Kurt Nelson 0:00 So I believe so I'm, yeah, yeah. I just heard that. Heard that, yeah. It was strange, because again, all right, good to see you. Technology, Tim Houlihan 0:13 Colin, we've been looking for, I mean, I have been looking forward to this for some pretty specific reasons, for all the jazz and, you know, illusions and mentions. So I'm hoping that we get to talk about music today. But Colin Fisher 0:27 yeah, definitely I'm on brand for the name of the podcast. Yeah, Tim Houlihan 0:30 good. Okay, yeah, very much. So, so where are you at in the process of of talking about the book with, you know, interviews and that sort of thing, are you like, close to the end, close to the beginning, uh, Colin Fisher 0:42 closer to the end. So this is probably podcast 30 or so, or something like that. So okay, yeah, we've got got two weeks, two weeks before launch here in the UK, and then it's September 2 in the US. Tim Houlihan 0:56 Have you? Have you come into any questions that, or are there any questions that are just like, oh my god, if these guys ask me this question, I'll absolutely pull one Kurt Nelson 1:06 more, one more time if I have to answer this one more time. I'm just sick of it. It's Colin Fisher 1:11 just done. You know, I am from from my days in jazz. I am a goldfish. I forget instantaneously what I've been asked, what I've been what I said in response. So it serves me well in this process. All right. Kurt Nelson 1:27 Well, good, because that is one of the things we have had, you know, we know that when you get to the end, like you're just doing this back and forth, and there are some of those questions that everybody asks, and it's just like, I just have my wrote response, and I really don't want to be doing that. So if there are questions like that, just let us know. Corollary to that, though, over your 30 plus or so interviews, has there been, like, has there been a you haven't gotten questions on things that you thought might have been something in the book? Like, nobody's really dug into this. And I thought this would have been a little bit more of what, you know, people might have been interested in, or something that I wanted to talk about. Colin Fisher 2:09 You know, I would say not too, not, not extremely. I think the the fairly normal thing of, I a lot of this is, you know, the books got the the four sections and that I talk most about the first and the last, okay, and they're kind of middle to about conformity, competition. Yeah, we talk a little bit less about those on average. But okay, you know, it's not like it's never it's not like it's never happened. And I'm pretty happy to go wherever you guys are interested in, you know, I, I, yeah, I'm not very attached to, we have to, like, hit the talking points in the book or anything like that. So we've, we, you know, I feel like I've, I've been doing that. And, yeah, well, we'll get some of them, but if the conversation goes other places too. And, you know, I, I talked about one where we talked about improvisation and creativity in groups for most of the time, and most of it wasn't in the book. But that's all fine with me. Well, all I want to talk about Tim Houlihan 3:11 is jazz Tim. Kurt Nelson 3:14 I need to rein Tim in. That's good because, I mean, the way that we typically try to do these, is it really? We want it to be conversational. We want it we will go down rabbit holes and kind of go, Oh, that's really interesting. Let's go down there. We have four pages of questions that we will never get through. Actually, more than that, maybe so and and, you know, part of our issue is that we just are, I would, I would be having, like, another four pages of additional questions that we haven't you know, you covered so much in your book, so many really cool things, and it just brought up all these questions. So we'll try to hone it in, but we will. The intent is for this to be a conversation. Again, this is a podcast, so if there's if, if you go, Tim, that was the dumbest question I've ever heard. We can, we can edit that out, and we don't have to answer. Notice that it would never be Kurt that would ask the dumbest question. That's never be me. It is going to be me. So let's just get that set up straight Tim Houlihan 4:15 in advance. Kurt Nelson 4:16 So or if you go, I, you know, can I restate that? We're perfectly fine doing that's a podcast. It's a podcast. We'll do post edit production on things we don't we typically keep the conversation full. We'll take out ums and ahs, but mostly we try to do that unless there is something that you want to removed, or different pieces of that we start with a speed round for questions that coke Pepsi kind of things to start that are pretty easy. Oh, we think they're easy. Sometimes we It feels like we're stumping the guest, and it shouldn't be that way. And then they lead into the book or lead into the content. And then Tim always asks, Colin Fisher 4:58 listen to I listen to head. So, yeah. Horrific Kurt Nelson 5:00 Tim. Tim will always ask some questions, and I always say Tim, even though it's me as as well, and I do know that we have even extra questions on music this time. It's all good. So any questions before we start? Colin Fisher 5:17 No, I think I've seen enough. So you guys the videos mostly for social clips. Or do you post the whole the entire video? Kurt Nelson 5:23 We'll post the whole piece, but mostly it's for the shorter in the shorts, the clips, that's where we get most of those views. The you know, again, it's podcast first. We've been doing this for eight years, and well before we did any video. We've only been doing video for about the past year, because that's what everybody tells us we need to do. So Colin Fisher 5:46 it's been surprising. I think even, even my publicists have been surprised that the percentage of of podcasts that are using the video substantially now it's it, you know, I think we went in thinking it was gonna be like 5050, but it's been like 8020 where, like video, and a lot of them are, I would say probably a third of them, their biggest listenerships on YouTube. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 6:13 where ours is growing up there. It's getting it's growing. It's getting there. And part of what we what, again, the reason, some of the reason behind that, not that you you care, but it's the the algorithms of finding new podcasts. Because there are so many podcasts out there, it's really hard to find new ones. YouTube has a much better again, you you watch a video on behavioral science somewhere, or on Team somewhere, and then this could be in that right hand will show up much more likely than any other way of being. People able to discover podcasts. So Colin Fisher 6:49 interesting, yeah, I mean, I found the whole thing interesting. You know, it's, no, yeah, how, how all this works. It's what, what I do is study other people's work, and I've gotten to study a whole new industry here and how it works. So, yeah, it's been, it's been an interesting ride so far. Tim Houlihan 7:07 Well, good. And you get to live in London? Colin Fisher 7:11 I do. I do. I, you know, living in London is great, although today, you know, we're in a little bit of a heat wave in there, in a country that is not set up for heat. So, yeah, for these podcasts, I've got the like, shades drawn. And, you know, as soon, as soon as we're done with this, like, I'm putting the fan back up and everything else, yeah, take it down there. Actually hiding it is there? Is Tim Houlihan 7:36 there any air conditioning in your in your building, or Colin Fisher 7:39 no. This is just an old, old Victorian