The Secret to Great Teams

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

We all know what it feels like to work on a great team. People like and trust one another. Teammates communicate with each other. Meetings are crisp and effective. At the end of the day, things just get done.

We've all been on bad teams too. Here, interminable meanings become a substitute for doing actual work. People undermine and undercut one another. Productivity is low, and morale, even lower. There is something mysterious about great teams. We know what they are when we see them, but how exactly do they come together? Is there a way to figure out the secret sauce of great teams and build teams based on this recipe?

Today, we take a deep dive into the science of teamwork. We'll explore one of the most common errors we make in constructing teams and what effective teams do in order to punch far above their weight. How to build great teams, this week, on Hidden Brain.

There are times in our lives when we become lost in the things we do. Time vanishes. Minutes pass, then hours. We don't notice that the sun has set or that we forgot to eat lunch. Psychologists sometimes call this a state of flow. Now, flow is supposed to be an individual state, but the same thing sometimes happens on effective teams. We feel in sync with other members of our group. Tasks get done almost effortlessly.

At Carnegie Mellon University, psychologist Anita Williams Woolley studies the science of teamwork. She has explored not only why some teams click, but why others don't. It turns out you can learn a lot by observing teams where people are constantly at loggerheads.

Anita Woolley, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Anita, I understand you grew up in a small town in Maine, and at the age of 14 you got a job waiting tables at a local restaurant, and it gave you an early glimpse into the nature of teams. What were your coworkers like?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Oh, well, it was definitely an interesting employment situation. I'd had other jobs before this, but was really excited to be a waitress. There were a variety of people, some of whom were older, had been working at the restaurant for longer, and then a couple teenagers like me. And the old timers sometimes were a bit annoyed by some of the younger ones, maybe a little threatened that we wouldn't come in and take their tips or whatever, and so it could be a little challenging to work with them and get along.

Shankar Vedantam:

She quickly learned to tiptoe around one coworker in particular.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Yeah, so she'd been there the longest and she was just somebody who I think was easily frustrated and she just would want to either tell us what to do or blame us for problems or find ways to point out the problems or mistakes that we were making as a way maybe of keeping us in our place.

Shankar Vedantam:

Anita remembers one day at work when things came to a boil.

Anita Williams Woolley:

So, New Year's Eve, lots of people, lots of different things happening. Everybody needs help at some point. She had a way of sort of barking at you if she needed you to do something, regardless of what you might be doing. And so, one of the things she barked at me about was she wanted me to make drinks for her table. At that restaurant, the waitresses made the drinks and I had no idea how to make drinks. I had a few recipes in my pocket and I didn't really know what the drink was she wanted me to make, but I didn't want to ask her because I knew that was just going to be really negative to have her yelling at me in the middle of the restaurant. So I just kind of made it up.

I was like, "Okay, that kind of sounds like this." And apparently it was terrible. It was worse than if I just asked her. But there were lots of episodes like that with her because of just how aversive or difficult it was to really interact with her.

Shankar Vedantam:

And, of course, when you made the drinks the way that you thought the drinks should be made, when you just basically, essentially, made it up, the customers probably said, "This might not be a restaurant we want to come back to," whether or not they actually said anything aloud.

Anita Williams Woolley:

That's right. And in a small town, especially, is a really big problem, and I think if a customer's drinking something that tastes really strange, they might even wonder about the safety of the things that we're serving them, let alone the quality.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, Anita, after you graduated high school, you went on to college on an ROTC scholarship. This is a scholarship where the government helps pay for your education and you commit to serving in the military for a length of time after you graduate. You attended a training camp at Fort Bragg in North Carolina that gave you another insight into the nature of teamwork. What was it like to be a female cadet?

Anita Williams Woolley:

It was challenging in ROTC because everything was designed with men in mind. So the clothing, for example. Our uniforms were all designed for men, so boots were wide, pants didn't have waists, that kind of thing. And also, I was often the only, or one of only a few female cadets. Also, the activities were designed for people who have more upper body strength or who have certain physical attributes.

