time to ask: What’s this all for? What are we working toward?

These groups, who by all rights should know what they stand for, devote a surprising amount of time telling their own story, reminding each other precisely what they stand for—then repeating it ad infinitum.

This idea helps give us a window into how successful cultures create and sustain purpose. Successful groups are attuned to the same truth as the starlings: Purpose isn’t about tapping into some mystical internal drive but rather about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal. Successful cultures do this by relentlessly seeking ways to tell and retell their story. To do this, they build what we’ll call high-purpose environments.

High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal. They provide the two simple locators that every navigation process requires: Here is where we are and Here is where we want to go. The surprising thing, from a scientific point of view, is how responsive we are to this pattern of signaling.

Here’s where you’re at and Here’s where you want to go.

That shared future could be a goal or a behavior. (We put customer safety first. We shoot, move, and communicate.) It doesn’t matter. What matters is establishing this link and consistently creating engagement around it. What matters is telling the story.

Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.

In other words, Burke and his team felt a bit like starlings in a flock feel. They moved as one because they were attuned to the same clear signal of the Credo resonating through the group. We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses, and patients; to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. The difficult choices they made weren’t really all that difficult. They were closer to a reflex.

Stories are like air: everywhere and nowhere at the same time. How do you measure the effect of a narrative?

This child has unusual potential for intellectual growth—aligned motivations, awareness, and behaviors. Rosenthal classified the changes into four categories. 1. Warmth (the teachers were kinder, more attentive, and more connective) 2. Input (the teachers provided more material for learning) 3. Response-opportunity (the teachers called on the students more often, and listened more carefully) 4. Feedback (the teachers provided more, especially when the student made a mistake)

Over the next month, time spent calling increased 142 percent, and weekly revenues increased 172 percent. The incentives hadn’t changed. The task hadn’t changed. All that had changed was the fact that the workers had received a clear beacon of purpose, and it made all the difference.

This is why we work. Here is where you should put your energy.

In the ensuing years, Stott’s approach has become the model for controlling sport-related violence in Europe and around the globe. One of the reasons it works is that it creates a high-purpose environment by delivering an unbroken array of consistent little signals. Every time an officer banters with a fan, every time a fan notices the lack of protective armor, a signal is sent: We are here to get along. Every time the police allow fans to keep kicking the ball, they reinforce that signal. By themselves, none of the signals matter. Together they build a new story.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, the fans shouted out to one of the blue-vested liaison officers. “The fans called over to the liaison and said, ‘Hey, can you come and sort this policeman out for us?’ ” Stott says. “The roles had reversed, and the fans were policing the police. They had socially bonded with the liaisons. They saw them as their advocate.”

One of the best measures of any group’s culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

The answer, Edmondson discovered, lay in the patterns of real-time signals through which the team members were connected (or not) with the purpose of the work. These signals consisted of five basic types: 1. Framing: Successful teams conceptualized MICS as a learning experience that would benefit patients and the hospital. Unsuccessful teams conceptualized MICS as an add-on to existing practices. 2. Roles: Successful teams were explicitly told by the team leader why their individual and collective skills were important for the team’s success, and why it was important for them to perform as a team. Unsuccessful teams were not. 3. Rehearsal: Successful teams did elaborate dry runs of the procedure, preparing in detail, explaining the new protocols, and talking about communication. Unsuccessful teams took minimal steps to prepare. 4. Explicit encouragement to speak up: Successful teams were told by team leaders to speak up if they saw a problem; they were actively coached through the feedback process. The leaders of unsuccessful teams did little coaching, and as a result team members were hesitant to speak up. 5. Active reflection: Between surgeries, successful teams went over performance, discussed future cases, and suggested improvements. For example, the team leader at Mountain Medical wore a head-mounted camera during surgery to help facilitate discussion and feedback. Unsuccessful teams tended not to do this.

But they all performed the same vital function: to flood the environment with narrative links between what they were doing now and what it meant.

This is the way high-purpose environments work. They are about sending not so much one big signal as a handful of steady, ultra-clear signals that are aligned with a shared goal. They are less about being inspiring than about being consistent. They are found not within big speeches so much as within everyday moments when people can sense the message: This is why we work; this is what we are aiming for.

priorities, whether you name them or not,” he says. “If you want to grow, you’d better name them, and you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities.”