house. You know that? Like, there's no, there's no air conditioning in any of these things, wow. I mean, in, in my office, like, if I go into the office, though, there's air conditioning, yeah, okay, yeah. Today, today wasn't a good day. My wife was leaving for a silent retreat, so I wanted to stick around here and say goodbye, but that means I had to do to to this afternoon. Oh, in the home recording studio. Yikes. Okay, yeah, that's That's all right. That's all Kurt Nelson 8:11 right, all right. Well, we appreciate it, and hopefully we conversation won't heat you up too much. So No, no, Colin Fisher 8:17 I'm sure it'll be fine. I have prepared the room, room adequately here. Okay. Kurt Nelson 8:25 All right, we're looking forward to this. So, Tim Houlihan 8:27 okay, yeah, so Okay, anything else? I'll do a count in and we'll, we'll get started. Then Great. All right, okay, with 321, Colin Fisher, welcome to behavioral grooves. Colin Fisher 8:42 Thanks so much Tim. Thanks so much Kurt. It's a pleasure to be here. Tim Houlihan 8:46 It is a pleasure to have you. So let's loosen things up with a little bit of a famous speed round. So first question, would you prefer to learn a new instrument or a new language? Colin Fisher 8:58 Prefer new instrument? No question. What should I do? Is probably a different question. Tim Houlihan 9:04 Okay, well, okay, so can we just spend just a tiny little bit of time setting this up? Because we're gonna, we're gonna have music. You you do play an instrument, or many instruments? Do you play multiple instruments? Colin Fisher 9:17 Now I do so I will let the cat out of the bag here. And I was a professional jazz trumpet player before I got into this whole business school professor author thing. And so I do play other instruments. I would say, the only one I would tell other musicians I play is piano. But I would say, by the standards that I've seen, kind of normal people say they play instruments. I probably meet that standard for a few other instruments as well, but I wouldn't mostly brass instruments. You know, I have a valve trombone. I can make a slide trombone function. You know, it's like anything all the kind. Low brass instruments have the same valve combinations. So I can, I can make a baritone, we do phoneme work. I can get some stuff out on tuba, and it'll sound okay. I can make, make your various saxophones, you know, function like I know what all the buttons do and those kinds of things. So, yeah, I mean, that's what happens when you go to a music school, right? There's, there's, there's a lot of instruments around. There's a lot of people interested in music. And you, you pick up a lot of things by osmosis. Kurt Nelson 10:28 Okay, so you, you said, I, I want to learn I should learn a language, but I want to learn it. So if which instrument would you like to become proficient on, that you could say to other musicians, right? That's what I'm assuming you're saying. Which, which one would that be? It Colin Fisher 10:46 would be bass. So I wish I was a better bass player. So again, I know, like, I know you know what the frets are, and I know what all the strings are supposed to mean, and but I'm not, I'm not great at it, and I teach my 17 year old now, son, piano. And it would be so nice if I could actually play a bass and not just have to kind of plunk out keyboard bass things around I've always wanted bass has always been the one that I think of the rhythm section instruments fits my personality the best. Where interesting Kurt Nelson 11:23 we could it's a speed round tip. I'm sorry Colin Fisher 11:31 we're losing in the speed bar. Kurt Nelson 11:35 That nomenclature is, should you just change? All right? Hopefully this next question doesn't go down the rabbit hole that we just went down with with musical instruments. Here, are you a coffee drinker or a tea drinker? Colin Fisher 11:49 Coffee, okay, okay. Kurt Nelson 11:52 Coffee, good. Living in London. You did not the tea you're Colin Fisher 11:56 I go through. I go through phases. I'll try and get off coffee and drink more tea. And it lasts for a couple months, and then I end up back on coffee. Tim Houlihan 12:06 Why do people say that? Why did like I I, if I could get off coffee, I would drink tea. Or, you know, like, is coffee that I don't drink coffee? Is coffee that addicting? Is it really that hard to stop drinking? I see here's here's mine. Kurt, this is full of water. Is it? Would it be hard to stop? Colin Fisher 12:30 It's not that hard. I only have one, one cup of coffee a day. But it's it, you know, I like it. I like it. I in, you know, I this is probably the most embarrassing thing, I'll admit. So I'm I drink a mocha every morning, and I put, like, a bunch of chocolate in it. So the reason it's hard to get off is you can't put a bunch of chocolate and tea. Tim Houlihan 12:56 Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay, agree or disagree. This is the third speed round question, agree or disagree. More, workplaces should let people jam like jazz bands. Kurt Nelson 13:10 Yeah, agree, agree, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, we're, we'll talk about that. Colin Fisher 13:16 Trying to keep trying to keep to the speed round. Sorry, no, no, that's supposed to elaborate Kurt Nelson 13:20 there, here, here is, here is the last of our so called Speed Round questions. How do you know if you're a member of Stratus or just sitting in Colin Fisher 13:33 well, they they tell you, either they pay you for the gig or they don't pay you for the gig. Kurt Nelson 13:38 So this was a little snippet for our listeners. This was a little snippet. Little snippet from the book, and it's a wonderful little story, and I hopefully we'll get there and talk about that, because it is. It's about, how do you define who's on your team and what is a team in various different pieces? But you know, we're speaking with Colin Fisher about his new book, The collective edge, and I wanted to start, he started the book off with this Harry Potter, you know, asking like, who's the villain in Harry Potter? And it's not Lord vorder mode. I can't even say his name, right? It's the man name, yeah. You say it's somebody else. Can you tell us who you say? Who is the real villain? Colin Fisher 14:29 So the real villain of Harry Potter isn't Lord Voldemort, and I'm not afraid to say his name. I don't know, yeah, but it's, it's it's the sorting hat. And I say it's a sorting hat because you've got this object that's taking 11 year olds and telling them, I'm going to read your mind and I'm going to put you into these groups that nobody ever leaves, nobody ever escapes these categorizations. That they're put into. And then there are, you know, spoilers for Harry Potter, but there's two wars that kind of bookend the the story. And the dividing lines for this war were drawn by this sorting hat right there. And so it's like, yeah, we can we can blame the particular person who, kind of, you know, was the match that set off the fire, but you're creating a big pile of kindling. If you're creating groups of this strength that then go around and they compete against each other, they, you know, are being encouraged by everyone to, you know, compete and insult each other and do all these things, which we know as behavioral scientists are really, really dangerous things to be doing. Tim Houlihan 15:50 Yeah, so, so tell us how this, how does this metaphor play out in the book? How do it when it comes to group identities, especially, Colin Fisher 16:00 yeah, I mean, we're constantly our behavior is informed by group identities, both, you know, groups that were