Shankar Vedantam:

I understand that there was a training exercise where a squad had to essentially get from point A to point B, and this had to be done in a limited amount of time with everyone carrying a lot of equipment. Give me a sense of how your team handled that challenge and what happened.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Yeah, so this exercise, they call them strack lanes where a group of maybe 10 or so people, you have different obstacles, and there was a male cadet who was in charge. He had to lead us through this thing to get everything over this obstacle, and he just had assumed that, okay, these couple of females we have, they're not going to be any use. We just have to work around them. So I'm just going to lay it out and get these other guys to do it, and we'll work around them, essentially. Not really wanting to listen to any input or ideas from anybody and just thinking he had to decide it all himself.

Shankar Vedantam:

And what happened? Did it work?

Anita Williams Woolley:

It was a disaster, because, as it turns out, there were things that the women could have done to help as well as things the guys couldn't do that he was assuming they could do, and so we had people, equipment that couldn't get over the wall. People got left behind. Time ran out. It was a pretty big disaster. If it had been a real situation, we probably all would've died.

Shankar Vedantam:

When she was in college, Anita had taken a class with a professor named Richard Hackman. He was a researcher who studied teams.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Richard Hackman really introduced a lot of important insights about teams, but the thing that was striking to me related to the fact that there were a lot of components of teamwork that didn't have so much to do with what the people knew as much as the ways that they were coordinating their inputs together. And he had lots and lots of examples in his course that I found totally fascinating of brilliant people put together to fly an airplane, to perform in an orchestra. He studied a lot of different interesting situations where they're very talented people, but failures in their collaboration and in their teamwork in ways that you wouldn't expect.

Shankar Vedantam:

I imagine this must have run counter, not just to your assumptions, but to a lot of other students in the class, because, again, the idea that you put a lot of brilliant people together and you get a brilliant team, that seems so intuitive.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Absolutely. And also, another piece of it that was enlightening was the fact that it's not all about the leader. And I think, especially younger people, have the idea, at least at the time, and certainly in our OTC, that the leader makes all the difference. If the leader knows what's going on or knows what to do, then everything else will be fine, whereas Richard also had a lot of examples showing that it wasn't just about the leader. You really needed all the team members to be contributing and actively collaborating for things to come together.

Shankar Vedantam:

When it comes to building great teams, many of us leap to understandable assumptions. Get the smartest, most talented people together, put them under the leadership of an effective leader, and you build a great team. But the research that Anita was studying challenged that conventional wisdom.

When we come back, the errors we all make in building teams can cost us on the sports field and in office settings. They can also have life and death consequences. You are listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. It seems like simple arithmetic. If people are ranked on a scale of one to 10 and you build a team of tens, you should have a standout team. Each individual is smart. When you assemble a bunch of superstars, you should get a superstar team. Unfortunately, human behavior is more complicated than that.

At Carnegie Mellon University, psychologist Anita Woolley has studied why arithmetic is not always a good guide to psychology.

Anita, we often see that teams have everything going for them. They're filled with brilliant people who know each other well. They're motivated to succeed, but very often, they don't. And at a national level, this can sometimes have catastrophic consequences. Tell me about the team of the best and the brightest that President John F. Kennedy put together in the 1960s.

Anita Williams Woolley:

So, Kennedy put together a group of people who he knew he trusted. They were really accomplished people like Robert Kennedy, of course. There was Arthur Schlesinger. There was Robert McNamara. People that we heard about a lot before and after in terms of their individual accomplishments, and definitely seemed to be set up to work together well in advising him as his cabinet.

Shankar Vedantam:

But this team of superstars ended up making a number of very serious mistakes. One was the botched invasion of Cuba on April 17th, 1961. The invading army was a group of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA. Their goal was to overthrow President Fidel Castro and his revolutionary government. Anita says it's a classic example of what can happen when a lot of smart people on a team have the same biases and blind spots.

Anita Williams Woolley:

They had a plan to land at the Bay of Pigs and move into the country and displace his government, and they thought the Cuban people would be aligned with that and supportive of that and be happy to see the Americans come. But there were a lot of indicators to suggest that maybe they were overlooking some opposition, some opinions even within Cuba that wouldn't necessarily see this as a great thing. But these weren't really raised in the discussions or not enough to cause the president to reconsider his plan.

