Daniel Coyle | How to Create a Culture Playbook For Highly Effective Groups

Srini Rao

 Dan, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Daniel Coyle

It's good to be back here with you. Thanks for having me.

Srini Rao

It is my pleasure. You were in that rare group of guests who has been here now three times. So I think you're like, you know, one of 10 guests who managed to accomplish that, which to me, that always says a whole hell of a lot about somebody's work and we have them back multiple times. So we had you, you know, right after you wrote talent code, right after your culture code. And now you have a new book out called the Culture Playbook, all of which we will get into. But I wanted to start by asking you, what is

one of the most important things that you learned from one or both of your parents that influenced and shaped what you ended up doing with your life and career.

Daniel Coyle

Wow, I want to back up and ask if do I get at Saturday Night Live, you get it like a jacket if you host it a certain number of times. I'm just wondering if anything like that could be in store for me so I can number four.

Srini Rao

We should do that. We really should. We should actually get a jacket. I mean, I can't afford to get you jackets, but we should do that.

Daniel Coyle

That was just a picture. No, I think one of the things, it's funny. I ended up dedicating the book to my father who passed away around the time it came out. And when I sort of got away from that and thought about my interest in group and what makes great groups and really realized that his approach to life, he was a kind of a relentless connector, this amazing sort of communication.

magician really and his ability to connect deeply with people and really asking them great questions and I really saw the power of that in my own kind of ecosystem there through him and so it ended up being um kind of there there's so many moments in the book where he's sort of present um in a way and I guess my mom also brought um she has this tremendous uh sense of fun and uh joy in life which

is also very present and this playfulness that is part of what it's like to be in a great group or a great culture. And they both embody that in really vivid ways. So they're sort of threaded throughout.

Srini Rao

Yeah, there's something.

I think about a lot. You just mentioned that you lost your father right around the time that this book came out. And I remember we had Alex Benion here and he actually had his book come out at the same time that he lost his father. And I remember him telling me, he said, people think that I'm dealing with a book launch while navigating the loss of my father. But he said, in reality, I'm dealing with losing my father while navigating a book launch. And I just turned 44 yesterday. And so naturally you start to think about things like this as you get older.

And I have always wondered like how somebody actually processes that kind of grief without losing their mind. Like how do you find yourself on solid ground again? Because I, we all know this is going to happen to us. It's something that is a part of life. And yet I don't think there's a self-help book that can prepare you for this. Like to me this is one of those experiences that no person can understand until they've gone through it. But

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, I see that.

Srini Rao

I'm just wondering like how in the world do you navigate that? Well, at the same time now you have, you know, your next book come out. So you have this like big accomplishment at the same time. You have this tremendous loss.

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, no, it's definitely sort of a rollercoaster ride and there's no, there is, as you say, there's no blueprint, no playbook. But there were some pieces of wisdom that people shared with me as I went through it that I continue to sort of use and share. And one of them is that even when somebody goes away, the conversation doesn't necessarily stop. It sort of keeps going in sometimes some deeper ways. Like all the people you lose in your life are people you still are.

kind of in contact with in a way. And I'm not talking about in a sort of seance, Ouija board way, I'm talking about just in the patterns of thought and behavior and in the questions you ask yourself and in the things you might observe, they're still sort of really sort of strangely present in the world. You might be able to call them up on the phone and chat in real life, but there is this presence that doesn't go away. And...

Srini Rao

You're probably right.

Daniel Coyle

And that it just takes a lot of time. I mean, no matter how old you are when you lose your parents, there's nothing like it and there's a loneliness that's after it that's really profound. And having some support, especially with siblings to go through, it ends up being really important. But yeah, that conversation has always been a source of kind of comfort and sort of it keeps things spinning forward, it gives us a little energy

to certain areas that didn't exist before.

Srini Rao

I've asked a number of people when they've been forced to either confront parental mortality or their own mortality depending on Whether it happens early in life or late in life How it changes the decisions they make about how they're gonna live their life going forward and I wonder if You know, this is shed any light on that for you

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, it does. It gives you that. It gives you just bigger perspective. It gives you there's a I don't know. Our modern world is really good at giving us a lot of things to do all the time. And I think the older you get in, the more you the more sort of perspective granting events, let's just call them those PGEs, those perspective granting events, the better you get at saying no to certain things.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Coyle

And we're not here to talk about other people's work, but there's a book by Oliver Berkman out right now that if anybody, your audience might be interested, it's called 4,000 Weeks. It's about the power of limits. It's about the power of really recognizing mortality. The title is the number of weeks you get in your life. And the power of really seeing that clearly is, you know, connects to stoicism, obviously, and a lot of other stuff. But...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yep.

