The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
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“I mean, I remember that it happened,” Dean told me. “But to be completely honest, it didn’t register strongly in my memory because it didn’t feel like that big of a deal. It didn’t feel special or different. It was normal. That kind of thing happened all the time.”
It was normal. Google personnel were interacting exactly as the kindergartners in the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge interacted. They did not manage their status or worry about who was in charge. Their small building produced high levels of proximity and face-to-face interaction. Page’s technique of igniting whole-group debates around solving tough problems sent a powerful signal of identity and connection, as did the no-holds-barred hockey games and wide-open Friday forums. (Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure.) They communicated in short, direct bursts. (Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.) Google was a hothouse of belonging cues; its people worked shoulder to shoulder and safely connected, immersed in their projects. Overture, despite its head start and their billion-dollar war chest, was handicapped by bureaucracy. Decision making involved innumerable meetings and discussions about technical, tactical, and strategic matters; everything had to be approved by multiple committees. Overture’s belonging scores would likely have been low. “It was a clusterfuck,” one employee told Wired magazine. Google didn’t win because it was smarter. It won because it was safer. *1
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Let’s take a closer look at how belonging cues function in your brain. Say I give you a moderately tricky puzzle where the goal is to arrange colors and shapes on a map. You can work on it as long as you like. After explaining the task, I leave you to your work. Two minutes later I pop back in and hand you a slip of paper with a handwritten note. I tell you that the note is from a fellow participant named Steve, whom you’ve never met. “Steve did the puzzle earlier and wanted to share a tip with you,” I say. You read the tip and get back to work. And that’s when everything changes.
Without trying, you start working harder on the puzzle. Areas deep in your brain begin to light up. You are more motivated—twice as much. You work more than 50 percent longer, with significantly more energy and enjoyment. What’s more, the glow endures. Two weeks later, you are inclined to take on similar challenges. In essence, that slip of paper changes you into a smarter, more attuned version of yourself.
Here’s the thing: Steve’s tip was not actually useful. It contained zero relevant information. All the changes in motivation and behavior you experienced afterward were due to the signal that you were connected to someone who cared about you.
We get another example of how belonging cues work in an experiment that might be called Would You Give a Stranger Your Phone? It consists of two scenarios and a question.
SCENARIO 1: You are standing in the rain at a train station. A stranger approaches and politely says, “Can I borrow your cellphone?”
SCENARIO 2: You are standing in the rain at a train station. A stranger approaches and politely says, “I’m so sorry about the rain. Can I borrow your cellphone?”
QUESTION: To which stranger are you more likely to respond?
At first glance, there’s not a lot of difference between the two scenarios. Both strangers are making an identical request that involves a significant leap of trust. Besides, the more important factor here would seem to have less to do with them than with you; namely your natural disposition toward handing a valuable possession to a stranger. All in all, a reasonable person might predict that the two approaches would yield roughly equal response rates.
A reasonable person would be wrong. When Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School performed the experiment, she discovered that the second scenario caused the response rate to jump 422 percent. Those six words—I’m so sorry about the rain—transformed people’s behavior. They functioned exactly the way Steve’s tip did in the puzzle experiment. They were an unmistakable signal: This is a safe place to connect. You hand over your cellphone—and create a connection—without thinking.
“These are massive effects,” says Dr. Gregory Walton of Stanford, who performed the Steve’s tip experiment and others. “These are little cues that signal a relationship, and they totally transform the way people relate, how they feel, and how they behave.”*2
One of his most vivid examples of the power of belonging cues is a study by an Australian group that examined 772 patients who had been admitted to the hospital after a suicide attempt. In the months after their release, half received a series of postcards that read as follows:
Dear
It has been a short time since you were here at Newcastle Mater Hospital, and we hope things are going well for you. If you wish to drop us a note, we would be happy to hear from you.
Best wishes,
[signature]
Over the next two years, members of the group that received the postcards were readmitted at half the rate of the control group.
“A small signal can have a huge effect,” Walton says. “But the deeper thing to realize is that you can’t just give a cue once. This is all about establishing relationships, conveying the fact that I’m interested in you, and that all the work we do together is in the context of that relationship. It’s a narrative—you have to keep it going. It’s not unlike a romantic relationship. How often do you tell your partner that you love them? It may be true, but it’s still important to let them know, over and over.”
This idea—that belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced—is worth dwelling on for a moment. If our brains processed safety logically, we would not need this steady reminding. But our brains did not emerge from millions of years of natural selection because they process safety logically. They emerged because they are obsessively on the lookout for danger.
This obsession originates in a structure deep in the core of the brain. It’s called the amygdala, and it’s our primeval vigilance device, constantly scanning the environment. When we sense a threat, the amygdala pulls our alarm cord, setting off the fight-or-flight response that floods our body with stimulating hormones, and it shrinks our perceived world to a single question: What do I need to do to survive?