Shankar Vedantam:

The attack was supposed to be secret, but unbeknownst to the White House, the Cuban government learned about it ahead of time and prepared accordingly. The Cuban military quickly surrounded the invaders, taking most of them prisoner.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Now, all of a sudden, Fidel could even make a case for why the US was actually the enemy. And so they kind of went into it with some assumptions about how it would be received and how successful it would be without really considering the opposition in the ways that it might be counterproductive.

Shankar Vedantam:

So two or three decades later, the United States faced another disaster: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. The physicist Richard Feynman was appointed to investigate what happened. He concluded that while rank-and-file engineers were raising questions about the missions, their managers, under pressure from Congress to show results, didn't listen. It's another example of a team composed of very brilliant people, in this case, literally rocket scientists, and their failing to coordinate and work well together as a team leading to a major disaster.

Anita Williams Woolley:

So the pressures they were operating under in that case, there was a lot of pressure for them to move ahead with a launch. It had been delayed several times. The public was calling into question the amount of money being spent on the space program. And so they were very motivated to find a way to move forward, to not delay again, and were then motivated to discount any objections that were being raised, which we do know, in that case, there were some concerns being voiced. They weren't being voiced by somebody who was very senior in status in the group, but we know now that those concerns were very valid and what was being described in fact did happen.

Shankar Vedantam:

I understand that you yourself were involved in understanding how the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred and how to prevent similar attacks from taking place after 9/11. With your mentor Richard Hackman, you took part in something called Project Looking Glass where groups of scientists pretended to be terrorists and members of the US Intelligence Services tried to foil attacks. How did these games unfold, Anita?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Well, they were fascinating exercises where we would convene two teams to basically work against each other in some ways. Many times what these exercises would focus on would be a threat from the past. Sometimes we would know how it had panned out, sometimes not, and in some cases, the personnel were kind of adopting the goals and the motivations of the folks that might be trying to carry out an attack while others would be trying to then figure out and prevent the attack from taking place. Very different dynamics would develop in the two groups on the basis of their role, which I think itself was quite insightful to notice how that happened as a function of what they were trying to do.

Shankar Vedantam:

Was it the case that in fact the terrorists regularly beat the spies?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Yes, and some would say that could be expected, right? You have the benefit of surprise when you're on the offense. But it was also true that taking that perspective on the situation led them to just really think creatively in some ways and really focus on what they were trying to carry out and make really good use of the opportunities that they saw. And so the dynamic was much more creative and exciting in those teams, and they did regularly come up with things that the other team didn't detect or make plans to prevent.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the things that you were trying to do with this Project Looking Glass, Anita, was you were trying to address essentially a shortcoming that had been identified among US intelligence agencies, which is that it seemed to be the case that different aspects of the US intelligence agency network had information about the 9/11 attacks, but they didn't share this information in a way that would be useful for other parts of the system.

Talk a little bit about this idea that you were trying to solve. It wasn't just a question of getting the information, but it was also a question of is the information getting to where it needs to get?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Yeah, absolutely. So the 9/11 commission that took place for quite some time after the attacks, one of the major conclusions was that there was a failure of collaboration. They didn't connect the dots, as the cliche came to be known, and people in different agencies in different pockets of the broader intelligence community, either not sharing the information or not reaching out to the right people to make sure they had the information or realize the implications of the information that they had. And so, hindsight is always 20/20, as they say, but even moving forward, it was clear that there was some real problems and they were multifaceted, keeping people from being able to integrate the different pieces in the ways that they needed to.

Shankar Vedantam:

And I understand that you did some work at the micro level, sort of looking at individual teams, counter-terrorism task forces, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and sometimes even at the level of individual teams, individual meetings, you were spotting some of the same problems that were manifesting themselves at the much larger level.