are we're in the presence of, and groups that we just imagine being in the presence of. And that's what this idea of identity is, that we, we are, compose big parts of ourselves with these group identities. And they can be these broad social categories, like Americans or Harry Potter fans or whatever it is, or they can be much smaller groups, like our family, like our friend group, or, you know, our work teams or organizations. And that the differences, the differences in the dynamics of all these groups, are kind of invisibly shaping our behavior in ways that we systematically ignore, and we're actually shockingly careless about how we let those dynamics push us around. And so what I'm trying to get at in the book is to say like these, we know something about group dynamics and how systematic they are, and we know something about the conditions that allow us to not directly control all of them, but at least tame them and stop them from running amok in the way the kind of sorting hat puts everybody into groups and then lets it go. And you know, actually what happens is something that social science says, Yeah, that might be what happens if you just don't pay attention to group dynamics Kurt Nelson 17:37 you set it up for failure. Is you're looking at this, one of the things that you talk about there, that I thought was really interesting is this idea that throughout and again, we'll use the Harry Potter books as reference. Nobody switches houses in Harry Potter there is like you are, you are slithering, or you are, I forget even what the other ones are, right? But you become whatever that the Sorting Hat puts you into without changing, which isn't really how we work in the real world, because we do, you know, move or change and shift, particularly as you were talking about some of the different elements within there. How does that play into this? Is that, is it a good thing that we can shift and move, or should we be more consistent? I'm American, therefore I'm an American, and I'm always gonna be an American, right? Colin Fisher 18:32 So I think it's good that we can shift and move, and it's good that we have from a perspective of we all have multiple identities, and the idea that we just have this one single identity that guides our behavior, from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, from the time we're 18 all the way till time we die, that's illusory, right, that we don't have One single identity, and it's more accurate to think of your identities as a network, just kind of like a social network, where you have relationships between your different identities. Some of them enhance one another. Some of them might contradict one another. Some of them can be marshaled in certain situations the same way you'd call up help and advice from from a certain group of people in your life. In one situation when you need to move, move from one house to another, there's one set of friends you'd call when you you know you break up with your significant other. There's a different network of people you'd call and or maybe it's the same for you guys, but that you know these and so we call upon these identities that most of them refer to groups, they refer refer to other groups of people. And that thinking about that identity, then you know, we. We're shifting during the day, during our lives, between actually being amongst these different people. And you know, when we wake up, we're with our friends or family, our roommates or our family. And you know that kind of takes on one set of roles. So when I wake up here, you know, I'm very much my father, my husband. Identities are most evoked. And I'll tell you, my teenage children treat me a lot differently than my PhD students when I'm at work and I'm the professor, right, like, right? And that the way I think of myself and the way I interact is quite a bit different, right? That for some reason, my teenage children are a bit less deferential to me than are my, you know, students who are, you know, looking to me for my expertise, and, you know, paying to be there and learning something from me. Whereas, yeah, we have to work real hard to get your kids to take take the same level. So, you know, these we just take them for granted, right? That that's not an extraordinary story for anyone. And yet, you know, we talk as if, yeah, we have this single identity. We have one way that it's influencing us, and we're really overlooking how different it is just based on who else is around you, that we can behave totally, totally differently from situation to situation, and a lot of that is down to grooves. Tim Houlihan 21:32 Yeah. So, okay, so the book really is about the edge that you get by being part of a collective, by being a part of a group, and you structure the book on six conditions that you use to promote effective cooperation. I'm just going to rattle through them, just so that our listeners know that it's composition, goals, tasks, norms, psychological safety and coaching. Do you have a favorite? Do you have is there? Is there a part of this that you go, man, if it just wasn't for this? This is the this is the catalyst. This is the fulcrum that everything rests on. Kurt Nelson 22:05 But we know this is like trying to pick a favorite child. So, but, but do you have, like a favorite Colin Fisher 22:13 so the the favorite and most influential are probably exactly opposite for me. Oh yeah, great. Okay, let's hear it. So my, my doctoral dissertation was on the timing of team coaching interventions. So everything for me, you know, I was very focused on coaching, and especially, there's kind of a like improvisational element to coaching, where people are observing what's going on in the group and figuring out the right moments to act and how to insert themselves in this and so I find that fascinating. It's kind of what got me into loving groups, is this kind of real time interaction, how people are reading one another's behavior and figuring out what they're going to do based on what the other people are going to do, learning more about it. However, team coaching is really important, but that it's almost entirely subordinate to the other five conditions there where, you know, if you mess up any of those other five, it's really hard for team coaching to make a difference. And so, you know, and that as I've tried to help more teams and organizations tried to help students, you know, work with better teams, the stuff that people get wrong is much more frequently on the list of especially what I call the the elements of team structure, which were the first four things that you talk about, the composition, the task, the goals and the norms. And so those, those are the things that I would say people are the invisible factors that people don't realize they're getting wrong. I think it's a lot easier to kind of notice once you know what psychological safety is, which is this shared sense that it's okay to take interpersonal risks, that I can ask questions when I don't know something, I can, you know, make a mistake and admit that mistake, and try and admit that I'm learning from it. You know, these kinds of interpersonal risks, those things tend to be evident once people are aware of them, whereas the influence of the structural factors when we've got a team that's not quite composed right, that doesn't have the right norms, that's got a task that isn't well suited to a group, or the goals aren't as as well defined or shared as we might think, those things tend to be much more invisible and that we don't notice them as quickly. And so it takes more more of this kind of effort and raising