The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

  Michaels operated within the comedy ecosystem like an orchid collector: seeking, locating, and gathering the best species. In the past, he had located remarkable blooms of talent in his hometown of Toronto, in Chicago’s Second City, at ImprovOlympic, and in other locales. But in recent months a new species of comedian had arrived: smart, fearless ensembles with high verbal IQ and a raunchy inventiveness. They were colonizing the entertainment landscape with breathtaking speed, the vanguard of an invasion that would star in and/or write for The Office, The Daily Show, 30 Rock, The Colbert Report, Parks and Recreation, Community, Conan, Key & Peele, Broad City, Bob’s Burgers, New Girl, The League, Girls, and Veep—not to mention movies like Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Bring it On, and Bridesmaids, among others. They called themselves the Upright Citizens Brigade.*2

  The remarkable thing about the UCB, from Michaels’s perspective, was their depth. While most other improv groups produced a small handful of great teams, UCB produced dozens, all of which could perform with remarkable skill. What’s more, UCB didn’t seem at first glance all that different from Second City or ImprovOlympic or any of the other comedy groups. All were influenced by the late comedy legend Del Close; all offered improv classes to create feeder systems of newcomers; all shared a boundary-breaking, anything-goes aesthetic. In fact, the only discernible difference was that UCB trained its comedians almost exclusively using a strange and difficult improv game called the Harold.

  Most improv games are built on simplicity and speed—creating brief sketches in response to audience prompts—but the Harold is different because it is long and complex. It requires eight people, contains nine interweaving scenes, and lasts around forty minutes—an eternity in the attention-deficit-disorder world of improv. The Harold is hard to teach and hard to learn, and as a result it often ends in spectacular failure. Del Close famously likened a successful Harold to watching a group of people tumble down the stairs at the same time and all land on their feet. The vast majority of the time, however, people just tumble down the stairs.

  The structure of a Harold is as follows:

  • Group Opening

  • First Beat: Scenes 1A, 1B, 1C (two people each scene)

  • Group Game

  • Second Beat: Scenes 2A, 2B, 2C

  • Group Game

  • Third Beat: Scenes 3A, 3B, 3C

  Don’t worry if you can’t follow it—in a way that’s the point, because in a Harold you have to come up with interlinking scenes on the fly with seven other people; so that all the “A” scenes connect, all the “B” scenes connect, and so on. It requires you to pay deep attention to what the UCB calls “game,” or the comic core of each scene, and to hold those threads in your mind, calling back previous connections as you build new ones.

  Unlike other comedy groups, the UCB didn’t perform Harolds once in a while. They were obsessed with Harolds. There were Harold teams, Harold nights, Harold classes, Harold competitions, and Harold practices, as well as practices devoted to analyzing each element of the Harold. The walls of their theater were covered with photos of their best Harold teams. As one observer said, UCB’s relationship to Harolds was roughly the same as the Catholic Church’s relationship to celebrating Mass. All of which adds up to a curious situation: UCB was creating some of the most cohesive comic ensembles on the planet by spending a huge amount of time doing an activity that produced mostly pain and awkwardness.

  To find out more, I go to a Harold Night at UCB’s new (unsmelly and rat-free) theater on West Twenty-sixth Street in Chelsea. I find a seat and start chatting with my neighbor, a woman named Valerie, who like many in the audience is enrolled in UCB classes, hoping to make it onto a Harold team someday. She has come not to be entertained but to learn. “I’m watching for technique, mostly,” she says. “How people respond under pressure. I’m really working on my reactions, trying to react to people in an authentic way and not with old habits.”

  The show begins: three teams, each of whom performs a Harold. After each Harold, Valerie offers a high-speed analysis. “Too closed off,” she whispers after a Harold that involved a headphone-wearing woman on the subway singing an Adele song too loudly. “She didn’t leave room for anybody else to connect. She was just making a joke, and there was nowhere for the others to go.”