Anita Williams Woolley:

That's right. When we brought together some of these task forces, for example, it really was a microcosm of the larger community. People came in, they were very closely identified with their own home agency. Many of them had spent their careers there, and they had perceptions of the other people based on what agency they were from. And in some cases, some of these are military or have other affiliations. They literally wear their identity on their shirt, making it very clear how they're different from the other folks. And so some of the usual areas of focus goals, priorities of their home agency would override things that would make more sense if they were really focusing on their work with the team.

Shankar Vedantam:

So around 15 years ago, Anita, you set out to solve the mystery of why some teams work and some teams don't, and you brought people into your lab and organized them into teams and give them a series of tests. And in some ways, this was like an IQ test, except it was an IQ test for teamwork. Could you explain what you did?

Anita Williams Woolley:

So when we give individuals an intelligence test, and of course there are a variety of different ones out there now, essentially we give them a sample of problems that tap into maybe a few different processes that capture a basic capability, and together it can represent the capability of the individual. And here, in thinking about it with teamwork, what we wanted to do was give the team a set of team-based tasks or problems. So things they had to work together to solve, but that would require them to work together in different ways to capture fundamentally different processes and things that you wouldn't necessarily assume that the same team would be good at.

So, very mathematical kinds of problems alongside very visual, creative kinds of problems or verbally-oriented problems or things that required precision and accuracy and speed to kind of get at all of these different ways that a team would have to combine their inputs to successfully solve a problem.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the things that you drew from these exercises was that just as we think about individuals having an intelligence quotient or an IQ, you could also think of groups having an IQ. This is a bit of a mind-bending idea because of course groups don't share a single brain, but explain what you meant by this and what you found in this study, Anita.

Anita Williams Woolley:

We definitely were initially inspired by some of these ideas from individual intelligence, which, abstractly speaking, you could say, is the notion that the human brain is a system and intelligence is characterizing how well that system functions. And so then we started to think more about what does that mean? How would you capture that? Does that exist actually? Because at the time when even teams researchers thought about intelligence in teams, it was as a function of the intelligence of the individual members. So this idea that there would be a capability of the combination of people working together that was separate from the individual intelligence of members. That was not really an idea that had been tested.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, researchers who study intelligence at the individual level have long noticed that a kid who does well in math will often do well in history and often do well in languages. And they've made the case for something called general intelligence, a kind of capacity that allows you to perform well in very different tasks. In some ways, you were trying to measure the general intelligence of groups.

Anita Williams Woolley:

That was kind of the initial hypothesis, if you will, because based on what we knew from the research at the time, we had a lot of different studies looking at how does a group interact to be creative versus how does a group interact to be very accurate and precise and efficient. And the ways that teams would interact to do both of those things well look very different and suggested that maybe you wouldn't have the same team doing both of those kinds of things or expect them to do equally well at both of those kinds of things.

And so we were really testing a hypothesis that perhaps there is a consistent ability to work together that would characterize a team even across those very different kinds of tasks.

Shankar Vedantam:

Did you find that in fact some groups are consistently effective while other groups are consistently ineffective?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Yes. Yes, we did. And that was really the fundamental hypothesis that we were seeking to test, that there was this consistent ability of certain teams that work well across all of these different task types. And, of course, then there were teams that did not work well across all of the task types.

Shankar Vedantam:

Of course, what this then suggests is that there must be something that is actually either undermining or supercharging the effectiveness of different teams. And the search was presumably on now to determine what it was exactly that made teams so effective. And, of course, one theory that we've looked at before is that effective teams are filled with people who have high IQs. This is, of course, our commonly held belief. Did that hold up to scrutiny?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Even though we had an inkling that it wouldn't be all about individual intelligence, we thought that there would be a fairly sizable role for individual ability to play. So we were surprised to see that individual intelligence didn't have as much of a relationship with the collective intelligence of the team as even we kind of expected it would.

Shankar Vedantam:

So if it's not intelligence, people might say, "Well, maybe it was the personality traits of the individuals in the group." Is it possible that the personality traits determined how successful a group was, the general intelligence of the group?