“The results indicate that Union Square Cafe achieves its differentiation strategy of ‘enlightened hospitality’ through a synergistic set of human resource management practices involving three key practices: selection of employees based on emotional capabilities, respectful treatment of employees, and management through a simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviors benefiting customers.”

Creating engagement around a clear, simple set of priorities can function as a lighthouse, orienting behavior and providing a path toward a goal.

“We assume that because we’re complex, that the way we make decisions is also complex,” says Madeleine Beekman, who studies slime molds at the University of Sydney. “But in reality, we’re using very simple rules of thumb. The slime mold shows us that it’s possible for groups to solve extremely complex problems using a few rules of thumb.” In the case of slime molds, these rules of thumb are as follows: If there’s no food, connect with one another. If connected, stay connected and move toward the light. If you reach the light, stay connected and climb. “Honeybees work the same way,” Beekman says. “So do ants and many other species. They all use decision-making heuristics. There’s no reason we wouldn’t use it too. If you look at these species, you can feel the connection. Like us, they all seek a collective goal.”

Beekman and the slime molds give us a new way to think about why Danny Meyer’s catchphrases work so well. They are not merely catchphrases; they are heuristics that provide guidance by creating if/then scenarios in a vivid, memorable way. Structurally, there is no difference between If someone is rude, make a charitable assumption and If there’s no food, connect with one another. Both function as a conceptual beacon, creating situational awareness and providing clarity in times of potential confusion. This is why so many of Meyer’s catchphrases focus on how to respond to mistakes. You can’t prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously. If it ain’t broke, fix it. Mistakes are like waves; servers are really surfers. The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.

We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with. There’s glory in making a mistake. Stone after stone to form a bridge.

On a fundamental level, Danny Meyer, KIPP, and the All-Blacks are using the same purpose-building technique. We might call it the lighthouse method: They create purpose by generating a clear beam of signals that link A (where we are) to B (where we want to be). There’s another dimension of leadership, however, where the goal isn’t to get from A to B but to navigate to an unknown destination, X. This is the dimension of creativity and innovation.

This is because all creative projects are cognitive puzzles involving thousands of choices and thousands of potential ideas, and you almost never get the right answer right away. Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices.

Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.”

Nonetheless a handful of “Ed-isms” are heard in Pixar’s corridors. Here are a few: Hire people smarter than you. Fail early, fail often. Listen to everyone’s ideas. Face toward the problems. B-level work is bad for your soul. It’s more important to invest in good people than in good ideas.

If Danny Meyer is a lighthouse, beaming signals of purpose, then Catmull is more like the engineer of a ship. Catmull doesn’t steer the ship—he roves around belowdecks, checking the hull for leaks, changing out a piston, adding a little oil here and there. “For me, managing is a creative act,” he says. “It’s problem solving, and I love doing that.”

The difference with successful cultures seems to be that they use the crisis to crystallize their purpose. When leaders of those groups reflect on those failures now, they express gratitude (and sometimes even nostalgic desire) for those moments, as painful as they were, because they were the crucible that helped the group discover what it could be.

It’s a never-ending process of trying, failing, reflecting, and above all, learning. High-purpose environments don’t descend on groups from on high; they are dug out of the ground, over and over, as a group navigates its problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast-changing world.

Figure Out Where Your Group Aims for Proficiency and Where It Aims for Creativity: Every group skill can be sorted into one of two basic types: skills of proficiency and skills of creativity. Skills of proficiency are about doing a task the same way, every single time. They are about delivering machine-like reliability, and they tend to apply in domains in which the goal behaviors are clearly defined, such as service. Building purpose to perform these skills is like building a vivid map: You want to spotlight the goal and provide crystal-clear directions to the checkpoints along the way. Ways to do that include: • Fill the group’s windshield with clear, accessible models of excellence. • Provide high-repetition, high-feedback training. • Build vivid, memorable rules of thumb (if X, then Y). • Spotlight and honor the fundamentals of the skill. Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before. Generating purpose in these areas is like supplying an expedition: You need to provide support, fuel, and tools and to serve as a protective presence that empowers the team doing the work. Some ways to do that include: • Keenly attend to team composition and dynamics. • Define, reinforce, and relentlessly protect the team’s creative autonomy. • Make it safe to fail and to give feedback. • Celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative. Most groups, of course, consist of a combination of these skill types, as they aim for proficiency in certain areas and creativity in others. The key is to clearly identify these areas and tailor leadership accordingly.

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