  “Too straight,” Valerie whispers after the second Harold, which involved a coffee machine that used its artificial intelligence to seduce its owner’s girlfriend. She explains that a good Harold doesn’t stay locked in the same story-space but allows players to make leaps to wildly different scenarios.

  “That was amazing,” Valerie whispers after the third Harold, which involved a vampire, a family on vacation, and a couple who gave birth to an animate sex toy. “They really supported each other. Did you see how some of them just let things play out without getting too involved? I love that.”

  When Del Close developed the Harold in the 1970s, he wrote down the following rules:

  1. You are all supporting actors.

  2. Always check your impulses.

  3. Never enter a scene unless you are needed.

  4. Save your fellow actor, don’t worry about the piece.

  5. Your prime responsibility is to support.

  6. Work at the top of your brains at all times.

  7. Never underestimate or condescend to the audience.

  8. No jokes.

  9. Trust. Trust your fellow actors to support you; trust them to come through if you lay something heavy on them; trust yourself.

  10. Avoid judging what is going down except in terms of whether it needs help, what can best follow, or how you can support it imaginatively if your support is called for.

  11. LISTEN.

  Every rule directs you either to tamp down selfish instincts that might make you the center of attention, or to serve your fellow actors (support, save, trust, listen). This is why Close’s rules are hard to follow, and also why they are useful in building cooperation. A Harold places you in front of an audience, then asks you to disobey every natural instinct in your brain and instead to give yourself selflessly to the group. In short, it’s a comedy version of Log PT.

  “You have to let go of the need to be funny, to be the center of things,” says Nate Dern, former artistic director of UCB. “You have to be able to be naked, to be out of things to say, so that people can find things together. People say their minds should be blank, but that’s not quite it. They should be open.”

  UCB is also unique in that it approaches Harolds as if they were a sport. This mentality is reflected in the terminology. There are coaches, not directors; practices, not rehearsals; and each Harold is followed by a rigorous feedback session much like an AAR or a BrainTrust meeting. “Some is positive, but mostly it’s critique-based,” Dern says. “Things like ‘You didn’t listen to your scene partner’s idea.’ Or ‘You steamrollered your partner and didn’t let them contribute.’ It’s pretty intense. As a performer, it’s tough, because you already know you had a bad show, and then your coach will tell you all the things that were bad.”

  “In every other form of improv, you can get by on charm,” says Kevin Hines, the academic supervisor of UCB New York. “Not in the Harold. It’s totally unforgiving. Which is why the people who succeed here tend to be extremely hard workers.”

  In other words, the Harold is a group brain workout in which you experience, over and over, the pure, painful intersection of vulnerability and interconnection. Seen this way, UCB’s brilliance on stage and screen is not an accident. It is the product of thousands of microevents, thousands of small interpersonal leaps that were made and supported. These groups are cohesive not because it’s natural but because they’ve built, piece by piece, the shared mental muscles to connect and cooperate.

  “They Think with One Brain”

  Around 2000, the world’s most exclusive jewelry stores began to be targeted by a new type of robber. These robbers operated in broad daylight, in the toniest shopping districts, in full
view of security cameras. The method was usually the same: They entered the stores dressed as wealthy shoppers, then used hammers to smash the jewelry cases, taking only the most valuable gems. The robberies were well planned and well executed—most took fewer than forty-five seconds. Though the robbers were occasionally rough with guards and customers, they were averse to gunplay and creative in their escapes. In London, they departed in a chauffeured Bentley; in Tokyo, they used bicycles. One criminologist described their work as “artistry.” The robbers were young, rumored to come from Serbia and Montenegro, parts of war-torn former Yugoslavia. Police called them the Pink Panthers.*3

  • Paris 2001: A group of Panthers posing as workmen used blowtorches to melt the security coating off the windows at the Paris-Boucheron flagship store, then smashed the windows and made off with jewels worth $1.5 million.

  • Tokyo 2005: A group of Panthers posing as wealthy customers used pepper spray to disable security guards and left with jewels worth $35 million.