Daniel Coyle

I think there's a great sort of freedom and liberation that can come with getting out of the fast flow and in carving out moments to pause. I think most people who are sort of flourishing these days are good at pausing. They're pausing athletes because in this world, this river of a life that is just speeding up and more change and more instability and more information just flowing all the time.

the ability to step out of the river onto a rock and stop and really stop and really look around. You know, in fact, I was joking with a friend the other day, this new book, the Culture Playbook, should be called the Culture Pause Book because it sort of came out of that idea that, hey, if you pull back as an individual, as a group, to really see what's going on, there's a tremendous productivity and a tremendous power.

Srini Rao

And while you're growing up, did your parents encourage you to pursue any particular career paths?

Daniel Coyle

You know, should I be hearing those voices in the background, Trini? Was it like, is that from my end? I can't really tell.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I'm sorry. We're we could probably, you know, know where it is. It will. No, no, it's not. Josh, make sure you edit this out, please. I'll make a note here. Yeah, we're in the middle of moving. Give me a second. I'm going to I'm going to close the curtain that's in my room. So that way, I won't pick that up.

Daniel Coyle

Oh, sorry.

Daniel Coyle

No worries. I couldn't hear it and I couldn't tell where it was coming from. So I just wanted to be respectful of the product here.

Srini Rao

Yeah, no worries. That's the thing, when you have like a super nice mic, it's also ultra sensitive. So it tends to pick up everything, so, but yeah.

Daniel Coyle

Sure. Yeah. I'm sorry. Your question was did they did my parents put me in any particular pathway or nudge me in a particular pathway? Was that it?

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, you know, not really. There were just sort of these natural pathways available because of the sort of ecosystem in which we lived. I grew up in Alaska. We moved there when I was three. My dad was a physician. And so that was obviously very available because all the people we knew were doctors and in that sort of line of work. And it wasn't until I got to college and sort of paused and pulled back. And right before I...

accepted to medical school. I was about to go to medical school because I thought that was the right path. And just sort of paused and pulled back and took a deeper look at what I was, where I really wanted to explore, what really lit me up, what I, the impact I wanted to have. And so that got me away from conventional medicine and into this area of journalism and researching performance and looking at the science beneath performance, all the stuff that sort of looks like magic, but it's not really magic. So.

whether that's a culture or an individual, that echo of sort of science. I mean, you know, my dad happened to be a radiologist, so he was looking at x-rays all the time. So I grew up walking in his office and seeing x-rays of stuff and got the knowledge that underneath everything, there is something else. There are things that are causing things. There are bones. And...

So I sometimes have made that loose connection to my own work because basically I'm trying to walk around with an X-ray machine and looking at, oh, there's Michael Jordan, there's Mozart, there's the incredibly talented groups and people. Well, let's X-ray them. What's going on? It looks like magic, but it's not really magic. There's a there there, there's a thing there, there's something to understand there. And that's what, that's kind of what drives me.

Srini Rao

Well, I want to revisit just a few moments from the Talent Code because I think it'll make a perfect segue into talking about culture in general. And one thing that stayed with me from our conversation, I never forgot this because I've re-quoted it in numerous conversations. And I remember asking you about prodigies and how I was thinking to myself, why the hell did my parents make me practice for 10,000 hours when I got good at something? And you said those are the kids who actually end up being really screwed up.

And so I want to revisit a clip that came from our conversation with Dan Pink and kind of hear what you have to say about this with regards to sort of cultivating talent for the future of work and educating people. Take a listen.

Srini Rao

So what do you make of that? I mean, as somebody who wrote a book about talent and how we cultivate world-class performers, what is the future of education, particularly, to prepare us for the kinds of cultures that we are going to be working in?

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, I love it. When I say this as the parent of a woman who's just doing her student teaching to be an elementary school teacher. And so this conversation is, I'm also on the board, I was on the board of our local Montessori school here. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with Dan's point there. Systems want stuff, right? Every system wants something. And his point that the systems want control, compliance, obedience. And that model, I mean, we really have to remember that model, our model of education was

built during an age where work was largely a simple linear process of executing some authority's plan. You wanted to build Mr. Ford's automobile. You wanted to harvest the corn. Very straightforward, simple, A to B to C to D, sort of linear jobs, linear processes.

Daniel Coyle

It kind of makes sense to design a system for command and control, right? That's kind of what we're trying to produce. The problem is that there's this massive mismatch between that system and the world we face now. The world we face now is anything but sort of simple linear A to B to C to D. There's an interesting distinction, I think, that needs to be made between two kinds of problems in the world. Problems that are complicated, where there is a linear solution, where we can build something, and it will always turn out if we follow the steps, we will get the results.

I could give you the instructions on building a Maserati engine. If you did them right and had the resources, if you followed the instructions, you would build one and you would have one. That type of system is complicated, right? But there's another one that's a different category, complex. Complex problems in systems, as you probably know, are ones that change as you interact with them. They're not the engine of a Maserati. They're raising a kid, right?

