Collaborative Intelligence

Richard Hackman: We actually were quite surprised and pleased about this because this started out based on the concern that we have in this country and indeed worldwide about why teams that are supposed to do things such as counter terrorist threats don't work as well as they ought to. How come they actually don't wind up connecting the dots until after the bad act has occurred. So we really wanted to understand teams that do that kind of work in intelligence but what surprised us was the degree to which the lessons we learned about what gets in the way of team effectiveness for those teams and what the opportunities are that they have, the degree to which that also applies to all kinds of other teams ranging from musical ensembles that are performing and decision making teams and businesses or service teams in the public sector. So the book actually changed, it was going to be lessons about teams for the intelligence community and now it is as much lessons about teams from intelligence professionals that apply to other kinds of teams as well. So the book is really about what we know about collaborating in a smart way to do team work that can get really hard problems solved regardless of what the domain or sector is where those problems come up.

Rachel Salaman: Well one of the issues you address early on in the book is when teams, when not. In other words how do you know when a group rather than an individual will come up with the best result. How do you answer that?

Richard Hackman: One of the places where teams are very commonly used and they shouldn't be is to do the creation of something that is entirely new and unique and the example I'd like to use is composing a musical composition, say a string quartet. It definitely takes four people to play a string quartet that has been composed by Mozart but if you look at who actually made that string quarter it was Mozart, not Mozart and associates, and then you look at great plays, great novels, great poems and you discover that the performance of them is really amenable to teamwork and indeed a team is required to, say, put on a play but that that the creation of those are things that are done by individuals. So I generalize all this all the way to something as mundane as creating a collective vision statement or even doing a committee report. Indeed, the person who's going to write that report needs to consult widely, get as smart as possible by talking to as many people as possible about it but then you have to go off by yourself when you're putting together ideas and images into a really unique configuration. That's something that is best done by a person not by a team. The notion of sending the senior leadership of an organization off to an executive retreat center for a weekend to collectively craft a corporate vision statement is really a bad idea because it will come back and it will be bland. What you want to do is have a very smart chief executive who has consulted with everybody go off alone and come back with something that really stretches people's thinking about what might be possible here. Then they can edit and respond but let's not use teams for acts of individual creativity. The up side is when we've got something that no one person is competent to do a lot of the teams, a lot of the teams in the intelligence community are of this type, we really need somebody who knows about law enforcement. We really need somebody who knows about immigration. We need somebody who knows about intelligence estimation then you've got to have a team because the members bring those different perspectives and different areas of expertise that no one person has.

Rachel Salaman: So it sounds like it's very important to actually get that right, to know when a group is better than an individual for a particular task and vice versa.

Richard Hackman: I would totally agree with that and I would go a little further and say I think we way overuse teams. I spend far too much of my time in faculty committees where we probably didn't actually need to have a committee for that. So the rule I use, and I try to get my colleagues to follow although rarely successfully, is there needs to be a really good reason for having a team. If we're going to have it let's do it right, let's set it up right, let's lead it right but let's not have so many of them. Let's not have teams that are just oh we've got a problem, form a taskforce to do it, that's never a good enough reason for having a team.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you list several kinds of teams which you call surgical, face to face, distributed teams and co-acting groups, then there's another one you call sand dune teams. How important is it that the right kind of team is put on a particular task?

Richard Hackman: That's another place where we often don't give it enough thought when we compose the team. We just say let's throw some people together and the team will work out the details. We really need to know is this something where we really want to have individuals doing most of the work and then we'll splice it together. Well that's a different kind of team than if we want a group of very diverse people laboring together to come up with something that is more than just the sum of the individual contribution. So it's not rocket science to answer the question what kind of a team should we have here but it does require a moment's thought and one of the purposes of research in the book is to get people to just pause a little bit and think what kind of a team do I want here? Do I need people face to face? Can we get away with having teams that are doing their work exclusively using electronic means such as the internet, telephones and video conferencing for communication and coordination and you give that some thought and the chances are very good that you'll come up with the right kind of team. I'd like to say one other word on the virtual or distributed teams because a lot of organizations now think that they can save an enormous amount of time and an enormous amount of money by having teams that relate to one another exclusively using electronic means and I think we're coming back a little bit from the over enthusiastic impulse to do that. A number of organizations in the intelligence community and elsewhere have found that there really is some advantage to having people sitting around getting a feel for each other face to face and so while the execution of the work can very often be handled electronically it's worth the time and effort to have people get together for a launch meeting, to come together maybe about halfway through the project to say how are we doing, how do we need to change how we're operating. If you could get them to do it, to come back after the thing is done and say hey what did we learn from this that we want to carry individually or collectively to our next round. So what I think we're going to see is a mix of face to face and virtual teams rather than moving all the way away from face to face teams.