people's awareness of them as these hugely influential factors to get people to really look at them, see. Seriously, Kurt Nelson 25:00 let's dig into that, because I found that to be one of the most insightful things. From my perspective, we've done a lot of work with teams and leaders and different things, but as a leader, you actually brought in a you shared a study that somebody did, and I forgive me, I don't remember who it was, where they were looking at teams and their performance, and then they'd ask the team members, should we change the members of the team? Should we, you know, the process of the team, or should we change the structure? And it was like the processes were and the team members, but then the structure was never really it was like a really low percentage of people who said that, and that was indeed, you know, the thing that was probably going to make the biggest difference. And I just difference. And I just it hit me as why is it that it's so hard for even team members, but particularly leaders, to really think about that structure, the composition part, the, you know, the goals, those things, as opposed to some of the other factors, because we know, I mean, leaders have tried to change their teams and to get them to perform better, you know, for millennia, and we're not doing a good job of it. Colin Fisher 26:14 Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I think there's two reasons. So first, I'll give credit to Michael Johnson and his colleagues at University of Washington for for that clever study that they did. Yeah. And I think there's, there's kind of two reasons why the result when you, you give people this case of a troubled, struggling team, and say, Okay, what do you want to change? Yeah. And I think it was 84% of people tried to intervene in the process of the team. Yeah, now, in a way, that's very understandable, because team process is what we see right when we're when we're a member of a team, you can see, you know, are people trying as hard as they can? Are there coordination problems? Is there dysfunctional conflict in the team? And those are all elements of process, and that's the stuff that's very, very visible to us on a moment to moment basis. And I draw the analogy to, you know, when, when we have a cold, right? We see symptoms. First, you see that we have a runny nose. You see that you're coughing. But you know, we we've advanced in medicine far enough that we don't treat a runny nose by, you know, jamming as much tissue up our noses as we possibly can to, like, Damn Damn it, right? That's, we know that's not the way we do it, right? We want to treat the underlying cause of this, which is generally some kind of virus in our system and but we don't do the same thing with teams that we see these symptoms, we see these runny noses, and people run off to just treat the symptom. And of course, you know it's it's fine to treat symptoms, like when you treat the symptoms of a cold, it makes you feel better, right? That's that, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem. And those things tend to be hidden. They tend to, tend to be things that we can't see as easily, and for a lot of team members, they're often things that may be harder to change, that, especially team composition, that that feels like something that may be out of our control. The task you know, especially if it's given from from, you know, your leaders, or a higher level of the organization, you may not feel like you have full control over what task we're charged with, what goal we were given, who's on this team, and so it feels like we don't have that control. And so I think people then turn to something that feels easier for them to handle, which is directly trying to intervene in the process. Tim Houlihan 28:40 But why is structure so important to the team? Why does that actually the most influential element? Colin Fisher 28:49 So structure causes process that that the and this is, I think, where a lot of mistakes in how teams are LED and and especially in the kind of like team building industrial complex makes this mistake of thinking like process alone causes different aspects of team effectiveness. But it's more like, you know, by so my mentor, Richard Hackman, I'm gonna throw, throw a like $20 word in here, used to call process epiphenomenal, to team performance and that. And what that means is basically structure is causing performance, and process happens to come along for the ride. It happens too at the same time, but it doesn't have this direct causal relationship. Now I think that's too strong of a statement, honestly, especially as somebody who has come to love studying team coaching and improvisation, the process plays an important role, but that when you pit process against structure, structure always wins. That like if it's an arm wrestling match, structure is just much, much stronger. So if you have a team that you know has unclear goals, and like all members, don't understand the goal the same way. And so let's say our goal is we're, we're supposed to get to so I'm going to give you a kind of a vague goal. We're kind of, we're supposed to get to California. Okay, okay, let's go to California. Great. We're all going to get there. Are we all going to get there in the same place at the same time? No, we're not going to do that, right? And that's why vague goals are going to prevent coordination. Because if we're not going to the same place, of course, we're not going to act in ways that get us to the same place that we're going to end up in two different places and and so like seeing, Oh, there's a bunch of coordination problems. Well, yeah, if you don't have clear goals, if people don't understand why those goals are important, they're probably not going to work that hard. And so you need to articulate these things in order for people to do the things they need to do as team members. And it's the same for tasks that we know a lot about what makes work motivating, that we need to see the results of our own labor, that we can't be feeling like we're working on a task that we're never going to see the results of. So like, if you're on a committee that's tasked with writing a report, but then that report kind of vanishes into the ether at the upper levels of the organization, and you don't know what happens as a result of it. Well, guess what? People aren't going to be very motivated to do that work, and that's not because Pete The humans are unmotivated. That's not because they're not being coached or LED inadequately. It's because they don't understand why the work they're doing is important, and they they're not going to see the results of it. And so these, you know, if we kind of go one by one through all these elements of structure, you can see why when they're absent, we're going to have either problems with effort or problems with coordination, and that's going to cause process problems that's going to then those process problems are going to invite in the kinds of dysfunctional interpersonal conflict we have, because it sucks to be a part of a team that's not performing well, and just no wonder we start to blame one another and get annoyed with one another when things aren't going well, But then we go back to treating the runny nose of the team, and we don't actually look back to say, Wait a minute. Do we really have the same goal in mind? Do we actually know why we're here? Do we know why it's important? Does everyone you know play an important role in getting this done? And then we and then, you know, we have have all these problems. Kurt, Tim Houlihan 32:39 if you wouldn't