Anita Williams Woolley:

We didn't really see a consistent, strong relationship with any particular personality traits. Sometimes the problematic personality traits like neuroticism would show up as something that was a negative correlate of collective intelligence, but often it wasn't a very strong relationship and it wasn't very consistent across our studies.

Shankar Vedantam:

Anita, sometimes when we are on successful teams, we often feel like we're all rowing in the same direction. In some ways you examine this question. Does the feeling that we have cohesion with others make for better teams?

Anita Williams Woolley:

It turns out that was another surprise and continues to be surprising, actually. Some of the other usual suspects in looking at teamwork would be things like cohesion, satisfaction, liking, or even self-report, motivation. How motivated are you to work hard? The cohesion one in particular was very interesting because, given my background in ROTC, the military talked a lot about unit cohesion as being a main driver, and we found no correlation with collective intelligence, and we still don't.

So when we ask people about how satisfied are you with your experience in the group, how much would you want to come back and work with this group again, or would you want to spend time with these people socially? There are a variety of ways that psychologists get at this notion of groupiness, if you will. We did not see any correlation with collective intelligence.

So there were certainly some teams in our studies and some teams in the world where members enjoy one another and they work well together, but that's not always the case and certainly there can be groups that work together very well and they respect each other, but they're not interested in hanging out beyond what they're doing in their work together.

I've certainly been in groups where we're all very friendly and like to hang out, but we're not very productive. And so I think it's a common perception that we need to build teamwork and cohesion and build relationships as a foundation for productive teamwork and that's not necessarily the case, at least not in our studies. So it's not about how people feel about each other.

Shankar Vedantam:

Where do you think the assumption comes from and why do you think it goes wrong?

Anita Williams Woolley:

If we've been on a team that worked really well together, often we have good feelings about that, good memories. Maybe it did involve people that we either liked at the time or came to eventually. But the causation, the direction of causality, is the part that I think is hard for us to always really detect. And in fact, that was one of the points that I heard early on in taking Richard Hackman's course that really struck me.

I was going back through my notes recently and very early on I had a lot of underlining in some of my assignments about is it the fact that team members like each other and that leads them to perform well or do they like each other because they performed well? And he was making the argument that it was more of the latter.

Shankar Vedantam:

In other words, in sports teams, they sometimes say nothing brings a team together like winning. And in some ways that's what you're talking about here. When you're winning and things are going well, it's easy to feel like everyone is marching shoulder to shoulder.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Exactly. The problem is if you then use that as a way to problem solve and to make the assumption that the way to make the team work together well is to get them to like each other. I think that's the flaw and reasoning that sometimes is a problem.

Shankar Vedantam:

What's remarkable here is that we've looked at a number of different conclusions we might draw about why some teams are more effective than others, and it's actually kind of striking how often our intuitions are wrong or at least not supported by the evidence.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Well, teams, I think, we're coming to understand, are really complex adaptive systems. There are a lot of complex relationships that are not linear. They're not direct one-to-one correlations. There are a lot of things that work in combination and moderators and interactions and so on. And I think the human mind can't necessarily intuit all of that. We see the beginning and we see the end, and maybe we assume there's a straight line in between when there isn't.

Shankar Vedantam:

Many people extol the virtues of individual intelligence, feelings of camaraderie, and cohesion, but these things do not always determine the effectiveness of the groups that Anita studied. When we come back, what does matter? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Anita Woolley studies the science of teamwork. Over many years of research, she's found that the things we commonly associate with great teams, individual intelligence, a feeling of cohesion and camaraderie, are not always good predictors of what makes for great teams.

Anita, you have found three characteristics of great teams. The first of these has to do with a gender composition of teams. How did you come by this finding and what did you find?

Anita Williams Woolley:

I feel like as we talk about this research, I keep saying, "We didn't expect this and we didn't expect that." And so this is another one of those. So we conducted a series of studies in our initial exploration of this whole collective intelligence hypothesis, and a graduate student on the project noted a correlation with a proportion of women in the team and collective intelligence. And I was the one who initially said, "Oh, I don't know. Let's see if that holds. We shouldn't make a big deal about that until we know whether or not that's a really consistent pattern." And it was, and then as we dug into it more, we found that there were some other characteristics, specifically of women, that were really making a big part of the contribution to collective intelligence.

