The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

  What made the difference in cooperation, in other words, wasn’t how many people a person reached or how good their balloon-search technology was—it wasn’t really about a given individual at all. It was rather about how effectively people created relationships of mutual risk. The Red Balloon Challenge wasn’t even really a technology contest. It was, like all endeavors that seek to create cooperation, a vulnerability-sharing contest.

  The story of the Red Balloon Challenge strikes us as surprising, because most of us instinctively see vulnerability as a condition to be hidden. But science shows that when it comes to creating cooperation, vulnerability is not a risk but a psychological requirement.

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

  After talking to Polzer and other scientists who study trust, I began to see vulnerability loops in other places I visited. Sometimes they were small, quick exchanges. A pro baseball coach began a season-opening speech to his players by saying, “I was so nervous about talking to you today,” and the players responded by smiling sympathetically—they were nervous too. Sometimes these loops took the form of physical objects, like the Failure Wall that Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation built, a whiteboard where people could share moments where they’d fallen short.

  Sometimes they were habits of seemingly invulnerable leaders, such as Apple founder Steve Jobs’s penchant for beginning conversations with the phrase, “Here’s a dopey idea.” (“And sometimes they were,” recalls Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of design, in his memorial to Jobs. “Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful.”) Each loop was different, yet they shared a deeper pattern: an acknowledgment of limits, a keen awareness of the group nature of the endeavor. The signal being sent was the same: You have a role here. I need you.

  “That’s why good teams tend to do a lot of extreme stuff together,” DeSteno says. “A constant stream of vulnerability gives them a much richer, more reliable estimate on what their trustworthiness is, and brings them closer, so they can take still more risks. It builds on itself.”

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

  More immediately, the idea of vulnerability loops is useful because it helps illuminate connections between seemingly disparate worlds. For example, why are certain groups of comedians so successful? How is the world’s most notorious band of jewel thieves structured? And what does carrying around a really heavy log have to do with creating the best Special Forces teams on the planet?

  * * *

  * The questions were developed by psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron. In its full form, the Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness also includes four minutes of silent gazing into each other’s eyes. The original experiment was done with seventy-one pairs of strangers, and one pair ended up marrying. (They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.)

  Draper Kauffman’s Trust Machine

  One of the traits that set Navy SEAL teams apart is their combination of stealth and adaptability. They can reliably navigate complex and dangerous landscapes in complete silence. This is one of the reasons SEALs are chosen to take on operations like the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, the mission to rescue Captain Richard Phillips on the Maersk Alabama, and thousands of lower-profile but equally risky missions. The SEALs call this combination of skills “playing pickup basketball.” Like any good pickup team, they don’t need to talk too much or follow some predetermined plan; they just play the game.

  “We were once teamed on a mission with Rangers,” one former Team Six commander told me, referring to the army’s Special Forces teams. “The Rangers commander and I were together [at a nearby base] observing the [drone video] feed of the mission. The entire time the Ranger commander was on the radio with his guys. He was talking, giving orders—‘Do this, look out for that.’ He was acting like a coach on the sidelines yelling plays. At some point this commander notices I’m not saying a word, and he gives me this look, almost in disbelief. Like, why aren’t you telling your guys what to do? It was pretty striking. Our guys and their guys, doing the same mission. He’s talking the whole time, and we aren’t saying a thing. And the answer is, because we don’t need to. I know my guys are going to solve the problems themselves.”

  Within military circles, there are several theories on why the SEALs are skilled at playing pickup basketball. Some point to the rigors of the selection program, that steep pyramid of mental, emotional, and physical training from which only a small percentage of candidates emerge. Others point to the high quality of the individuals who are drawn to the unit, and to its relentless ethos of self-improvement.

  All these theories make sense, but they do not suffice. Training for the army’s Delta Force, for example, is equally difficult and even more selective. (It has a 95 percent dropout rate, as opposed to 67 percent for SEALs.) Other special operations groups draw high-quality individuals and center on relentless improvement. So why do SEAL teams work so well together? And as you dig for the answer, at some point you reach the story of a skinny, nearsighted, and titanically stubborn navy reject named Draper Kauffman.

  Kauffman was born in 1911, the only son of the legendary navy admiral James “Stormy” Kauffman. He was what modern psychologists would term an oppositional child. He was keenly aware of what people wanted of him and tended to do the reverse. When he was five, he got in trouble for staying outside the house too late. “Hurry up and spank me so I can go back out and play,” he told his mother. A mediocre student who was chided for laziness by his father, Kauffman graduated from the Naval Academy in 1933. When his poor eyesight prevented him from getting an officer’s commission, he quit the military and took a job with a shipping company.