mind, I'd just like to follow up on that with we Colin, you've been using the term teams a lot, and you have some very specific ideas about what a team is versus just a group of people. And could you just spend just a minute describing what you mean specifically by a team? How do you define a real team. Colin Fisher 33:02 So a real team, and I use the definition that my my mentor, Richard Hackman, made, you know, almost ubiquitous in this literature, which is a small group of interdependent people working toward a shared goal. And so real teams got to be small enough where we know everybody we're working working with. And, you know, we can get into exactly how small that should be, but I'm recommending you have three to seven people, or ideally 4.5 if you can find that point five person out there somewhere and and that they gotta be interdependent, meaning that the work I'm doing affects the work that you're doing, and that you might depend on me to do what you're doing. And that we have to have a shared goal, right? That we have to be working towards some some end that we all in this team agree is where we're trying to Tim Houlihan 34:00 get to, yeah, so, so it's fair to say that there's, there's a common use of the word teams to often refer to people who are basically all doing the same job for a whole bunch of different reasons that are not interdependent and and of varying degrees and sizes. We're talking here about a group of interdependent people that know what each other's doing and have that sense of cohesive goal and sure goal that thank you for that. Colin Fisher 34:27 Yeah, absolutely. So it's more the, you know, the jazz bands and the basketball teams that fit this definition of a real team, where you have, you know, not maybe call centers are going to be a thing of the past year pretty soon. But you know, if you have a group of people who are answering customer service calls, but they're all doing it individually, they don't depend on one another, you're just calling them a team to kind of, you know, give the illusion that they're more cohesive than they are. That's not, not what I mean by real team. Kurt Nelson 34:57 It's not the HR department. Know, the accounting department or team, or the sales team that is not doing collective sales, but independent sales. But they're, they're in a geographic region that's not necessarily the type of team that you're you're talking about, right? Colin Fisher 35:13 That That's right. But I also think it's not super helpful to, you know, draw a very clear line in the sand between these are teams and these are not teams that, in the book, I talk about the idea of groupiness, that we go from being these social categories, like Americans, like Harry Potter, fans like, you know, jugglers that are not not interdependent. They're not small groups, right? They're not nearly these real teams. And those are the kind of least groupy groups, these social, social categories, and the most groupie groups are these real teams, like your basketball team, like your bands, things like that, and but that there's a lot of room in between those two things, and that there's a lot of fluidity as well, that we can be part of. You know, what I would usually call a co acting group, like in this call center, but we could, you know, for a moment, maybe there's a crisis, and we come together, and the real team kind of briefly emerges out of this CO acting group. And so I think it's more helpful to kind of think in terms of the when we want to solve really important problems. Real teams are perhaps humanity's best tool for solving those problems that the great discoveries, the great businesses, the you know, the bands, the sports teams, the movies, almost everything that we love in the world was created by real teams. And yet, you know, and so when we have groups that are not as groupy as a real team, we usually want to be nudging them towards being groupier and being more like these real things. Kurt Nelson 37:03 Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna double down on that, because, you know, you also talk about this myth of the lone genius, right? It's actually your first chapter in this. And so you're talking about all these great things, like the best solution to many of the problems of today are, are going to be solved by teams and not by that lone genius. And yet, it feels like, and you bring up some some different statistics and various different things, that as a, as a society, as a, as a, almost a global world, we're moving, it feels like we're moving away from groups and more into individualism. Did I get that right? Colin Fisher 37:43 Yeah. I mean, it's, it's this bizarre contradiction, in a way, that by any measure, teams are making more of the good stuff in the world than ever before, that they're six times more likely to have patents, and those patents are likely to be far more influential. They're, you know, it's almost you can't even start a business without having a team. They have, like dating sites now for entrepreneurs to make sure that they like, form a team before they go out looking for funding. Like, it's like, not even allowed for you to like, seek, seek external funding now as an individual, and that is because there, there's been a lot of evidence that you, you know, no one person has the necessary knowledge, skills and and, you know, bandwidth to for make a huge, profitable business. You know, that's really tough. Everybody, everybody's got a team. And yet, despite this increasing dominance of team in the teams in the production of you know, almost everything. We also see trends towards rising individualism around the world. That people have this belief more now than ever, that, you know, we're not all in it together, that it's, you know, every person for himself, that we're all very unique, and that we, all you know, don't depend on one another, and that no matter what measure you look at of individualism, and surprisingly, no matter what country you look at, so even in you know, countries that we usually think of as being what we would call more collectivistic countries, usually, China is the kind of one that's held up as the prototype of a more collectivistic society, where people believe that their immediate families, friends, communities, are more of a part of their self than we do say in the United States. But even in those collectivistic countries, individualism is on the rise, and so we just see this global trend towards more and more individualism, but in a way, that belief isn't quite right, and that's that's one of the things I'm really trying to do in this book, is to say, like we're living in what I would call the age of individualism, that there's never been a more individual. Dualistic time to be alive than right now, and yet the problems that we're facing inherently require crossing group boundaries. They're going to require expertise that crosses nations, that crosses functions, that crosses organizations. And this individualism, to me, seems to be really standing in the way, because we're starting to all, you know, consume stuff that's saying, well, let's make myself better. I'm gonna, you know, have read this book and it's going to help me be a better me, and then maybe indirectly, they'll make the world a better place, because I'm a better me. But we don't directly, sort of intervene and saying, Well, how can we be a better we and and that there's so much less attention being paid to that right now. Tim Houlihan 40:49 I just want to stop right there that like that was just so beautifully, really, was. Colin, I love Colin Fisher 40:55 that. Thank