Shankar Vedantam:

So if having more women on a team leads to high levels of collective intelligence, does this mean, Anita, that having teams entirely comprised of women are the best teams?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Well, no. So, as we've kind of gone on and accumulated more data, what we started to see really more clearly was a curvilinear effect, if you will, where teams that had majority female but were still gender diverse, if you will, not entirely male or female, the teams that had majority women were most collectively intelligent.

Shankar Vedantam:

So the finding that having women on the team improves the outcomes of teams was connected to a perhaps larger phenomenon that you also observed, which is the capacity of teams to engage in social perceptiveness. What do you mean by that phrase, Anita? How would it work?

Anita Williams Woolley:

So, social perceptiveness is really a capability that individuals possess to pick up on subtle cues and draw inferences about what others are thinking or feeling. And in teamwork, that can be really helpful because it also helps individuals anticipate how others might react and to kind of use that information to facilitate the communication and coordination of the group.

And so, somebody who is more socially perceptive might notice, "Okay, well, I'm talking too much. Maybe I should stop and ask somebody else what they think." Or, "Gee, we're not hearing from this other person. I wonder if they agree with what we're saying or if they have some points that they don't agree with." A whole variety of different tendencies that go along with social perceptiveness that also facilitate the collaboration of the group.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, in some ways, I think what I'm hearing you say is that effective groups are groups that pay attention, in some ways, to one another, and perhaps the gender is sort of a marker of it, but it's only, if you will, a crude marker of what we are really trying to get at, which is that effective groups really are paying attention to one another and picking up on cues that people are sending to different members of the group.

Anita Williams Woolley:

That's right. And so the gender effect is really capturing that when you have individuals in a team who just have a habit of being attentive to the needs of other people, of responding or anticipating what they might need of maybe taking a step back and giving somebody else the floor and also stepping up to help when they see that somebody else needs help. All of those kinds of tendencies are things that foster collective intelligence in a group.

Shankar Vedantam:

The finding is mirrored by what Anita found when she explored how often individuals spoke in group settings. Teams with higher levels of collective intelligence usually didn't have one person dominate the conversation.

Anita Williams Woolley:

So, the consistent finding is that groups that are more collectively intelligent, they don't have the conversation dominated by one or a few people. You don't have all the work being done by one or a few people. There's roughly equal involvement in the group's collaboration.

Shankar Vedantam:

You've looked at how the use of video platforms like Zoom might affect the equality of team members' contributions. What do you find?

Anita Williams Woolley:

So, we decided to just try using a manipulation of whether or not the people collaborating could see each other on a video conference or just hear each other. And what we found was that the video conference actually seemed to reduce collective intelligence. One of the ways that it did that is it disrupted synchrony and sentiment. If you're happy, and I'm talking with you, my voice should reflect the happiness that you're communicating. And we tended to see that less when there was video in part because it really seemed like people were distracted, perhaps by the video. And also it led to actually more unequal contribution to the conversation. There were certain people who were actually more likely to dominate the conversation when the conversation was taking place by video.

Shankar Vedantam:

A very interesting finding, Anita, has to do with the average level of social perceptiveness in the team. In another study led by some of your frequent collaborators, they looked specifically at the member of the team who scored lowest on social perceptiveness. Why did they do that and what did they find?

Anita Williams Woolley:

So what they found was that the lowest-scoring member, if you will, was really the strongest predictor of the collective intelligence of the team. Because when you have somebody who is really not paying attention to these cues, the disruption that it creates can really offset all the benefits of what the others might be doing to try to facilitate collaboration. And it echoes some other findings in the general research literature about bad apples spoiling the barrel. When you have one person who's particularly problematic, the disruption it causes can really have a disproportionately negative effect on the team overall.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm thinking about what happened to you in that restaurant when you were a teenager. In some ways, having one coworker who was really grouchy meant that other people simply stopped communicating with each other.