They evolve and change and shift all the time. And the problems that we are seeking to solve in the work world and the future of work, we've got a lot of the complicated stuff figured out. We can build systems for that. We can build AI for that. But when it comes to really complex issues that require human intelligence, that require groups to do two things, they have to stay together and change at the same time. Change their relationship. Change their roles. Change their orientation to each other.

And we saw some really vivid examples of the best and the worst of that, even during this recent COVID epidemic. Going into it, if you had to bet on an industry that would struggle, you'd say restaurants were going to have a hard time because it's hard to have a restaurant when no one can come into the restaurant. But what you found, and I'm sure there are restaurants like this in your neighborhood, what you found is that certain restaurants were able to kind of...

change and adapt and all of a sudden they're doing curbside and doing family meals for one price and changing the way that they cook and building a ghost kitchen and adding an app and reorganizing themselves in real time. There's a restaurant in my neighborhood called Edwin's and I saw the guy the other day and he said, we're doing way more revenue than we did pre-pandemic and it really, we were able to reorganize on the fly. Now that's complex. You're changing the relationship.

Daniel Coyle

A command and control world that produces command and control people and command and control classrooms is hopelessly mismatched for a world where we're going to need to change. The other visual, I think, for the future of work is... The old future of work would be sort of like a football team. Run the play. We're going down the field and we have certain plays we want to run and you have to fit your role and you have to...

practice the move and do the move and succeed at the move and perform the move over and over again and then we'll be successful. Well it shifted. This is way more like a pickup basketball game now where we don't know who's going to handle the ball. We don't know what the play is going to be. We're going to have to read and react and kind of be ready to change. If the defense does something else, we've got to do something else. Or maybe even a better metaphor is we have to be like a flock of birds going through a forest. There's going to be...

Some parts we're going to know where to go. Some parts we're going to hit this huge tree and we're going to have to reorganize and go around it and find a different way of aligning and flying together so that we can survive rather than just run into the tree. So it's this complexity, this landscape of complexity that we're working in now makes certain skills obsolete like obedience and compliance, I would say, and valorizing those things and training for those things.

And it makes other skills like teamwork, creativity, culture, building a sense of purpose, creating a sense of shared vulnerability and skin in the game, creating a sense of belonging. Those are now like non-negotiables. Those are like the reading, writing and arithmetic of this complex world, connecting, navigating and sharing, really.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, there's a quote from Stephen Coller's book, The Art of Impossible. He said, back in 2002, the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, a nonprofit educational coalition that included everyone from executives at Apple, Cisco, and Microsoft to experts from the National Education Association and to the US of Department of Education was charged with determining which skills our children need to thrive in the 21st century. The old answer, of course, was the three Rs, reading, writing, arithmetic. And

The new answer the force sees, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and cooperation. And I've been writing an article about this. And one of the things that I realized when it comes to critical thinking is that mistaking information for knowledge actually prevents us from cultivating our critical thinking capacities. And that is largely what I see as one of our big challenges, particularly in a world where we're just overloaded with information. People are just consuming endlessly. So there's a sort of idea that consumption

which I'm realizing it doesn't the more I you know spend time talking to people like you because you and I could have this conversation if I do nothing with what you tell me then I haven't really learned anything

Daniel Coyle

That's right, that's right. And all this, and that's something that gets easily forgotten. All learning and all growth happens sort of like photosynthesis. There's a couple of moments in the cycle. It's a loop. You've got an experience, and then you've gotta have the reflection piece, right? Experience it, reflect on it, and that changes you. Experience and then reflect, experience and then reflect. And our world is really good at providing us with experiences. As we've said, it's just like an endless stream of bullet points coming at us.

and a stream of information, but if we don't carve out and spend time as individuals and as groups, in reflection, learning how to press pause and really trying to figure things out together in an authentic way, it becomes really, really hard to navigate that complex landscape.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I think that makes a perfect segue to talking specifically about the culture playbook. So why was this the natural follow up to the culture code? Why a playbook after you wrote a book about the code?

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, I had a real, you know, writing the College Club was sort of a fun, life-changing experience, and it's a mix of theory and practice, and it sent me on this journey to visit the top performing groups on the planet, all the stuff that is really fun to do, and it created all these continuing conversations. And during those, after you launch a book, there's these conversations that happen afterwards. And there was this call that I heard really clearly, like, give us more. Like, give us more of the action. Give us more of the cookbook. You've taken us on a tour of the restaurants.