you. I Kurt Nelson 41:00 well with that though, Colin, yeah, Tim Houlihan 41:01 I'm really, I just, I'm just, I'm sorry, I'm just, Kurt Nelson 41:07 Tim is lost for words, which doesn't happen very often. Really good. But in the book Colin, you do talk about how that teams or groups are our humanity superpower, but you also talk about how they can be the source for evil, right? That, that we do get the in you. You bring up some of the the collectivism and various different pieces and the conformity that comes with, you know, this aspect, kind of that whole second section of your book. So can you talk a little bit about how they can be our greatest asset, and yet they can still be some of the negative draw that we have as well. Yeah. Colin Fisher 41:48 I mean, anything that's worth studying for your whole life probably has to have a little bit of paradox in it, right? Yeah, there's got to be, there's got to be some like contradiction there. And that, you know, on some level, like groups themselves are a little bit of a contradiction, because, you know, like, if we really wanted the, like, best, most effective groups, like the the there's, there's other organisms on Earth that do this really well, and they, were do teamwork to the extreme, and there are things like ants or bees, right? And but that they lose completely the individualism and the value of each in each unique individual. And any conflict between individual needs and collective needs is solved in favor of the collective when you're in these, like, very extreme, you know, collectivistic species. Now humans aren't that way, right? Like, we don't want to live in a world where every time there's a conflict between individual and collective needs, we resolve it in favor of the collective. You know, that's like the most dystopian movies of this Kurt Nelson 43:01 kind that you mentioned, and yeah, the board, Colin Fisher 43:05 you are the collective. You're the high Yeah, and yeah, and star Kurt, like, we find that really frightening, that aspect of of teamwork, especially, I think, in individualistic societies where, you know, like, a lot of this stuff came out of the Cold War, when you know, there was explicit conflict with more collectivistic societies and economic model of communism. So there's this kind of, like latent fear of collectivism, but there's some truth in that, right? Like, we don't want to live in a world that's pure collectivism. We don't want to be ants, we don't want to be the Borg. We want to be something else, and yet, in a group, we do need some little bit of conformity pressure, which can be healthy. That says we're going to go along to get along. Sometimes we're not. Every time we disagree with the collective, we're not going to all voice that every single time or, you know, agitate to get our way anytime the groups deviating from our individual preferences, that would be bad, right? That would that would not be a good world to live in anyway. So there's this kind of inherent paradox where we need conformity pressure, like social peer pressure is part of what makes groups good. Sometimes it makes us better versions of ourselves when we join really productive groups that we want, that we want to be held to a standard that's not just being in it for ourselves, that's really being there for other people, being a good citizen of some kind of community, and that that's that's positive. We want that, but that that same tendency, that conformity pressure can lead to disaster. And that's what, you know, the so kind of a behind the scenes thing. The when I wrote the proposal for this book, my agent felt very strongly it needed to be called group think. Two words Wow, and yeah, and that, you know, that's obviously a plus. On groupthink, which is this extreme conformity pressure one word that led to these disastrous decisions, where conformity pressure was suppressing dissent. It was people not sharing their real opinions, not saying what they know, and so the group couldn't take advantage of all the resources that they have available, they end up making bad decisions, like the Bay of Pigs invasion, like the Ford Pinto, like the Challenger disaster, like New Coke and that. There's so many of these, these examples that are out there where we have some evidence that, like this, conformity pressure in decision making rooms was leading, leading us to just disastrous outcomes for the world or for a company. Yeah, because I'm putting new coke on the same level as these. Kurt Nelson 45:50 Come on, New Coke was a move for the long, long haul. Colin Fisher 45:57 Yeah, it's coming around now. Yeah, all right. Tim Houlihan 46:00 I want to loop back to something Kurt teed up in the speed round, and that was, you attend, you go to a jazz club, and you sometimes sit in with a band, and sometimes people come up to you at the end of the night, go, oh, man, you're you guys are fantastic, addressing you collectively and like, you know, how long have you been a part of this group kind of thing? And you're like, I'm not a part of this group. Tell us about that. What differentiates, how do you identify, or how, what is it that creates a sense of belonging to that group, versus just, I'm sitting in Colin Fisher 46:36 belonging to a group, right? Is almost entirely a psychological construct. And so you belong to a group when you think you do and everyone else agrees with you. There's two sides to that, yes, yeah, and, but I mean, you know, we can have that sense of belonging without everyone else agreeing, right that we certainly can claim identities, claim group memberships without anyone else's consent, and that can inform our behavior just as much as anything else. The point I like about jam sessions where so if you've never been to a jazz jam, first, what are you doing with your life? But second, yeah, what that, you know, people just, you show up, you get on stage, we play, you know, music from kind of a standard repertoire that we all know and and so, you know, we don't have to rehearse. We don't have to have ever met. We don't, in some cases, even have to speak the same language, you know, as long as you know what you know, autumn leaves. I can just say autumn leaves and the way we go. So, you know, this is this great kind of moment of, there are these temporary groups, kind of forming and unforming, and yet there's, usually, there's a house band that's being paid to be there, and that that's an actual band, right? That they, they have, they know who's a member of that band and who's not a member of that band, but that from the outside, when people are kind of coming in and out like this, you can't necessarily tell so, especially people who kind of come, you know, they're not there at the beginning, and then they show up, and I'm already on stage and I'm playing, and I stay there, you know, often for, for quite a long time. So it's like, well, being a member of a group isn't this objective thing that observers get to decide. I don't get to decide whether you are or not a member of that group. That's something that ideally is something that we're negotiating that, like, if I wanted to be a member of the house band, I would have to talk to them, and they'd have to agree with that. And and so that that's really the point I was trying to make there, is that, like a lot of people think, oh, groups are what they appear to me to be, and that there, there's a lot of, really dysfunctional things happening in the world today, from people saying that observers get to decide whether you are or not a part of the group, rather than it being a negotiation between the person and the