Rachel Salaman: What is a sand dune team?

Richard Hackman: Sand dune teams we didn't go in expecting to find and we found in a number of organizations now, sand dunes, as your listeners will know, form and reform as the winds change and the tides change. The configuration of the beach, the dunes on the beach today, is a little different than what it will be a week from today and we found a couple of places where when the environment is fast changing and often unpredictable you can't have a kind of fixed steady team that does the same thing day in day out, week in and week out. Instead what you tend to see is a larger sized unit, say maybe 20 or 25 people, who have an overall collective mission, they know what they're there for. They have shared norms of conduct but they come together at different times and in different ways for different projects and in any particular moment it may be that an individual is working on one sub-project with these two people but another project with those five people some of which may be very long term projects, others may be something that has to be done this very afternoon. It is a joy to see in those circumstances when a sand dune kind of operation is working because you see a level of flexibility within the team and how it's organized and how it's led that mirrors the dynamic aspect of the environment in which they're operating.

Rachel Salaman: I was interested that one of your chapters is titled "You Can't Make A Team Be Great." Now what do you mean by this and where does that leave the team leader?

Richard Hackman: The leaders that we have seen in our research, not just in the intelligence community but in all different kinds of organizations... I've been studying teams for decades because they frustrate me so much that I keep going back to learn more about what goes wrong and how they can set it up so it will go right and one of the saddest kinds of failures we see is a leader who desperately wants this team to do very well and tries to drive the team as if one had a carriage and you were trying to drive a team of horses to pull the carriage very quickly and efficiently in the direction that you want it. You can't whip a team into shape and make the team do well, that almost always backfires. That's what I mean when I say you can't make a team be great but I'd say probably the main message of my research and of this book is that what you can do is put in place some conditions which, when present, increase the chances that the team will not only do well but will become increasingly competent at managing itself. In that chapter that you referred to I think I refer to the ideal allocation of a team leader's time and I call it the 60 30 10 rule and the 60 is 60 percent of the variation in how well a team does, 60 percent. Most of it depends on how well that team is set up in the first place, whether its mission is clear, whether it's got the right structure, whether it's got the right people on it, it's got the right size, it's got the right resources.

Before the team even meets most of the game is determined by how well that team is conceived, oriented, structured and supported. Then 30 percent, and this surprises a lot of people, but 30 percent depends upon the launch of the team. What happens in a team's first few minutes is hugely important in determining the trajectory so a really wise leader will get the team structured and composed and directed right and will have a great launch meeting where the team is in effect brought to life. Then the 10 percent is kind of ongoing hands on coaching, teaching, helping. That's the reverse of what an awful lot of team leaders that we've observed over the years do. They think their job is to be right there on top of the team telling people what to do and how to do it, that's in the 10 percent category. They say sometimes oh the team will work out the details. No, what you want to do is set it up right, you want to launch it beautifully and then the team is going to a) have fewer problems and b) the problems it does have are going to be more easily remedied than would be the case if you didn't have a good structure and you didn't have a good launch.

Rachel Salaman: Well I think one of the most surprising things about that is the 30 percent dedicated to the launch. Can you talk a bit more about what that involves?

Richard Hackman: Well what you have are a bunch of people who are dragging down the hall to get to this darn team meeting which is the last thing they want to do and they're not sure exactly what it is that we're supposed to do. They don't know who for sure is going to be in this group. Is it going to be too big and is Charlie in it because Charlie's a real jerk and I don't want to be a team with... so you've got all this oh boy another team meeting. Every one of your listeners will have had the experience of saying oh I've got to go to the team meeting of that taskforce or that committee. So you've got to start by saying, hey, this is actually this is pretty interesting. Here's what we're going to do, it's really important what this team has to do and let me tell you why it's important. It's also going to be quite a challenge, this is not something we can do just by nodding off and writing something on a piece of paper. This is going to stretch us, we're going to have to really pull out a little bit to do this, it's going to make a big difference to people. So you get people in that meeting, you get people excited about what it is that we're here to do. Now as an aside, Rachel, if you can't do that, if you can't come up with anything to say about that then you've got to say to yourself wait a minute, why do I have this team anyway. There is no reason, no point, no excuse ever for having a team where you can't say this is really important. All of you are needed, we need your diverse input. It's going to be challenging, it's going to make a difference. If you can't say those things you shouldn't even have a team so that's one thing that you're doing in that launch. The other thing is making sure that people on the team recognize and understand the diversity of the knowledge, experience and perspectives that other people make. We see in cross functional or cross disciplinary teams in many cases a lot of stereotyping going on.