  Then as World War II approached, he quit that job so he could volunteer as a driver for American Volunteer Ambulance Corps. His parents and sister, fearing for his safety, wrote letters asking him to reconsider. His response was to request a posting to the most dangerous place possible: the northern part of the Maginot Line, where Hitler had amassed his troops to invade France. Shortly after Kauffman arrived in February 1940, the war began.

  Kauffman’s first job was to drive the ambulance through the battlefield to pick up wounded. He was unprepared for the chaotic realities of battle. “I never would have done this if I’d known what it would be like,” he wrote. “So many shells exploded in the road ahead…that my only instinct was to drive as fast as possible and I damn near wrecked the car doing it. After we got [the wounded] transferred to another ambulance to go back to the hospital, I sat in my driver’s seat and started shaking like a leaf.”

  Around this time Kauffman encountered a group of French soldiers who represented everything he was not. The Corps Franc was an elite group of volunteers whose job was to sneak behind enemy lines, disrupt communication, take prisoners, and wreak havoc. They were organized in small teams, each carrying light arms and explosives. Kauffman was struck by their brotherly connection, which far exceeded anything he had encountered back at the Naval Academy. “You were either accepted by the Corps Franc or you weren’t accepted, and the two were miles apart,” he wrote his family. “There wasn’t anything they wouldn’t do for you. If one member of the patrol was trapped and there were five others, they would attack fifty Germans to try to free the one man who was trapped.”

/>   Over the course of six weeks, Kauffman spent days and nights with the Corps Franc, witnessing their nightly rituals of toasting the dead, and their cool under enemy fire. “You sincerely call a man a friend in a very short time when things are hot,” he wrote. “This climaxed one day when I picked Toine [a member of the Corps] off the field with his face half gone, one arm shot to pieces, and his left foot gone. When we got him into the light of the Poste de Secours, I almost gave way, and he didn’t help any by winking at me with his good eye and squeezing my hand with his good one.”

  After the Maginot Line was overrun, Kauffman traveled to Britain and volunteered with the bomb-disposal unit of the British Naval Reserves. In June 1943 he returned to the States and joined the Naval Reserve. Word spread about this skinny lieutenant with a talent for bomb disposal, and he was sent to Fort Pierce, Florida, assigned the task of selecting and training soldiers for underwater demolition units that would penetrate the German defenses along the French and North African coasts. The expectation was that Kauffman would follow the navy’s template for training specialized teams: a few weeks of moderately strenuous selection and training, overseen by officers. Instead, he threw out the template and decided to re-create the Corps Franc.

  First, Kauffman created Hell Week, a weeklong selection program filled with Maginot Line levels of pain, fear, and confusion, featuring four-mile open-water swims, obstacle courses, hand-to-hand combat training, ten-mile runs, paltry amounts of sleep, and a curious telephone-pole-lifting exercise he’d seen British commandos use to build strength and teamwork. Those who survived Hell Week (25 to 35 percent of the class) were given eight to ten weeks of specialized training where they learned and honed the more refined skills they would use in the field.

  Second, Kauffman decreed that every aspect of the training be team-based. Instead of operating solo, trainees were put into groups of six (the number that fit in navy-issue rubber rafts) and kept together through the duration of training. What’s more, each team had to be self-sufficient, able to navigate around or through any obstacle without relying on some central command.

  Third, Kauffman eliminated the hierarchical distinction between officer and enlisted man. In his program, everyone did the training, no matter their rank. This, of course, included Kauffman. The enlisted men of the first class took one look at their ungainly, nearsighted commander and reached the same conclusion: There was no way this guy would make it. But as the trainees watched, he proved them wrong.

  “We were testing [Kauffman] all along,” wrote Dan Dillon, a member of the first demolition class, “but my respect for him deepened because a lot of officers will tell you what to do, but they won’t do it themselves. This man…asks for suggestions. If they’re good, he uses them….And he participates in everything….The dirtiest, rottenest jobs that we tackle, he is in there doing as well as the rest of us. How could you not respect him?”

  The teams that graduated from Kauffman’s makeshift training program were a success from the start, from Omaha Beach to the Pacific. In the 1960s, when President John Kennedy expanded the nation’s unconventional warfare capabilities, Kauffman’s training program was used as the template for what became the SEAL teams, and it remains so to this day. All of which adds up to an unusual situation: The world’s most sophisticated and effective military teams are being built by an outdated, primitive, wholly unscientific program that hasn’t changed in its essentials since the 1940s.

  “I call it ‘unconscious genius,’ ” one SEAL training officer tells me. “The people who built the original training program didn’t completely understand why this was the best way to build teams, but they understood that it was the best way. It would be so easy now to go back and change things, to modernize them in some way. But we don’t, because we appreciate the results.”

  If you go to SEAL training sites, you will find Draper Kauffman’s telephone poles. They are stacked in the dunes near the SEAL obstacle courses in Coronado and Virginia Beach. They look like remnants from a construction project, but SEAL commanders consider them sacred objects. “Log PT [physical training] is the lens through which you can view everything that happens here,” said Tom Freeman, a SEAL commander.*1 “It captures the essence of every evolution, because it’s about teamwork.”