incumbent members, and that when observers get To decide, we get all kinds of sort of coercive, dysfunctional dynamics going on that are not really how group membership works, right? That these kind of psychological concepts that we have to negotiate between us, it's interesting Kurt Nelson 49:36 too, because you also bring up this idea of out groups, right? And particularly in today, you bring on in some research that shows, hey, the way that we get likes or views on social media is not by pulling in people and saying, Hey, here's all the great things that my in group does. And again. And we can think political parties or, you know, even just whatever little subset of those that you have, but it is really about, you know, who is the out group, and really focusing on the hate that you can focus in there is that part of this too, is what you're saying is like you're defining the other group, even though you're not part of them, and that it just spurs some of that, that hate and the attention, or am I conflating the two things? Yeah. Colin Fisher 50:27 I mean, I think that the two are definitely related. And I think you're, you're talking about some great research from Jay van Bavel and his colleagues that is about, you know, social media and out group hate, and how animosity towards our group. So saying, you know, I'm outraged because, you know, the the other political party is doing X, Y and Z, that for the first time now, will get you more attention than saying, Hey, we accomplished this great thing in my political party, and isn't that wonderful? So that, if we compare these kind of in group love and out group hate, out group hate on social media is what's getting people ahead, now more than ever. And that that that trend, unfortunately, at least the last time we I saw data about it looks like it's accelerating. So this, this idea, I think, does play out sometimes, when people are interacting and they take a little snippet of somebody's belief, right, and say, Oh, you must be, you know, member of political party I don't like, or you're one of us, and they're taking, you know, little bits of beliefs and bundling them into one big identity. And I think the rise of polarization, especially in the US, is that, you know, it used to be okay to kind of have pluralistic attitude, or pluralistic in the sense of different kinds of different opinions on different issues, and that they didn't all have to conform just sort of one political hegemony that bundles all of them together. And I took the example in the book of when Tucker Carlson was criticizing the change of footwear on Eminem's spokes candies. So there was this whole kerfuffle online where, you know, people were up in arms that now the some of the Eminem's weren't wearing high heels and go go boots anymore and that. But then that became a proxy for political beliefs, like, what side of that issue you were on now, said, You know that implied your, are you one of us? Are you one of them? And that increasingly, on social media, like every single opinion start, has started to have this character where we start to bundle beliefs and enforce conformity within the group, and that that happens that there's more enforced conformity when we feel like we're in a hot conflict with the other group, and that that's a that's actually a very robust psychological finding when there's inter group conflict. We, you know, we enforce conformity within our group, and we also perceive more commonality or homogeneity among the out group, that we stop seeing people in the out group as individuals. We view them all as more alike than we do when we're not in this conflict. And both of those things are big problems. Kurt Nelson 53:32 Yeah, the out group becomes the Borg, and then we, you know, we are the good people coming together, and we have a whole bunch of more questions. But I know Tim is, is aching to get down to into some jazz conversation. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna let him go and Colin Fisher 53:51 talk about clear the floor and let him solo. Yeah, clear the floor, Kurt Nelson 53:55 everybody. We're gonna get a, we're gonna get a deep dive here into some music, uh, history. Tim Houlihan 54:01 Well, you talk about kind of blue, Miles Davis is 1959 classic that if you haven't listened to Miles Davis on kind of blue, you have to go out and do it right now. You just put, put down the damn podcast and listen to kind of blue, but you talk about it as you know, as an example of synergy, of this exemplar team of experts coming through what what can we what can leaders take away from this? What's the lesson for for leaders when it comes to leading teams, especially, Colin Fisher 54:35 one of the most important points is, again, in the structure and in the the composition of the team in the first place. So now, you know, people think of miles Davis's, you know, sort of kind of blew the late 1950s band as an obvious band to have assembled. But at the time this, this was kind of a crazy band to have assembled that, you know. Miles, Miles's style and, you know, the terror saxophonist John Coltrane, their style could not be more different, wildly different. Yeah, that they're, they're at polar opposites, and that, you know, some of the other musicians, like Cannonball wilderly, like Wynton Kelly, were known for much more of a kind of bluesy style that, like, is almost on a completely different axis of comparison than the like continuum between miles and John Coltrane. And so the bringing this particular group of people together and then not doing songs that were in the style that any of them had been doing. So say, you know, that what was popular, kind of, leading up to this was either, you know, Bebop was still strongly associated with jazz, which tends to be really fast tempos and there's a lot of different chords coming at you in quick succession, or, you know, kind of more bluesy revivals, which was called hard bop at the time and then, but in kind of blue, they just play like one chord forever, and it's just, you know, all right, we're not doing we're not doing fast tempos, we're not doing a bunch of different chords. We're not going to, you know, do these traditional blues that have the kind of, you know, shuffly Groovy feel that we're used to and that we're going to have this kind of, you know, collection of contrasts all come and do that and that, when we look at what made this synergistic in some ways, you know, it's all of these things. It's these things about the structure. It's who we got into the room. It's the task that we ask them to do. And there's a lot I could also say about, like, the norms that, you know, maybe get into the weeds a little bit too much for behavioral science podcasts rather than the music podcast, but maybe, maybe we can keep talking about that after we're done. Tim Houlihan 56:54 I think we could do that. Yes, yeah, I'd like to talk more about Freddie the freeloader and flamenco sketches and those guys as well. But for the time being, we want to say a big thank you to you. Colin Fisher, thanks for being a guest on behavior grooves. Thanks so Colin Fisher 57:11 much. It's been so fun. Really fun. Thanks for having me. Tim Houlihan 57:16 We'll end there. We will end there. Kurt Nelson 57:20 Tim, yeah, okay. Further, I thought for sure you were gonna dig in and like, well, that man, sorry, we took up too much time otherwise. So yeah, Tim Houlihan 57:30 and you've got two more of these today. Is that right? Colin Fisher 57:33 No, so this was the second today. Oh, Speaker 1 57:36 okay, Colin Fisher 57:38 yeah, so yeah, Kurt Nelson 57:40 we're