Now give us the dish, now give us the cookbook. And so I set out to write that. And during that time, thinking of course, oh, this will be kind of easy, right? It's a bunch of, you know, it's just, let's fill it down. Like, classic mistake. Because the more you actually get into that, the more you really try to understand the culture building process, and especially vividly as we went through COVID and everything else, it became really clear that you can't just sort of have a list of recipes.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Daniel Coyle

Culture change, any kind of thing where you're trying to get better as a group, is a process. It's in a process of experience and reflection. The book I ended up writing is much more of a workbook, workshop. There's a ton of questions in it, the ideas to provide groups with an experience together. The experience of going through this book together and saying, which of these ideas, taken from the top performing groups, are the best?

These are all models. They're all these cool models of how to do it. What's our version of that gonna be? And what's stopping us from doing it? And where should we take it next? And so the idea is to use the book as kind of this gathering place, this magnet around which people can have these conversations around how are we gonna interrelate? How are we gonna get along? What are we gonna do when things go bad? How are we gonna learn together? What are we gonna do if we run into a brick wall where they can...

sort of pull out of the fire hose of regular life and talk about these questions and use the book as a platform on which to do that. So it ended up being a lot more fun. It also was fun because my daughter Zoe helped with all the illustrations. There's about 70 illustrations in there and she's pretty handy with a pen. And so we were able to kind of work on that together, which was totally delightful. Like any book project, you sort of set sail.

things change and evolve. And as it's evolved, here's the books now coming out at a moment where people are really hungry to have this conversation. So it's gonna be fun to see where it goes next.

Srini Rao

You open the book by saying that culture is not a gift you receive, it's a skill you learn, and like any skill can be done well or properly, you might start out thinking as many people do, that culture is the soft stuff, the warm and fuzzy and tangibles. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. How did we end up with this narrative of culture being sort of the soft stuff? Because that was kind of my first thought too, was, yeah, how do you develop a skill of building a culture?

And, you know, I think back to something Sam Altman said when they made their Y Combinator curriculum available. And he said that Airbnb really nailed it. He said that—and he said this is incredibly hard to do. But he said Brian Chesky, when he would interview people, would ask them, if you only had a year to live, would you still take the job? Because he wanted people that dedicated to the culture of Airbnb. And he said it's very hard to get a culture like that.

Srini Rao

different than most of us have been taught to believe? Like, why is it that we see it as something soft?

Daniel Coyle

because it feels like something soft. You walk into a winning locker room, a great restaurant, a great school, and you can't, we're wired, culture's so deeply wired into us that we don't notice it. It's sort of like high quality oxygen, like all of a sudden, oh, I feel energized and I wanna hang out here. You know that magnetic feeling you have when you're in a good culture? You just like it, and you're aware that something cool is happening, and you're aware that everybody's in sync, and you're kind of in the presence of a big group brain.

But how did it get that way, right? It's almost like you're looking at this beautiful rose, a beautiful bouquet of living roses. And you're like, wow, that's beautiful. You're magnetized by the beauty. But what you don't see is the process, the roots, the photosynthesis, the way sunshine churns that chlorophyll out. So.

That's what this book is about. We're just not built to see underneath because we take these, when someone gives us, you know, the book is really about belonging cues, vulnerability loops, and these very basic behaviors to where, like for example, there's a wonderful experiment that I wrote about in the culture code where if you have a conversation with a stranger,

Srini Rao

Mm.

Daniel Coyle

If the stranger comes up to you, you're on a platform, you've got your cell phone, right? And the stranger comes up and says, hey, can I borrow your cell phone? You'll say no, like 98% of the time. If the stranger comes up and says, I'm so sorry about the rain, can I borrow your cell phone? You'll say yes, 400% more often. Which is kind of nuts, we won't notice it, but we'll just feel slightly more warmly toward that person, and we will literally, as a woman named Allison Wood Brooks at Harvard, who did this experiment,

We will literally hand them our cell phone 400% more often because they had a behavior, they expressed a sympathetic observation about the weather, and that made us kind of bond with them. And that's exactly the level at which culture happens. It's like under your conscious radar, but you are constantly, constantly tuning in to the fact, am I connected? Am I not? Do I share a future? Do I not? Do these people care about me or do they not? Do I have a voice here?

And when you get a clear signal that the group cares, you respond. And so all of this culture, this like, it's kind of this unconscious brain that we all carry around that is either lighting up or not. And the idea of the book is to say, here's kind of how that brain works.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I mean, OK, so you actually just kind of teed up my next question because I was going to ask you about those three key behaviors that you talk about, which form the foundation of the book. But you just mentioned them. So let's kind of bucket them, because I know you broke them all into a bunch of different tips. But let's start with the first one. You say two things here. You say that psychological safety is powerful because it's personal. You may experience a warm sense of connection and belonging the person next to you may be experience.

seeing the opposite as you explore these questions with your group, be sure to keep curiosity, perspective, and empathy foremost in mind. And then you go on to talk about cool kid bias, the misperception that working in the physical office possesses more value, leverage, and impact than remote work. And this bias is natural because it's rooted in our proximity loving brains and it's amplified by the assumption that being seen in the office is the best way to move up the ladder. Now, you know, when we talk about psychological safety, it's funny because I'm the guy who has been fired from every real job that I've ever had, hence the reason I do this.

