The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

  According to most social scientists, this reality was both logical and historically unavoidable, as English hooligans embodied the working-class aggression known as the English Disease. Decades of experience showed that the disease could not be cured, only its symptoms controlled. As the 2004 tournament approached, riots seemed inevitable. As one English writer put it, sunny Portugal was about to become the target of the “biggest English invasion since D-Day.” To prepare, the Portuguese government purchased $21 million of riot-control tools: water cannons, truncheons, pepper spray, and police dogs. It also looked at new approaches, including the work of an obscure Liverpool University social psychologist named Clifford Stott.

  Stott is a plainspoken, crew-cut man who specializes in crowd violence. He studied the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the U.K. poll tax riots of 1990, and as the 2004 championships approached, he was working on a new theory that had less to do with the forces of social history than with social cues. His idea was that it was possible to stop crowd violence by changing the signals the police were transmitting. In his view, riot gear and armored cars were cues that activated hooligan behavior in fans who might otherwise behave normally. (Ninety-five percent of the people arrested for soccer violence, his research showed, had no prior history of disorderly conduct.) Stott believed that the key to policing riots was to essentially stop policing riots.

  Stott’s early trials of his model were sufficiently compelling, and the Portuguese authorities were sufficiently desperate, that Stott found himself, to his everlasting surprise, in charge of a high-stakes experiment: Could the most dangerous soccer hooligans in the world be stopped by a handful of social cues?

  First, Stott set about training the Portuguese police. Rule number one was to keep all riot gear out of sight: no phalanxes of helmeted cops, no armored vehicles, no riot shields and batons. Instead, Stott trained a crew of liaison officers who wore light-blue vests instead of the customary yellow. These officers were selected not for their riot control skills but for their social skills: friendliness and ability to banter. Stott encouraged them to study up on the teams and fans and get good at making small talk about the coaches, on-field strategies, and team gossip. “We sought out people who had the gift of the gab,” he says, “who could throw their arm around someone and chat with them about anything.”

  The bigger challenge for Stott was rewiring police instincts. The English hooligans had a habit of kicking soccer balls in public places, booting the ball high into the air and down onto the heads and café tables of bystanders, thus igniting the kind of small-scale confrontations of which riots are born. Conventional police procedure is to immediately and forcibly intervene and confiscate the ball before any open fighting breaks out. But on Stott’s advice, Portuguese officers were instructed to do something more difficult: to wait until the hooligans kicked the ball within reach of the police. Then and only then could the police take the ball and keep it.

  “You have to play by the shared rules,” Stott says. “The police can’t just go take the ball, because that’s precisely the kind of disproportionate use of force that creates the problem. If you wait until the ball comes to you and simply hang on to it, the crowd sees it as legitimate.”

  To some Portuguese police, Stott’s ideas sounded illogical if not insane. Several protested, saying that facing gangs of violent hooligans without protective armor was reckless. By the time the tournament arrived, the English press had derisively termed the program “Hug-A-Thug.” The sporting and scientific worlds waited doubtfully to see if Stott’s method would work.

  It worked. More than one million fans visited the country over the three-week-long tournament, and in areas that used Stott’s approach, only one English fan was arrested. Observers recorded two thousand crowd-police interactions, of which only 0.4 percent qualified as disorderly. The only incidents of violence occurred in an area that was policed according to the old-fashioned helmet-and-shield system.

  In the ensuing years, Stott’s approach has become the model for controlling sport-related violence in Europe and around the globe. One of the reasons it works is that it creates a high-purpose environment by delivering an unbroken array of consistent little signals. Every time an officer banters with a fan, every time a fan notices the lack of protective armor, a signal is sent: We are here to get along. Every time the police allow fans to keep kicking the ball, they reinforce that signal. By themselves, none of the signals matter. Together they build a new story.

  For Stott, the most revealing moment in Portugal came halfway through the tournament when a yellow-vested Portuguese policeman had an encounter with an overly exuberant English fan. The policeman tried to calm the fan; the fan resisted, and then the policeman reflexively used force, grabbing the fan roughly. A ripple of energy moved through the crowd; people shouted and pushed. It was exactly the kind of situation Stott feared most: a single overuse of force that could cause a disastrous spiral.

  But that didn’t happen. Instead, the fans shouted out to one of the blue-vested liaison officers. “The fans called over to the liaison and said, ‘Hey, can you come and sort this policeman out for us?’ ” Stott says. “The roles had reversed, and the fans were policing the police. They had socially bonded with the liaisons. They saw them as their advocate.”

  The Fastest Learners

  One of the best measures of any group’s culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill. In 1998, a team of Harvard researchers led by Amy Edmondson (whom we met in Chapter 1) tracked the learning velocity of sixteen surgical teams learning to perform a new heart surgery technique. The technique was called MICS, minimally invasive cardiac surgery, and it involved performing coronary artery bypass grafts and valve repairs through a small chest incision rather than by sawing the breastbone in half. Each of the sixteen teams took the identical three-day training program, then returned to their hospitals and started performing the procedure. The question was, which team would learn the fastest and most effectively?