Science has recently discovered, however, that the amygdala isn’t just about responding to danger—it also plays a vital role in building social connections. It works like this: When you receive a belonging cue, the amygdala switches roles and starts to use its immense unconscious neural horsepower to build and sustain your social bonds. It tracks members of your group, tunes in to their interactions, and sets the stage for meaningful engagement. In a heartbeat, it transforms from a growling guard dog into an energetic guide dog with a single-minded goal: to make sure you stay tightly connected with your people.
On brain scans, this moment is vivid and unmistakable, as the amygdala lights up in an entirely different way. “The whole thing flips,” says Jay Van Bavel, social neuroscientist at New York University. “The moment you’re part of a group, the amygdala tunes in to who’s in that group and starts intensely tracking them. Because these people are valuable to you. They were strangers before, but they’re on your team now, and that changes the whole dynamic. It’s such a powerful switch—it’s a big top-down change, a total reconfiguration of the entire motivational and decision-making system.”
All this helps reveal a paradox about the way belonging works. Belonging feels like it happens from the inside out, but in fact it happens from the outside in. Our social brains light up when they receive a steady accumulation of almost-invisible cues: We are close, we are safe, we share a future.
Here, then, is a model for understanding how belonging works: as a flame that needs to be continually fed by signals of safe connection. When Larry Page and Jeff Dean participated in the whole-company challenges, the anything-goes meetings, and the raucous hockey games, they were feeding that flame. When Jonathan protected the bad apple group from Nick’s negative behavior, he was feeding that flame. When a stranger apologizes for the rain be
fore asking to borrow your cellphone, she is feeding that flame. Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.
This model helps us approach belonging less as a mystery of fate than as a process that can be understood and controlled. A good way to explore this process is by examining three situations where belonging formed despite overwhelming odds. The first involves soldiers in Flanders during the winter of 1914. The second involves office workers in Bangalore, India. The third involves what might be the worst culture on the planet.
* * *
*1 The Google/Overture pattern is not unique to them. In the 1990s, sociologists James Baron and Michael Hannan analyzed the founding cultures of nearly two hundred technology start-ups in Silicon Valley. They found that most followed one of three basic models: the star model, the professional model, and the commitment model. The star model focused on finding and hiring the brightest people. The professional model focused on building the group around specific skill sets. The commitment model, on the other hand, focused on developing a group with shared values and strong emotional bonds. Of these, the commitment model consistently led to the highest rates of success. During the tech-bubble burst of 2000, the start-ups that used the commitment model survived at a vastly higher rate than the other two models, and achieved initial public offerings three times more often.
*2 Here’s a handy use of this effect: Thinking about your ancestors makes you smarter. A research team led by Peter Fischer found that spending a few minutes contemplating your family tree (as opposed to contemplating a friend, or a shopping list, or nothing at all) significantly boosted performance on tests of cognitive intelligence. Their hypothesis is that thinking about our connections to the group increases our feelings of autonomy and control.
The Christmas Truce
Of all the difficult and dangerous battlefields in history, the Flanders trenches during the winter of 1914 might top the list. Military scholars tell us that this is due to the fact that World War I marked the historical intersection of modern weapons and medieval strategy. But in truth, it was mostly due to the mud. The Flanders trenches were located below sea level, dug out of greasy clay so waterlogged that a rainstorm could transform them into canals. They were cold and miserable, an ideal breeding ground for rats, fleas, disease, and all manner of pestilence.
The worst part, however, was the closeness of the enemy. Opposing troops were only a few hundred feet apart in many points and occasionally much less. (At one place near Vimy Ridge, two observation posts stood seven meters apart.) Grenades and artillery were a constant threat; a carelessly lit match was an invitation for a sniper’s bullet. As future prime minister Harold Macmillan, then a lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards, wrote, “One can look for miles and see no human being. But in those miles of country lurk…it seems thousands, even hundreds of thousands of men, planning against each other perpetually some new device of death. Never showing themselves, they launch at each other bullet, bomb, aerial torpedo and shell.”
Beneath the mud resided deeper layers of historical hatred between the Allies and the Germans. English and French newspapers printed fervent myths about how German barbarians were melting down innocent victims to make soap. For their part, German schoolchildren were reciting Ernst Lissauer’s “Hymn of Hate,” which was only slightly less subtle:
You we will hate with a lasting hate,
We will never forgo our hate,
Hate by water and hate by land,
Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown,
Hate of seventy millions choking down.
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone—
ENGLAND!
The war began in August. As the weeks and months passed, the two sides systematically killed each other and were killed, the bodies strewn in the barbed wire of no-man’s-land. As Christmas approached, voices in distant capitals argued for a temporary cease-fire. In Rome, Pope Benedict appealed for holiday peace; in Washington, D.C., a Senate resolution requested a twenty-day break in the fighting. Military leaders on both sides swiftly deemed this idea impossible and informed their troops to expect surprise attacks on Christmas. Any soldier who attempted to create an illicit truce, they warned, would be court-martialed.