wrapping it up. Yeah, there you go. Okay, yeah, Colin Fisher 57:43 no. Well, it's, it's, you know, they're all late because, you know, most are US based, and my time overlap with, with the US is Tim Houlihan 57:51 usually in my late afternoons, yeah, yeah, okay, Colin Fisher 57:55 all right, yeah. So it's, yeah, it's, that's part of the reason why they're so clustered is because, like, I only, you know, I'm trying not to do these, like, going into the night more often than I have to. And, yeah, and that that does, that gives me kind of a narrow window, especially for people who are on the West Coast, you know, there's like, one, one or two hours that we can have a overlap in the workday with, with West Coast based ones, Tim Houlihan 58:20 yeah. Well, go ahead. Oh, Kurt Nelson 58:23 I just, I do want to say I was, we get to see a lot of books. We, we, you know, and I was really, really enthralled with yours. I think you bring in a great number of wonderful research to back up. But you also tell the stories, and you have the great analogies of all of this stuff, and it comes out really well. I have to say, I do want to start a workshop though, on the leadership of turtles. Said that I was like, Oh yes, I you know that. Oh, the jazz, the jazz, it was great. It was good to me. But I didn't really learn anything new. I could have been leadership of turtles. And I'm going, Yeah, I love the leadership of turtles. Colin Fisher 59:10 I know Well, believe it or not, I presented that at a conference as, like, opening so, so I was part of an it was in the symposium called the leadership lessons from unusual places. Okay, it was going to be about jazz, but I as a joke, started with the leadership lessons from turtles, and then into the jazz. So, yeah, there's an actual Academy of Management Conference where that's, and I think it's probably, it's probably in the proceedings somewhere that we can, we can cite and pretend to science, yeah, I want Tim Houlihan 59:48 to start a workshop called entity just, just for the sake of having the word Colin Fisher 59:55 Yeah, I know I got, I could, I could not believe that's what they decided to call it when I got. Out into the field. It's like everyone just hates, you know, stuff that anybody's gonna be able to understand intuitively in group. I think groups, you know, groups, had like, an inferiority complex at the beginning, and so they were, like, dressing up all this terminology to sound as sciencey as they could. Yeah, like getting all this complex terminology, and it's like, man, you, you're shooting yourself in the foot, in the long run, Tim Houlihan 1:00:29 that they are. Colin, I have a I have a favor to ask Kurt, and I have been bootstrapping this for this podcast for eight years and 500 episodes and and so. And it's, we love it, right? But we do not have a big promotional budget, and we're wondering if you would be okay with just providing a little testimonial, a little Hi, I'm Colin Fisher, this is why you should, should listen to behavioral grooves kind of kind of thing. Could you, would you be okay with just shooting something off the hip right now? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, look at Yo, yeah, good with the light? Okay, yeah, Colin Fisher 1:01:10 no, I Well, the lights are hot. That's why I keep turning Yeah, no, just turning them off. Yeah, I can kind of see I'm shining a little too shiny. All right, so what? Where do you want me to start it? Oh, just whatever. Tim Houlihan 1:01:22 Well, it's your thing, yeah, okay, you would start it with something. I thought, Well, I mean, you know, Hi, I'm Colin Fisher. I'm, you know, credential, yeah, whatever. Colin Fisher 1:01:35 Hi, I'm Colin Fisher. I'm an associate professor of organizations and Innovation at University College London, and offer and author of the collective edge unlocking the secret power of grooves. And I love behavioral grooves. This was such a fun conversation that Tim and Kurt bring behavioral science to life with a sense of humor, and it's one of the most engaging podcasts I've been a part of. They're great conversations every time, with great guests. And if you're not listening, what are you doing with your life? Kurt Nelson 1:02:10 Love it. Tim Houlihan 1:02:12 I like the default. What are you Kurt Nelson 1:02:17 doing with your life? Behavioral grooves, you Yeah, are you even really alive? Because obviously, Tim Houlihan 1:02:27 I just moved to Chapel Hill, and like, one of the first things I was looking for is, where are there? There's plenty of bluegrass around, but where is there? Where's the good jazz? And it's been, it's been a little more difficult to find than I had hoped. But, Colin Fisher 1:02:42 yeah, that's funny. I've never, I've never given it too much thought. I never played, played in Chapel Hill. And, yeah, I can't usually, usually, when you say something, I can at least come up with like, a person or two who is like, oh, there's so and so around there. And they'd know, yeah, now that you say it, it's like, Who do I know in North Carolina who's into jazz? And it's like, not so sure? Tim Houlihan 1:03:08 Well, you here's a here's a little jazz reference. You might know the Dakota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So a fantastic legacy Club's been around for 40 some years. Lowell pick Pickett, who was the founder, is celebrating his 80th birthday. And there's, they're planning a big celebration in in Minneapolis, and it's a, honestly, I've seen some of the most amazing shows in a, in a, you know, a club that's, you know, on a big night, it's 250 people on regular nights, 110 or so. And it's just really cool that for all these years, they've been able to support, you know, everything you know, from cannonball add early to Pat Matheny to God. You know, the number of acts that I've seen there is pretty amazing. So Colin Fisher 1:03:59 that's amazing. That's great, yeah, been there. That's great. So it sounds like you're a pretty big jazz fan from, from, oh, Tim Houlihan 1:04:09 not like you, you know, I mean, it Kurt Nelson 1:04:14 was my job, yeah? But Tim, Tim, is it a how do you Americana is? Yes, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, Colin Fisher 1:04:24 yeah, transpose across genres too. So big bill for Zell fan then and that guy or not, Tim Houlihan 1:04:31 yeah, yeah for sure, yeah, but the Colin Fisher 1:04:35 Americana jazz overlap Tim Houlihan 1:04:38 and there, yeah, does that fantastic. And of course, then I don't know. And all of the I was listening to Lee written our last night, actually. So like, the guys that that sort of took jazz and brought it into rock, you know, especially like Steely Dan and people like that, you know that that's pretty great. Larry Carlson, you know, man, yeah, it's great stuff. But no, I'm mostly Americana guy. I produced and recorded records under my name, just as a, you know, with a folk base, basically, Colin Fisher 1:05:11 oh, is that? Is that where the podcast gets its name in part from, Tim Houlihan 1:05:15 no, no, not if he has Kurt. Kurt Nelson 1:05:22 Behavior in the grooves of our habits and routines. You know that of being in a groove and your Colin Fisher 1:05:30 artwork as has the record right Kurt Nelson 1:05:35 behind you, Tim, you're Oh, Tim Houlihan 1:05:37 well, this. I think actually that was a, that was a show. I don't have the, I don't have the records are on that side. Yeah, so I haven't, haven't figured out where all this stuff is going to go here. But yeah, anyway, thank you, yeah, Colin, Colin Fisher 1:05:58 thank you guys. Yeah, it was super fun. Transcribed by https://otter.ai