  • St. Tropez 2005: Panthers dressed in sunhats and flowered shirts broke into a waterfront store, took $3 million worth of gems, and departed by speedboat.

  • Dubai 2007: Four Panthers drove two rented Audis into the exclusive Wafi shopping mall and used the cars as battering rams to smash through the doorway of the Graff jewelry store. (They had disabled the cars’ airbags so they didn’t activate.) They left with jewels worth $3.4 million.

  • London 2007: Four male Panthers dressed as middle-aged women, complete with wigs and expensive dresses, robbed a Harry Winston store and left with $105 million in emeralds, rubies, and diamonds the size of jelly beans.

  When you view security camera footage of the robberies, the clips form a single, seamless loop. The Panthers move through the stores like water; their actions are coordinated, calm, and focused. They don’t look at each other; they know where to go and what to do. They swing hammers at the cases with calm precision, sweep away broken glass and extract the diamonds with practiced efficiency, then depart like shadows.

  Authorities were also impressed by something else: In a line of work not known for loyalty, the Panthers seemed to have a genuine attachment to one another. On rare occasions when they were apprehended, they were immune to police attempts to get them to turn state’s evidence. In 2005, a Panther named Dragan Mikic escaped from a French prison when a group of men—presumably fellow Panthers—used ladders, rifles, and wire cutters to break into the prison and free him. As one prosecutor said, “These guys don’t care about being put in jail. They know they are going to escape.” As another observer put it, “They think with one brain.”

  As the Panthers’ notoriety increased, people wondered who they were and how they were organized. The most generally accepted theory was that they consisted of a group of former soldiers who’d served in the Yugoslavian wars. Some believed the Panthers to be former members of a paramilitary unit called Arkan’s Tigers, an infamous group who worked for strongman Slobodan Milosevic. Others believed them to be former members of the JSO, Serbian special forces.

  Wherever they came from, there seemed no question that they were soldiers commanded and controlled by some central figure. As George Papasifakis, deputy of the Greek Property Crimes Unit, told a reporter, “Someone is definitely moving the strings on the ground in Serbia, and someone is in charge of initiating and educating the younger members.” It’s thrilling, cinematic stuff: a secret global organization of ex-commandos-turned-supercriminals, summoned to their missions by a shadowy leader. This narrative makes sense because we tend to presume that such faultless coordination requires special training, powerful leadership, and centralized organization.

  It is a perfectly good theory, but it has one problem: It is wrong. In the latter part of the decade, the investigative efforts of police and journalists gradually revealed the surprising truth. The Panthers were a self-assembling, self-governing, free-range mix of middle-class people, former athletes, and small-time criminals. One had been a member of Serbia’s national youth basketball team. Another had attended law school. What they had in common was the experience of living through a hellish war, an instinct for action, strong friendships, and the realization that they had nothing to lose.

  “Most of them grew up together in three particular towns, as friends,” says director Havana Marking, who helped uncover the story in her documentary Smash & Grab. “The experience of going through the communist regime and then the free-for-all nightmare of the war that followed, that really bonded them. They were mostly smugglers at the beginning, to survive. They worked together in those environments, and it wasn’t for money, it was for survival. They learned how to fake documents and cross borders, as well as other skills. They were attracted to adrenaline and action. You have to understand that crime, in the Balkans, was a normal life. If what happened in the Balkans hadn’t happened, these people probably would have been entrepreneurs, lawyers, and journalists.”

  Each team was built around a set of well-defined roles. There was a zavodnik, a “seducer” who scouts the location (usually a woman); a magare, or muscle for getting the jewels; a jatak, who arranged logistics. While there were leaders on each team, they did not issue orders. Instead, they operated according to a simple rule that one Panther explained to Marking: “We all depend on each other.”

  This interdependence began with the way the Panthers prepared for each robbery. Each team member (there were never more than five or six on a team) moved to the city and gathered information on the target store. They lived and worked together for weeks of intensive planning. They scouted the store, tracked the comings and goings of the employees, and sketched maps of the layout to target the most valuable gems. What’s more, each Panther shared the cost of the planning (which was not insignificant: the advance costs for the Tokyo robbery were $100,000). They did not rely on any outside structure or safety net. They were the structure, and if any of them failed, the group would fail.