And I have this just inherent distrust of authority. Like I always jokingly say if I got a real job one of two things would happen. I would either be promoted by the end of the first week or fired on the first day. So how is it that you create a culture where somebody like me who is already coming in with this idea that yeah I don't trust these people. How do you create psychological safety in that situation.

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, it's funny, there's a misunderstanding about psychological safety in that it's just about safety, right? Psychological safety is not about just creating these, as once the researcher puts it, like swaddling your people in cotton. It's actually about the opposite. It's actually about voice. If I were going to try to create, and maybe you're not mentoring with groups, if that's the way which is totally, it's the way a lot of people are really.

There's definitely a wonderful world of work for people who don't prefer that. But if we were to start a group and wanted you to be in it, I think a smart leader would first ask you and give you voice and figure out ways that you... You reminded me of one of my favorite stories about this. There was a captain of a gunship in the Navy. His name was Mike Abershoff.

and he inherited the worst gunship in the Navy. Worst performing, everybody on it was didn't like to be there. There were a bunch of rebels. And the first thing he did was he spent five minutes with each sailor in his office, asking them a couple of questions. If you could change one thing, what would it be? If you change one thing. And whenever anyone gave him an answer that he could immediately implement, the Captain Avershoff grabbed the loudspeaker and announced it. So he would announce.

Lunch begins at 1230, not 1215 now. Good idea. Thanks, sailor, so and so. Boom. There was this sense immediately of having ownership over the experience of being there. That's a concept in the book I call deep fun. It's when a group takes ownership over what it means to be in that group. That deep fun is what bonds people to groups, even people who have rebellious streaks.

There was a company in Michigan where the people weren't crazy about the coffee. They, the coffee wasn't that great. And so the leaders did a really smart thing. They said, oh good, you want to, is anybody interested in improving that? And some people said, yeah. And so they created, they kind of co-created this team and their job was to research and deliver the planet's best coffee back to the office. You guys give us the best bean, the best roast, go do it. And they gave them a decent budget to go do it. Go do it. Go get it guys.

Srini Rao

Hahaha.

Daniel Coyle

And that is actually, you know, and on the one hand, oh, is that just being manipulative? You could say that actually, that's probably legit, like, oh, what a manipulative company that is. On the other hand, if it's done authentically and co-created and not assigned, and they really do want better coffee, then say, yeah, go knock yourselves out. We can spend a few hundred bucks on figuring that out in some time. And when you do bring it back, there's going to be this deeper sense of connection. So that's psychological safety.

It's deep fun, it's voice, not swaddling people in cotton and telling them they're in a safe place. It is sharing the experience of what it is to work there. And it goes back to the basic definition of culture. Culture isn't like feeling good. It isn't happiness. It isn't a frictionless work. It's actually a set of living relationships in pursuit of a goal. And...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Coyle

and getting shoulder to shoulder around hard stuff is the most important part of it. There's sort of a fallacy about great cultures that they're happy, happy places to work. But one of the tips I have in the book is exactly that. You've got to kind of kill the happy smoothness fallacy because it's actually not about that kind of happiness. It's about being shoulder to shoulder, doing hard stuff with people you admire. That's what good culture's about.

Srini Rao

Right.

Srini Rao

Well, one of the things that you say is that strong cultures possess high levels of collective self-awareness. That is everyone in the group shares an understanding of the other strengths, tendencies, and habits, which helps drive group performance. And that struck me because, yeah, I am the host of the podcast, but I also have a team that I work with, like we're working on a bunch of other stuff. I have a community manager. So how do you develop that collective self-awareness then apply it to the projects that you're working on?

Daniel Coyle

Yeah. Yeah, there's some ways. I mean, the most powerful way that I know, and if there's one tip in the book that people should take away, it's this. It's an AAR, an after action review. It's an idea from the Navy SEALs and the military. And the concept is immediately after you do something together, you circle up and you talk about three questions. Number one, you talk about what went well. You ask, what went well?

Number two, you ask what didn't go well. Number three, you talk about what will we do differently next time? And the power of that is it's hard. It's a hard thing to do to circle up after everybody tried their best at something to say, hey, I think I screwed that up, or I think you screwed that up, or I think we're going down the wrong path there, or I think we're going on the right path there. Hard conversation to have, but that conversation and the transparency, the honesty, the authenticity that it generates helps you navigate.

that landscape together, it gives you, if we're gonna go back to that image of birds flying through the forest, if you don't know exactly where the tree is and you don't agree on where the tree is and you don't agree on where the rock is and you don't agree on where each other is, if you don't have that situational awareness, it's really hard to be aligned and autonomous and fly. And so this concept of these meetings where we can pause and say, wait a minute, I think we're headed for a rock.