  Log PT is not complicated. Basically, it consists of six SEAL trainees performing an assortment of maneuvers that seem more appropriate to an Amish barn raising. They lift, carry, and roll the log. They move it from shoulder to shoulder and push it with their feet. They do sit-ups while cradling it, and they stand for long periods while holding it overhead with extended arms. There is no strategy, no technique, nothing that calls for higher levels of thought, skill, or reflection. What sets Log PT apart is its ability to deliver two conditions: intense vulnerability along with deep interconnectedness. Let’s take them one by one.

  First, vulnerability. In SEAL vernacular, you do not do Log PT. You get Log-PTed. In the vast storehouse of pain that comprises SEAL training, Log PT delivers some of the highest, purest levels of agony. “There are times when the instructors will tell you to be at the O-Course in thirty minutes, and that’s when you realize: ‘Holy shit, we’re getting Log-PTed,’ ” Freeman says. “They send you to lunch first so you have time to fuel up and dread it. The worst part is the anticipation. You’re thirty seconds into a ninety-minute evolution, and your shoulders are burning, and you’re realizing that you’ve got an hour and a half more to go.”

  Second, interconnectedness. The weight (around 250 pounds) and length (ten feet) of the log lend it massive inertia; executing coordinated maneuvers requires each team member to apply the right amount of force at the right time, and the only way to do this is to pay keen attention to your teammates. Conceptually, it’s like trying to twirl a baton with one hand: If your fingers and thumb work together with the proper timing, the task is simple; if the timing of one finger is off, even by a fraction of a second, it’s impossible. That’s why a physically weaker team that’s working in sync can succeed in Log PT, while a bigger, stronger group can fall apart, physically and mentally.

  These two conditions combine to deliver a highly particular sensation: the point where vulnerability meets interconnection. You are in immense pain, inches from your teammates, close enough to feel their breath on the back of your neck. When a teammate falters or makes a wrong move, you can feel it, and you know that they can feel it when you do the same. It adds up to a choice. You can focus on yourself, or you can focus on the team and the task.

  When Log PT is done poorly, the log bucks and rolls, the trainees fight each other, and emotions rise. When Log PT is done well, it looks smooth and quiet. But that smoothness is an illusion, because just beneath the surface communication is happening. It takes the form of almost-invisible exchanges: Someone weakens, and the people next to him adjust their efforts to keep the log level and steady. Someone’s grip slips, and the teammates instantly make up the difference. A conversation travels back and forth through the fibers of the log:

  1. A teammate falters.

  2. Others sense it, and respond by taking on more pain for the sake of the group.

  3. Balance is regained.

  Thanks to Draper Kauffman, this exchange of vulnerability and interconnection is woven into every aspect of SEAL training and enshrined in a set of iron values. Everything is done as a group. Trainees must keep track of one another at all times; there is no greater sin than losing track of someone. During boat exercises, trainees constantly trade positions and leadership roles. Timed performances on runs are supposed to be held to an unbreakable standard, but instructors have been known to bend those standards for runners who slow down in order to help others, because they value the willingness of one person taking a risk for the sake of the team.

  “We’re all about seeking the microevent,” Freeman says. “Every evolution is a lens to look for teamwork moments, and we believe that if you stitch together a lot of opportunities, you start to know who the good teamm
ates will be. It comes out at the oddest times. For instance, let’s say they’re running late and the instructors are going to hammer them. Does somebody just urge everyone to hurry up and take off running? Or do they stop and say, ‘Look, we’re gonna get hammered for being late anyway, so let’s take a minute and get our gear tight, so when we show up we’re a hundred percent ready.’ There’s something about that second guy that we want. We want to be with him because he’s not thinking about himself; he’s thinking of the team.”

  Seen in this way, the high level of cooperation among SEALs is not a surprise but closer to an inevitability. They cooperate well because Kauffman’s training program generates thousands of microevents that build closeness and cooperation. “It’s more than just teamwork,” Freeman says. “You’ve left yourself wide open. Everybody on your team knows who you are, because you left it all on the table. And if you did well, it builds a level of trust that’s exponentially higher than anything you can get anywhere else.”

  The Power of the Harold

  One evening in 1999, Lorne Michaels, producer of Saturday Night Live, left his penthouse on West Sixty-ninth Street in New York and headed south to a run-down part of Chelsea. There he walked into a sixty-seat theater that, until a few months before, had been home to the Harmony Burlesque all-nude strip club. The air emanated mysterious smells; the Dumpster near the back entrance rustled with rats. In three years, city inspectors would shut the theater down for fire code violations. But this night Michaels was not paying attention to the setting. He had come to scout talent.