Anita Williams Woolley:

That's right. And it could be that everybody else was perfectly capable of collaborating well or very competent and we could have been a well-oiled machine, but as soon as we were withdrawing and not going to ask any questions or expose any mistakes if we could possibly avoid it, that really cut off a lot of other possibilities for better performance.

Shankar Vedantam:

There's another kind of perceptiveness that matters to collective intelligence, and that is an awareness of what other people know and where to get the information that you need. This idea is sometimes called transactive memory, and it's a term coined by the late psychologist Daniel Wegner. Can you tell me about this idea, Anita, and how he came up with it?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Wagner initially noticed this in his own relationship with his wife, where they recognized that there were a number of different areas of their relationship or even their shared experience where they would sort of specialize in remembering different details. And so whether it was about how to take care of different household things or even in recounting events that they had experienced together, they would each remember certain details and together they had quite a complete story. But it inspired him. He first looked at this in other close couples, but then over time, others have generalized these ideas and looked at them in teams and other settings and found very similar patterns.

The more effective teams, even outside of awareness. They don't necessarily know they're doing this just like the married couples don't necessarily explicitly know that they would fall into a pattern of coordinating and really expand the total amount of information they could collectively manage.

Shankar Vedantam:

I understand that one of your colleagues at Carnegie Mellon has found a robust transactive memory system among doctors is associated with better outcomes for their patients. Can you tell me about that work?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Yeah, so, Linda Argote, who's one of my colleagues at the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon, was looking at doctors working in trauma units and their work together and the implications for their patients. What she found was that keeping the same members together helped them form a transactive memory system where they would specialize, if you will, in small ways, sometimes imperceptible ways, to focus on different details of the patient's care. And the patients who were being treated by teams that developed these more effective transactive memory systems actually had better outcomes. They were in the hospital for a shorter time. They were discharged more quickly, which is an important marker of the quality of care they've received. So, it was an important, I think, insight for thinking about how even medical teams can be affected by these very subtle effects.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering what the idea of transactive memory means for the common belief that fresh blood is often good on teams. So you and I are members of a team. We've worked well together for long periods of time, but one of us leaves and now a new person comes in and joins the team. What's the effect of this? What's the effect of turnover versus stability on the long-term success of teams?

Anita Williams Woolley:

This is something that has been debated for quite some time. In fact, there were some research in R&D teams done in the 1980s showing that teams that were together at that time up to five years would continue to improve in terms of the quality of their outcomes and their communications at least that long before you would see this kind of drop off where things might get stale, where they fall into routines, they don't recognize that they're using sort of outdated approaches.

And so while bringing in somebody new can certainly bring in a new perspective or enable a team to consider some additional ways of addressing problems, teams also benefit from being together for a good period of time so that they can learn how to work together so that they can develop these shared systems for organizing and coordinating, such as a transactive memory system, especially, actually, when we're learning something new.

When we learn something new in a team, there's a lot about learning how to do it together that is important. And when we then change members, we really disrupt that process. And so, other research and hospitals Amy Edmondson has looked at surgical teams and how keeping them together, especially as they're learning a new procedure, can be important in that when you change the membership of the team too often, and in fact most organizations create changes in teams very often, you really disrupt a lot of these processes that could otherwise be very beneficial.

Shankar Vedantam:

What I'm getting from this conversation really is the complexity of how teams come together and what makes them work. And I like the analogy you raised earlier about a team as being the equivalent of a single human brain, which has different sections and regions that each do different kinds of things. And if you use that analogy, it's easy to see. Taking out the limbic system, for example, might not result in a brain that suddenly does very well because it's actually connected to all kinds of things that other parts of the brain are doing.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Exactly. And so if I decided, "Oh, I wish I had a better memory, and so I want to transplant this other memory that is objectively a better memory into my brain," I don't think we would expect it to work well with the other parts of my brain and seamlessly all of a sudden I have this better brain. In essence, yes, I think the analogy with teams can be useful.