Wait a minute, I think we should turn left. What do you see? Where do you think we could be better? What should we do differently? Those are incredibly powerful and they don't take much time. And yet there's this urge when we finish a project with people to immediately just move on to the next thing. Like to just high five and move on, right? Hey, nice job everybody, that was really great. Great teams don't do that. Great cultures don't do that because there's this wonderful learning opportunity immediately after you do something.

that when you ask what went well, what didn't go well, what can we do differently next time?

Srini Rao

Yeah.

You also talk about this distinction between productivity and creativity, which naturally of course given that we run the unmistakable creative that piqued my interest, you say in essence there are two types of work, doing regular stuff and making new stuff. If you're seeking to be productive, that is to do the regular stuff working remotely has been shown to be more effective and efficient than working in person. However if you're looking to innovate, that is to invent new stuff, it's far more effective to invest in physical togetherness. Now obviously when you're operating a small team like I do, we don't have an Airbnb type

getting together in person isn't as easy. How do we apply that? How do we think about that in the context of what you just said?

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, I think there's a few things. I mean, and one is that the advantage of proximity and creativity is not like small. It's pretty big. There was one study that showed that people when they're proximate with each other will discuss a problem eight times more often than if they're not. And because you're bumping into each other, because you're swirling around each other like noodles in a cook pot, bumping in, you get more creativity out of that. So prioritizing that. The idea that I would...

throw out would be the idea of toggling, where for certain gatherings, and there's a company called Articulate that has been in this for years, you'll spend the money to find a centrally located place and be together for a few days. Half of it is work-related, half of it is just relationship fun. And prioritizing that, getting on a tempo with that, co-creating a schedule where you're doing that. And then in the other time, when you're executing, then...

having a decision sheet that everybody can log into asynchronously, and using online tools and connecting about calibration and alignment, all of those things can happen. But if you're going to take on hard problems, hard creative problems, it's really hard to do that unless you are together. And so that's the idea behind the buckets, to actually really be intentional about, OK, what are we trying to do here? And this is what the remote work has.

is now requiring of us and it cuts back to our original conversation about, you know, command and control versus a little more creativity. At the heart of creativity is awareness, is realizing, oh, if we want to get where we want to go, we need to operate in a different way. We need to be intentional. It's tempting when we talk about creativity to try to leave things

It's creativity. There should be no boundaries. It should be very loose and flowing. That's not actually true. That's not how good creative people operate. I think good creative people operate with a lot of intention around their process. Working remotely requires us, I think, to raise the bar on our level of intention of the work that we're going to do together.

Srini Rao

So this is kind of a random question. What implications do you think something like virtual reality will have for this?

Daniel Coyle

I don't have a clue. It depends if it's realistic enough to fool our brains. It takes a lot to fool our brains. This uncanny valley stuff. I'm creeped out by it. I think people who are attracted to it, maybe we'll all be there in 10 years. I find it kind of hard to believe that it will be.

Srini Rao

Hehehehe

Daniel Coyle

anywhere near as good as actually being together. You know, we've got, our minds are pretty ancient technology and they work pretty well. And the idea of disembodying them to have them bump into each other seems like, I don't know, to me I don't think it's gonna work.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Well, you know, it's funny because I have an Oculus and I know I'm kind of bullish on some of the things that are possible with it. Just having played with it. I think it will change online learning a lot and make it much more interactive. But I have never saw it as a substitute for in-person relationships. So my old roommate and I have this debate. He's like, this is going to cause people to sit at home and never leave their house. And I said, I actually think it's going to get people to see each other in person more.

Daniel Coyle

Maybe so. I know, this is the great experiment, right? I mean, it's gonna be super interesting. The only thing that worries me about this experiment is that it's being led, funded, and driven by people who have zero social skills. And that's sort of the problem, right? Yes, I'm thinking of specifically somebody in particular at Facebook. When you see them interact, it's something that's humanoid. Like, I think it's humanoid, but I don't think it's very human.

Srini Rao

That Facebook.

Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Coyle

And I think that's been a huge, you know, we're seeing the drawback of that lack of intuition, that lack of vulnerability, that lack of honesty in some of that community. And it really does have severe consequences because they're building the platforms on which we're interacting.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Let's talk about vulnerability loops. You say vulnerability loops happen when two or more people come together to admit they don't know the answers to share weakness. So they're based on powerful psychological truth. When people take interpersonal risk together, they connect and cooperate far more deeply. And I think that what's interesting about public vulnerability in particular is that I feel like a lot of people, myself included, have confused.

you know, sort of airing their dirty laundry in public with public vulnerability. I remember we had a guy here who wrote a book. I don't remember the title of the book. It was about how the most powerful people from Washington to Wall Street, to Hollywood, make people like them. And he said, like, when you're in the public eye, you actually have to filter, to some degree, what you choose to say, because the reality is, if you're the president of the United States, your words have a much greater.

impact on what people do than if it's just somebody like you and me. I mean, I learned this from being on a reality TV show. My cousin said, look, anybody can make you look like a jackass in editing. Your job is to give them zero ammo to do that. And so I intentionally was very careful about what I said. And at the same time, to your point, like, where do you find that line of, okay, what is an appropriate level of vulnerability in the workplace and what's not?