Then on Christmas Eve, something happened. It’s difficult to determine precisely where it began, but it appeared to have been spontaneous, occurring independently at several places along the front. It started with songs. Some were Christmas carols; some were military songs. In most places, the singing went back and forth for a while, with each side applauding or jeering the other’s renditions.
Then something even stranger happened: The soldiers began to climb out of their trenches and approach each other in a friendly way. Outside a town called La Chapelle d’Armentières, English soldiers heard a German voice call out, in English, “I am a lieutenant! Gentlemen, my life is in your hands, for I am out of my trench and walking toward you. Will one of your officers meet me halfway?”
Rifleman Percy Jones figured it was a surprise attack. As he later wrote:
We commenced polishing up ammunition and rifles and getting all ready for speedy action. In fact we were about to loose off a few rounds at the biggest light when…words were heard (probably through a megaphone), “Englishmen, Englishmen. Don’t shoot. You don’t shoot, we don’t shoot.” Then followed a remark about Christmas. This was all very well, but we had heard so many yarns about German treachery that we kept a very sharp lookout.
How it happened I don’t know, but shortly after this our boys had lights out and the enemy troops were busy singing each other’s songs, punctuated with terrific salvos of applause. The scene from my sentry post was hardly creditable. Straight ahead were three large lights, with figures perfectly visible around them. The German trenches…were illuminated with hundreds of little lights. Far away to the left, where our lines bent, a few lights showed our A Company trenches, where the men were thundering out “My Little Grey Home in the West.” At the conclusion…the Saxons burst into loud cheers and obliged with some German tune. They also sang one of their national airs to the tune of “God Save the King.” We replied with the Austrian hymn, at which the applause was terrific.
Back at British High Command, Field Marshal Sir John French received puzzling reports that unarmed German soldiers were “running from the German trenches across to ours, holding Christmas trees above their heads.” French issued immediate orders to “prevent any recurrence of such conduct, and called the local commanders to strict account.” His orders had no effect. The truce grew. The soldiers involved seemed to have no more idea why this was happening than Sir John French did. They saw it happen and participated in it, and it still felt utterly inexplicable. Diarists on both sides would refer to the surreality of the event, many describing it as kind of a waking dream.
For many years, historians assumed that the story of the Christmas Truce was exaggerated, an isolated instance that had been inflated by softheaded newspaper writers. But as they dug deeper, they found the opposite was true. The truce was far bigger than had been reported, involving tens of thousands of men along two-thirds of the British-held line. The interactions included eating, drinking, cooking, singing, playing soccer matches, exchanging photos, bartering, and burying the dead.*1 In the annals of history, there are few cases where all-out violence pivoted so swiftly and completely to familial warmth. The deeper question is how it happened.
The traditional way of explaining the Christmas Truce is to see it as a story about how the shared meaning of the holiday can awaken the better angels of our nature. This way of thinking is attractive, but it fails to explain what actually occurred. There were plenty of other battlefields throughout history where enemies experienced shared spiritual holidays, yet did not engage in anything remotely approaching this level of connection.
The picture shif
ts, however, if we look at it through the lens of belonging cues. One of the most detailed accounts can be found in Trench Warfare 1914–1918 by Tony Ashworth. Over the course of 288 pages, Ashworth provides the historical equivalent of a slow-motion replay of the forces that triggered the Christmas Truce. He shows that it began not on Christmas but weeks before, when a steady flow of interactions created bonds of safety, identity, and trust. Ashworth likens the arrival of the Christmas Truce to “the sudden surfacing of the whole of an iceberg, visible to all including non-combatants, which for most of the war remained largely submerged.”
Ashworth details the physical closeness of the two sides. While the closeness brought violence, it also brought connection, through the smells of cooking and the sounds of voices, laughter, and songs. Soldiers on both sides became aware that they followed the same daily rhythms and routines of meals, resupply, and troop rotations. Both sides dealt with the combination of numbing routine and raw terror that made up military life. Both sides hated the cold and wet; both sides longed for home. As Ashworth puts it, “The process of mutual empathy among antagonists was facilitated by their proximity in trench war, and, further, was reinforced as the assumptions made by each of the other’s likely actions were confirmed by subsequent events. Moreover, by getting to know the ‘neighbor’ in the trench opposite, each adversary realized that the other endured the same stress, reacted in the same way, and thus was not so very different from himself.”
Microtruces began in early November. The British and Germans had a habit of delivering rations to the trenches around the same time. While the troops ate, the shooting would stop. The next day the same thing happened at precisely the same time. And the next day. And the next. From meals, the microtruces spread to other behaviors. When heavy rainfall made movement difficult, both sides would stop fighting. On cold nights in some sectors, troops from both sides would venture forth to gather dry straw for bedding, and both would withhold fire so they could work in peace. The tacit cease-fires grew to include supply lines (off limits), latrines (same), and the gathering of casualties after a battle.