Shankar Vedantam:

In some ways, I think the error we make in teams is thinking about the team as being modular, as basically the sum of its parts, whereas what I think you're really pointing at here throughout this conversation is that the team is really more than the sum of its parts and swapping parts in, swapping parts out, or the parts don't talk to one another, it can really affect how the collective performs.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Absolutely. And so the collective intelligence really is produced from the coordination and collaboration of the parts. It's not plug and play for those parts necessarily. There's a fair amount of learning that goes into finding those processes and finding out what works.

Shankar Vedantam:

In some ways, I feel like the ideas you're talking about are really applicable at almost every level, whether they're personal or professional or the level of communities or nations, which is how do you collaborate with other people? How do you get to work well with other people? How do you actually get to share information back and forth in a way that would be helpful to other people?

Anita Williams Woolley:

Absolutely. And I think a lot of it, just over and over again, you see the importance of not only people showing up with their skills and capabilities, but respecting and valuing the capabilities of the other people in such a way that both they will let themselves rely on them as well as admit to where they could use some help.

And I think the other way that it shows up all over the place is also being willing to ask questions and just clarify what are we doing? Why are we doing it? Because I think even in some of the big historical examples of failure, if somebody had spoken up and sort of just said, "Okay, hang on a minute. What are we trying to do? What do we think we're going to accomplish? Is this really the best way to accomplish that?" It might've caused people to rethink some assumptions they had about what they were trying to do or how it would work. And so I think, over and over again, we see in the collectively intelligent groups that you have people who are willing to do that.

Shankar Vedantam:

Anita Williams Woolley is a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University. Anita, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Anita Williams Woolley:

Thanks for having me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brains executive editor.

For today's Unsung Hero, we bring you a story from our sister show: My Unsung Hero. It comes from Leidy Klotz.

Leidy Klotz:

My high school had always gotten crushed in soccer by the West Hill Warriors. We saw them as the rich kids from the city. One of their fathers took work calls on the sideline on the first mobile phone I ever saw.

But my group of friends lived for soccer, and we had supportive parents too. One of our parents parked a hay wagon on the sideline so that they could get elevated video footage of our games. And by the time we played West Hill my junior season, it was time for us to finally beat them. And I'll never forget. We're already ahead in this game, two to nothing, when I drilled past my defender near the halfway line and made a backdoor pass to my friend who scored, which effectively ended the game.

I was so excited. As I ran to celebrate with my team, I screamed right in the face of West Hill's best player, the tall, blonde midfielder named Jeff Wentland. And Jeff was a big reason why we could never beat West Hill. He was skilled and smart and ultra competitive. He's the kind of guy who would slide tackle his grandmother to win.

As soon as the final whistle blows for this game, Jeff makes a beeline right towards me, and my mind is racing for an excuse to justify why I had screamed in his face. But when Jeff got to me, he just shook my hand, congratulated me on the win, and invited me to join his club team. Now, this was a team that brought together the best players from all the high schools in our area, and top college coaches paid attention to that club team. So playing on that club team put my development as a soccer player on a whole new trajectory.

Jeff's invitation opened the door to the formative experiences of my young life playing soccer at a Division 1 college, and then for a couple of years, professionally.

And in the decades since. I am not a soccer player anymore, but I've thought a lot about that moment. Why didn't Jeff punch me in the face? Why didn't he just point out that despite my team beating his, he was still a better player than me? And he was. Why was Jeff so gracious?

Jeff was only in high school, but he already figured out one of the most important things about competition, and that's that the game was over. He was looking ahead. I wasn't a trash talking rival anymore. I was a potential teammate, a partner.

Shankar Vedantam:

Leidy Klotz lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Oh, and the club team that Jeff Wentland invited Leidy to join? It won the National Indoor Soccer Championship that senior year of high school.

You can find more of Anita Woolley's research and other resources on our website: hiddenbrain.org. While you're there, be sure to subscribe to our free newsletter. Every week we'll bring you the latest research on human behavior, plus we always include a brain-teaser and a moment of joy.

One last request. If you like today's episode about teamwork, please share it with one or two people who you think would find it interesting. Word of mouth suggestions are the best way to connect new listeners to the ideas we explore on Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.