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, I think what's not is, and it depends in context here, obviously. There's no, there are a million different contexts here. Um, I rather, there's a lot of ways to be badly vulnerable. Um, and actually I bumped into a guy who works for a big tech company. He's been in some interesting rooms and he said that there are consultants, uh, training and helping CEOs to cry on camera.

They'll be doing takes of like a video to show everybody and they'll say like, do it again, but can you do it with more emotion? Like if you were to well up, that would be really good. So this is some like crazy Orwellian, you know, attempt to connect via, I would call it, you know, manipulative vulnerability. And I think people see right through it. The true vulnerability that works in a work contest is vulnerability that's built on learning.

It's built on trying to be a little better. I saw a beautiful example of it, or heard about a beautiful example of it at Pixar. Ed Catmull is the president and CEO of Pixar. And there was one day 15 years ago where he was standing next to a team of young engineers who were all working on something. And like anybody, when the boss is standing there kind of watching you work, you get kind of nervous. And at the end, Ed Catmull walked up to one of them and said, hey, when you guys are done here, could you come up to my office and teach me how to do that?

like incredible curiosity, incredible willingness to learn. He wasn't giving him feedback, he was trying to get better. And I talked to the engineer who that happened to, 15 years later, the guy still got goosebumps about it. Having people want to learn from you is really, really powerful. And most of us, it brings us in a deeper connection. And in all good cultures that I see, there's that.

that root curiosity that's built also with some care about in the relationship. But if it's a huge success, they're wondering, huh, I wonder where that came from. If it's a huge failure, same thing, turn toward the failure with saying, what happened there? Let's get better together. And so that's the kind of vulnerability that I think creates great culture, not ones that are like, you know, where we're talking about the skeletons in our closet or our deepest fears.

Daniel Coyle

That can have a place in group life for sure, but when it comes to groups that want to perform, I think that curiosity about how can we get a little better today than we were yesterday, and how can we get a little better tomorrow, those are the questions that really drive behavior.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, there are a few final ideas that I want to go over. One was what you called the failure wall. And then let's talk about the stories and then, you know, what you call the purpose mantras with, you know, different kinds of things we can do like the yearbook, the biography and all that, all that others. And then there's one more, the mantra manual, the yearbook and the biography.

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, yeah, these are all sort of ways in which, you know, it's funny, you would, you'd sort of think, you know, that good great cultures don't talk about themselves a lot. You'd sort of think good great cultures, you know, they just kind of know what their purpose is in their heart, right? They know what it is. And you'd be wrong. One mark of good culture is that when you're in it, it's kind of overwhelming. The language they use, the corny mantras they use, the symbols they use, the artifacts that are around. Walk into Pixar, walk into Navy SEAL Team Six. There's

there's this continual sense that we're gonna tell our story and we're gonna tell it over and over and over again. And these sort of ways, sometimes it's a culture deck, sometimes it's a culture book, sometimes it's a set of mantras that they sort of co-create together to say, they capture in some way the personality, the curiosity, the texture of the group.

And so all of these, and I give a few suggestions in the book, different ways that people can do that, all those are ways of kind of taking the story of your group. And story is like the strongest drug in the universe, right? It is something that activates our entire brain. It's 22 times stickier, according to one study, than just information. So if you want to sort of capture your group in some ways, you've really got to give a sense that...

how are we gonna use our story? How are we gonna tell our story? How are we gonna capture our story? I was just at a gathering of a big tech company and they broke into small groups and they were all writing their own mantras, right? And they were all coming up with the little phrases. And it was amazing how many of them, they didn't have to invent them because they were already kind of in the oxygen. And one of the mantras that one group came up with was do epic shit. And...

It's like a dumb thing to say in some ways, right? Like, you know, do epic shit. Like they sound like they're a bunch of mogul skiers or something. But man, did that resonate with that group. That really captured the texture, the stories that you could connect to that, the personalities that you could connect to that. Language and story is incredibly powerful and smart groups are aware of that and are continually reflecting their own story back on their own group as...

Daniel Coyle

a North Star as saying, this is what we look like at our best. What's stopping us from being at our best? Let's name those things so that we can be those things.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. You also talk about the three types of stories, right? Crisis stories, purpose stories, or four types of stories, virtue stories and impact stories. Can you explain what those are to people?