  At the outset, the Chelsea Hospital team looked like it would win.* Chelsea was an elite teaching hospital in a metropolitan area. Its cardiac surgery team was led by Dr. C, a nationally recognized expert who had been involved designing the MICS technology and who had already performed more than sixty procedures using the method. In addition, Chelsea had a strong organizational commitment to the new procedure, which it demonstrated by sending several department heads to the training course.

  At the other end of the scale was the team from Mountain Medical Center, which was smaller, not a teaching institution, and located in a rural area. Its team was led by Dr. M, a young surgeon who had never done the MICS procedure and who had a similarly inexperienced team around him.

  If you had to predict which team would perform better, Chelsea would be the logical choice. It had more expertise, more experience, and more organizational support than Mountain Medical. But as it turned out, Chelsea’s team did not win. To the contrary: It was slower to learn, and its skill (measured by the time it took to successfully complete the MICS surgery) plateaued after ten procedures. What’s more, the team members weren’t happy: In interviews afterward, they reported feeling dissatisfied. After six months, Chelsea ranked tenth out of sixteen teams.

  The Mountain Medical team, on the other hand, learned fast and well. By the fifth surgery, its members were already faster than Chelsea’s top mark. By the twentieth procedure, Mountain Medical was completing successful surgeries a full hour faster than Chelsea and, more important, was reporting high rates of efficiency and satisfaction. After six months, Mountain Medical ranked second out of the sixteen teams.

  This feast-or-famine pattern wasn’t unique to these two hospitals. When Edmondson plotted the results, she found that hospitals fell into two groups: teams that had high success and teams that had low success. It wasn’t a bell curve; it was more like a split screen. Teams were either like Mountain Medical or like Chelsea; they either clicked or they didn’t. Why? />
  The answer, Edmondson discovered, lay in the patterns of real-time signals through which the team members were connected (or not) with the purpose of the work. These signals consisted of five basic types:

  1. Framing: Successful teams conceptualized MICS as a learning experience that would benefit patients and the hospital. Unsuccessful teams conceptualized MICS as an add-on to existing practices.

  2. Roles: Successful teams were explicitly told by the team leader why their individual and collective skills were important for the team’s success, and why it was important for them to perform as a team. Unsuccessful teams were not.

  3. Rehearsal: Successful teams did elaborate dry runs of the procedure, preparing in detail, explaining the new protocols, and talking about communication. Unsuccessful teams took minimal steps to prepare.

  4. Explicit encouragement to speak up: Successful teams were told by team leaders to speak up if they saw a problem; they were actively coached through the feedback process. The leaders of unsuccessful teams did little coaching, and as a result team members were hesitant to speak up.

  5. Active reflection: Between surgeries, successful teams went over performance, discussed future cases, and suggested improvements. For example, the team leader at Mountain Medical wore a head-mounted camera during surgery to help facilitate discussion and feedback. Unsuccessful teams tended not to do this.

  Note what factors are not on this list: experience, surgeon status, and organizational support. These qualities mattered far less than the simple, steady pulse of real-time signals that channeled attention toward the larger goal. Sometimes those signals involved the hospital (MICS is an important learning opportunity); sometimes the patient (Patients will benefit); sometimes the team member (You have a role and a future with this team); sometimes they placed value on rehearsal or reflection. But they all performed the same vital function: to flood the environment with narrative links between what they were doing now and what it meant.

  The other feature of this list is that many of these signals could easily be viewed as obvious and redundant. For instance, do highly experienced professionals like nurses and anesthesiologists really need to be explicitly told that their role in a cardiac surgery is important? Do they really need to be informed that if they see the surgeon make a mistake, they might want to speak up?

  The answer, as Edmondson discovered, is a thundering yes. The value of those signals is not in their information but in the fact that they orient the team to the task and to one another. What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation. Those signals added up in a way that you can hear in team members’ voices. Listen to these quotes from the successful teams:

  [Surgeon] “The ability of the surgeon to allow himself to become a partner, not a dictator, is critical. For example, you really do have to change what you’re doing [during an operation] based on a suggestion from someone else on the team.”

  [Nurse] “We all have to share the knowledge. For example, in the last case, we needed to insert a guidewire, and I grabbed the wrong wire and I didn’t recognize it at first. And my circulating nurse said, ‘Sue, you grabbed the wrong wire.’ This shows how much the different roles don’t matter. We all have to know about everything. You have to work as a team.”

  [Nurse] “Every time we are going to do a [MICS] procedure I feel like I’ve been enlightened. I can see these patients doing so well….It is such a rewarding experience. I am so grateful I was picked.”

  Now listen to these quotes from the unsuccessful teams:

  [Surgeon] “Once I get a team set up, I never look up [from the operating field]. It’s they who have to make sure everything is flowing.”