People say oh she's from manufacturing therefore or he's from market therefore. No, what you want to do in that meeting is help them understand that the most important thing about them is not their home organization, not their role, but what they actually know or know how to do about this task and if you can get those two things accomplished in the launch meeting and you're doing it well the time will come very shortly in the course of that meeting when they kick you out and say we've got to get to work now, this is important, we've got to get to work, get out of here and then you can revert to the 10 percent. I'm hoping your listeners will take away from this a) the importance of the conditions but also b) the importance of the startup because what happens right at the beginning is just such a huge influence on what will happen subsequently.

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Rachel Salaman: If we can talk now about those conditions in your book you call them the six enabling conditions. The first of these is creating a real team rather than a team in name only. So what makes a team real?

Richard Hackman: There's been an awful lot of fluff in my view written in the management literature about oh have a team, you'll get all these benefits, and very often they're teams in name only. We refer to the marketing team and it's actually a whole department and there's no collaborative work there, they don't even know who's among the marketers. So the first thing is who's actually on this team, do we know who is and is not a member. Are they inter-dependent, do they need each other to accomplish this kind of work, and do they have enough stability over time that they could learn how to work together. As important as the launch is they need some time to get a feel and get a rhythm and learn how to work together so when I say you need a real team we need to know who's on it. We need them to be dependent upon one another for accomplishing the overall task and we need them to have enough time to learn how to work together.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose that's related to the second of your enabling conditions which is specifying a compelling direction or purpose for the team. So again it's not the name of a department for example, it actually has to have something it needs to do. What's involved in specifying this compelling direction?

Richard Hackman: I talked a couple of minutes ago about the importance of having something that is challenging, that is consequential, a really clear statement of what the purpose of this team is. To come up with that is not just a matter of sitting down in ten seconds and jotting down the team task or the team purpose on a notepad and then reading it off to the team. It actually requires pre-work by the person who's creating the team to get a deep understanding of what it is that we need to have this team for. Sometimes when you try to get that deep understanding you'll discover that we don't actually need the team but when you do you want to have it not just at the level of a cute little phrase or sentence that tasks the team. You want to have it a couple of levels deeper than that, you want to really understand what the purpose of this team is because then as a reader you'll do a much better job of communicating that with the team. Now what you say and what the team hears are going to be slightly different. What you want and what the team thinks would be better are going to be slightly different and that's one of the reasons that it's so important to have the launch meeting because that's where those differences can be discussed such that at the end of that meeting the person who's creating the team goes away saying yes they got it, they understand, and the team goes away saying hey this is pretty important, this is pretty exciting, we better get to work. That's the wonderfulness of having a real team that has a compelling direction.

Rachel Salaman: So in your view should the direction be set entirely by the leader during the preparation or the pre period or should it ever be a collaboration with the team?

Richard Hackman: It certainly should be a collaboration, if the leader is not... I mean what I want is a prepared leader. I want a leader coming into that team who has thought about it and has the best first take on it but in the interaction with the team the leader may very well learn I didn't fully understand the dimensions of this problem, we need to modify it in the following way. So the leader provides a good start, then there's collaboration and discussion to define it and get it better and maybe, and this gets a little more sophisticated here, but sometimes it's impossible to know at the outset exactly what the team should be doing. We know it's important but it's still kind of fuzzy and there's nothing you can do to clear it up because we need to do some of the work first to be able to clear it up, to be able to understand the problem better. Under those circumstances it's very often a good idea, and we see this a lot in the intelligence community, something squarely is going on in that region of the world. We don't know exactly what it is so task one is going to try to figure out the dimensions of the problem and we'll just take a couple of weeks for that one. So that's your task for the first phase, we've got to figure out what we're going to do about that but that comes later. We've got to understand it first so we have a kind of provisional initial statement of direction which is you've got to come back with a clearer, crisper, more focused statement of what we actually need to do there and that can be the first part of the task. I like it when I see that because that's real collaboration between the leader who's setting the overall purposes and the team who are their people with their feet on the ground so to speak who actually can learn what is involved in a way that will educate not just themselves but also the leader and may result in a change in the direction.

Rachel Salaman: Moving onto your third enabling condition, that's putting the right number of the right people in the team. Now this really goes to the heart of building an effective team doesn't it? What insights did your research give you into this?