  In other words, the Panthers were a little bit like comedians doing a Harold, or SEALs doing Log PT—small teams solving problems in a constant state of vulnerability and interconnection. As one Panther named Lela told Marking, “My one mistake would be their fall. If I make an error somewhere, they are doomed.”

  For her film, Marking interviewed a man and woman who were formerly on the same Panther team but hadn’t seen each other in some years. She watched how they interacted. “They hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and they were really happy to see each other,” she says. “They had a proper friendship and seemed to be genuinely close. You know how you can sense when two people are completely relaxed in each other’s company? You could sense it with them.”

  * * *

  *1 Not his real name.

  *2 Here is a partial list of UCB alumni: Scott Adsit, Aziz Ansari, H. Jon Benjamin, Matt Besser, Kay Cannon, Rob Corddry, Eliza Coupe, Andrew Daly, Abby Elliott, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Sue Galloway, Jon Glaser, Ilana Glazer, Donald Glover, Ed Helms, Rob Huebel, Abbi Jacobson, Jake Johnson, Ellie Kemper, Nick Kroll, John Lutz, Jason Mantzoukas, Jack McBrayer, Adam McKay, Kate McKinnon, Bobby Moynihan, Aubrey Plaza, Amy Poehler, June Diane Raphael, Rob Riggle, Ian Roberts, Horatio Sanz, Paul Scheer, Ben Schwartz, Jenny Slate, Jessica St. Clair, Matt Walsh, Tracey Wigfield, Jessica Williams, Casey Wilson, Zach Woods, and Sasheer Zamata.

  *3 The name originates from a 2003 London robbery where police discovered stolen diamonds hidden in a jar of face cream, a tactic made famous in the 1975 film The Return of the Pink Panther.

  Dave Cooper’s Rules

  If you were to seek out the highest-performing teams on the planet, at some point you would find yourself in Dam Neck, Virginia, home base for Draper Kauffman’s descendants: the three hundred Navy SEALs who make up Team Six. And if you were to ask a variety of current and retired Team Six operators which leaders they admire most, you would hear the same handful of names over and over. But the name you would hear most often is Dave Cooper.

  This is a surprising choice
, because Dave Cooper does not possess any obvious talents that distinguish him from the rest of Team Six. Cooper, who retired in 2012, is neither the smartest nor the strongest team member, nor the best marksman. He is not the best swimmer nor the best at close quarters combat. But he happens to be the best at a skill that is at once hard to define and immensely valuable. He’s the best at creating great teams.

  “Coop is a very intelligent guy who stayed in the trenches for a long time,” says former Team Six operator Christopher Baldwin. “He wasn’t one of those people who moved up the leadership chain just to move up. He’s one of us. He understood the bigger picture, and you could always talk to him.”

  “There are some higher-ups who’ve had run-ins with him, and he doesn’t always follow the rules,” says another operator. “But if you’re on his team, you can see why he’s effective.”

  Another operator puts it more succinctly: “Cooper is the dude.”

  They tell me how Cooper worked in Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, always in places that were “sporty,” to use the SEAL term. They tell me how well Cooper’s teams worked together, and how often they succeeded when things went to hell—especially when they went to hell. The more they talk, the more Cooper expands in my imagination to become a larger-than-life figure, a combination of Vince Lombardi and Jason Bourne.

  Then at a restaurant in Virginia Beach, we meet for lunch.

  Cooper turns out to be a medium-size guy in a beach shirt, shorts, and flip-flops who in most aspects resembles a suburban dad. As you might expect, he is extremely fit. As you might not expect, he is chatty and warm, with eyebrows that steeple together in concern when he listens. Like most SEAL operators, he carries himself with his elbows slightly away from his body, radiating awareness, scanning the room. Controlling the space, this is called.