  [Anesthesiologist] “I wouldn’t speak up if I weren’t confident that a mistake would lead to an adverse outcome. I’m not comfortable hypothesizing.”

  [Nurse] “If I see a MICS case on the list [for tomorrow] I think ‘Oh! Do we really have to do it? Just get me a fresh blade so I can slash my wrists right now.’ ”

  These voices sound like they are coming from different universes. Ironically, both were doing the exact same procedure with the exact same training. The only difference was that one group received clear beacons of meaning throughout the process, and the other didn’t. The difference wasn’t in who they were but in the set of small, attentive, consistent links between where they are now and where they are headed.

  This is the way high-purpose environments work. They are about sending not so much one big signal as a handful of steady, ultra-clear signals that are aligned with a shared goal. They are less about being inspiring than about being consistent. They are found not within big speeches so much as within everyday moments when people can sense the message: This is why we work; this is what we are aiming for.

  Now that we’ve established the basic mechanism of high-purpose environments, let’s explore the next question: How do you create one? The answer, it turns out, depends on the type of skills you want your group to perform. High-proficiency environments help a group deliver a well-defined, reliable performance, while high-creativity environments help a group create something new. This distinction is important because it highlights the two basic challenges facing any group: consistency and innovation. And as we’re about to see, building purpose in these two areas requires different approaches.

  * * *

  * The names of the hospitals and doctors were altered in the study.

  When you think of the planet’s most challenging environments, you tend to envision places like Death Valley or Antarctica: unforgiving landscapes that relentlessly expose weakness. You don’t tend to think of the New York restaurant scene. That is, until you consider the survival rates.

  Each year around a thousand new restaurants open in New York City. All are launched with optimism, confidence, and high hopes for success. Five years later eight hundred of them have vanished without a trace, for various reasons that are, in essence, the same reason. A successful restaurant, like a successful Antarctic expedition, depends on ceaseless proficiency. Good food is not enough. Good location is not enough. Good service, training, branding, leadership, adaptability, and luck are not enough. Survival depends on putting all of it together, night after night. If you fail, you disappear.

  Within this unforgiving ecosystem, Danny Meyer has built a record that is not as unlikely as it is inconceivable. Over the past thirty years, he has opened twenty-five restaurants. Except for one, they are all successful—and not just a little bit. Union Square Cafe, Meyer’s first restaurant, has won the top spot in Zagat’s best-restaurant rankings an unprecedented nine times; his other restaurants routinely occupy as much as a quarter of the top twenty, and his restaurants and chefs have won twenty-six James Beard awards. Perhaps more impressively, each of Meyer’s restaurants is unique, varying from a tavern to a barbecue joint, to an Italian café, to a fast-casual burger chain called Shake Shack that is now worth $1.5 billion.

  The reason Meyer’s restaurants are successful is the warm, connective feeling they create, a feeling that can be summed up in one word: home. When you walk into a Meyer restaurant, you feel that you are being cared for. This feeling radiates from the surroundings and the food but most of all from the people, who approach each interaction with familial thoughtfulness. When I asked Meyer’s guests and employees for examples of moments where this feeling was created, they offered the following two stories.

  A young woman, recently moved to New York from the Midwest, took her parents out to dinner at 11 Madison Park to celebrate her new start in the big city—and to allay her parents’ fears about the difficulties of living in New York. Toward the end of dinner, as they looked over the dessert menu, the father pointed to a forty-two-dollar glass of dessert wine called Château d’Yquem and commented on how insanely expensive New York was. The waiter overheard the father’s comment and, moments later, reappeared carrying a bottle of Château d’Yquem and three glasses. The waiter said, “We are so grateful you came tonight. I heard you talking about the C
hâteau d’Yquem. This is one of the rarest and best dessert wines in the entire world, and we would love to offer you each a taste with our compliments.” A small explosion of surprise and delight ensued.

  Then there was the time a dining companion of Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey found a beetle in his salad at Gramercy Tavern. The next day Kerrey and his friends were eating at another of Meyer’s restaurants. After they were seated, a salad arrived garnished with a small piece of paper on which the word Ringo was written. The waiter said, “Danny wanted to make sure you knew that Gramercy Tavern wasn’t the only one of his restaurants that’s willing to garnish your salad with a Beatle.”

  If you mention that it’s your anniversary or your birthday, the restaurant will remember. If you prefer a table by the window, it will remember. If you prefer the crusty ends of bread, it will remember.* These tasks are not simple, because they depend on an unbroken chain of awareness and action. The waiter who brought the Château d’Yquem had to (1) be alert to the dynamic between the excited, hopeful young woman and her worried parents; (2) notice the father’s comment about the wine; (3) connect it to an idea; (4) be empowered to spend the restaurant’s money on a gesture; and (5) deliver that gesture with grace. At any point, the chain could have been broken, and no one would have noticed. But the chain wasn’t broken, and so it created the signature upwelling of warm emotion that has carried Meyer’s ventures to success. The question is, how does Meyer accomplish this so reliably at so many restaurants?