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, you know, and each is different sort of species, right? All stories are not created equal. When you've got, you know, most good things are formulated at some point in a crisis. You can go to any group, any great culture you can name. And actually, if you scroll back in time, I would bet a hundred bucks that you'll find some crisis story, some story where, you know, with Pixar, it's when they tried to make a

kind of a disaster and they realized this is like B-level work. We're just trying to do this sort of transactional, quick movie and we're trying to knock it out and capitalize on this. They realized, as was captured in one of the mantras, B-level work is bad for the soul. They started this whole new set of structures and processes. They called it the Brain Trust, a group of people that came together to review drafts of the movie.

They, because of the crisis, if they hadn't had this crisis, they would not have developed the clarity of purpose and the types of, I would say, vulnerability loops, ways of interacting, structures of wrestling with the material that made them Pixar. So finding that crisis story and really telling it and spotlighting it can help orient people toward the power of it, the power of what you've built.

are sort of a similar thing, but you're looking back in time to find the people who embody most clearly the personality of the group. Delta Airlines had a legendary leader, and they sort of keep his desk almost like it's George Washington's desk or something, and they use that desk as kind of a totem to talk about the values that this person had. And there's other different sort of types of stories, but the idea is that your story is your fuel, and it's also your map.

and finding that or reflecting it. Most of us go through life sort of treating stories as stuff that's just sort of random, right? It's in the air, oh, I heard a story the other day, and that's interesting, and we don't bring a lot of intention to it. We don't treat it like it's a powerful thing. And I think in good cultures, you have a different sort of awareness around it. Treat stories as something that can be harvested, that can be dispersed and shared.

Daniel Coyle

There's some companies that have a cool meeting every once in a while. It's called a CSWD. It stands for cool stuff we do. It's a way of just kind of coming together and let's talk about these cool things that are happening in our ecosystem that maybe people haven't heard of. In elevating those stories of, oh, you wouldn't believe this guy came in at midnight and invented this cool new app. This guy helped this person solve this problem. And she...

brought tea to a sick teammate last weekend, whatever that might be, finding ways to sort of capture it, share it, and celebrate.

Srini Rao

So there's one final thing that I wanted to go over and this is one of those things that really struck me. You said if you're around high performing teams you'll notice that they possess a dual focus. Half of their attention is firmly on the project at hand while the other keeps a sharp eye on the team's inner workings. Like race car drivers they make regular pit stops to tune the group's engine and fill its fuel tanks. And it made me think of...

Dan Heath's book Upstream, I think it's called Upstream, which was all about trying to prevent problems before they occur, because what I noticed as I was reading that book was how right he was about the fact that we tend to be largely reactive when it comes to problems instead of being proactive to prevent them. So how do we do that?

Daniel Coyle

Well, a couple ways. I mean, one is the beauty of the tune up. The beauty of the tune up is that it's divided up into three different things. This is an idea that comes from IDEO Design Firm. But a lot of times, you put together a team on a project, and they just start working on the project, right? What they do is they pause. They realize this is a trip we're taking together. We should have a pre-flight meeting, a mid-flight meeting, and a post-flight meeting.

And in each of them, you sort of zoom out and ask big dumb questions like, what's going to stop us here? What are five things? If this fails, there's always a beautiful question in the pre-mortem, if this fails a year from now, what will have caused that? Ask that question. What would have caused it? And pre-identify what those obstacles are going to be. What relationships are most important in getting right on our team? What are you guys most excited and joyful about on this project? What are you most curious to learn? Asking those questions.

getting answer to those. In mid-flight, you do a similar thing where you pull out of the work itself and turn your attention toward the workings of the team. How's it going? Are the relationships that need to be good, good? Are the problems we thought were the problems still the problems? What new problems have come up? And so on and so forth. Pull out and navigate, pull out and navigate, tune. And that is the power of reflection. And really, again, that's this, it's called the playbook, but it could be called the pause book. This idea that

That investment that you make in the tune-up, that investment that you make in the pause, is an investment. It makes you faster, stronger, better, closer, more able to fly through this complex landscape without losing touch with your teammates and without losing touch with the project.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at The Unmistakable Creative, which I know I've asked you before. It's always interesting to see how people answer this question when they come back. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Daniel Coyle

You know, I think it's impact. I think it's their impact on others. I think at the end of the day, we don't know how big our impact's gonna be or where it's going to be, but I think their impact requires connection. It requires a little bit of connection to something bigger than just information. It has to have some impact on someone's identity and the way they see the world. And if you can change the way someone sees the world, you've had an impact.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your stories, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book and everything else you're up to?

Daniel Coyle

Yeah, danielcoil.com, C-O-Y-L-E, that's me.

Srini Rao

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.