Richard Hackman: Bigger is worser. Larger groups obviously have more shoulders to put to the wheel but large groups get worse at an increasing rate. You want to keep a group, five, six, seven people. If the task is such that you need more than that then cell divide. Say this sub group will do this, that sub group will do that part and then we'll bring them back together but excessive size is one of the most common and also one of the most pernicious blockers of team effectiveness so we've got to keep it small. Now if you keep it small you can't throw in one, two or three of just every little thing. You've got to make some very clear and conscious decisions about who specifically we want to have on that team and that's the other place where leaders sometimes go wrong. They will assign people to the team based on their role or on direct reports or we need somebody from each department and you really need to have people who both have knowledge, expertise, perspective, experience that is relevant to the task and also have at least a modicum of inter personal skill. That is people who are not only talented in the task work but who are also able to work collaboratively with others and there are some people in every organization who are just brilliant at what they do but they're not so good at working with other people and indeed they sometimes they virtually derail every team that they're on. Those people still have things to contribute to the organization but it may be that that is better done not on a team.

Rachel Salaman: You also say that teams should have clear norms of conduct or there should be clear norms of conduct for team behavior, that's your fourth enabling condition.

Richard Hackman: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: So how's the best way to go about establishing those?

Richard Hackman: You can set the initial norms, the initial norms are just something as simple as what do we always want to do and what do we never want to do. It ought to be a small number. There are certain things that if we're going to do well at this task there are a couple of things that we need always to do and there are a couple of things that we need never to do. One of the places where we've done a bunch of the research has been with airline pilot crews, cockpit crews, and the best team leaders, that is the best captains, will establish in the briefing before they actually start to fly together here are the two or three things that we're always going to do. I want every check list to be read and I want to make sure that we do that at a time when we are not rushed so that we don't miss something. Moreover anybody in the cockpit who sees anything that raises an eyebrow I want to hear about it. I don't care if you think I know what I'm doing. Maybe I don't know what I'm doing or maybe I'm distracted at that point. If you see anything that bothers you, you tell me. Those are the two things that we're for sure going to do and here's something that we're not going to do and you list the two or three things. I'd like to keep the cockpit door closed at all times or whatever it happens to be. So to get those established and then once that's established that helps the group get off to a good start and then you get around the midpoint of the group's work and you say how are you doing, what's going well, what's going poorly and you need to say we need to have a norm about that. We're making some progress on the work but we're having an attendance and punctuality problem so can we establish the norm that when we're going to have a meet everybody clears it on their calendars and we're there and we're there on time, okay with everybody. That may come from the members, it may not come from the leader, but halfway down the pike so to speak you learn the other things that ought to be addressed among the norms.

Probably the most important norm is that we really pay attention to who knows what here and that we give weight to members' input based on what they know or know how to do not on how tall they are or what their role is in the organization or what their race is or what their gender is, all these tasks, irrelevant things that too often determine how much influence somebody has. So trying to build a norm that says we're going to listen to the people according to what they know not what their stripes are is a hugely important point.

Rachel Salaman: And your fifth enabling condition is providing a supportive organizational context, now what does that look like?

Richard Hackman: There are few truly freestanding teams out there that don't have some kind of organization around them and around the saddest of the failures that we saw in the teams that we've looked at in the research is the team has great direction, it's the right size, it's got the right people on it, it's got good norms of conduct, it's ready to roll, and then it can't get from the broader organization the resources, the information, the assistance that it needs or a rewards system of the organization sets people off against one another for the achievement of individual bonuses. So you need to pay attention to the organizational context to make sure that a well composed and well directed team actually can get the resources and information and expertise and recognition that it needs to proceed smartly down its positive task. It's an enabling condition, it's not one of the essentials, but it's really sad to see a team that is otherwise set up fall into a pattern of frustration and despair when they just can't get from the organization the stuff that they need to actually do the work.

Rachel Salaman: Finally your sixth and last enabling condition is making competent team focused coaching available to the team which is something you mentioned earlier. Who should be doing this coaching, is it just the leader or other people too?

Richard Hackman: That's a very smart question Rachel because for a new team it's probably going to be the leader initially and this is that 60, 30, 10 I talked about before. This is the 10 percent, this is actually helping facilitating teaching the team. As the tour matures and becomes more competent in managing itself, and this is always a joy to see, you see the team needing the leader to do that less. You see people popping up from within the team to make their own suggestions. They say oh can we take the time out here and just look at how we handled that last thing, it's not the leader who's saying that. That's a joy to see because then you've got a team that is really managing itself but I do think at the outset, particularly if it's a new team, the leader has to take some responsibility for doing it and providing a model from which others can learn about how to do that kind of coaching well.

Rachel Salaman: You made the distinction there between new and old teams. It seems to me that a lot of these enabling conditions apply more easily to new teams. Did you see them also work with old existing teams that had been around for years with the same members?

Richard Hackman: Yes, that's a very important issue you've raised Rachel because let's just look at old teams for now, experienced teams, mature teams or teams that have been around for a long time, whatever you want to call them. We can predict by looking at the degree to which those conditions are in place how well those teams are going to do. It's really quite amazing how strongly the conditions shape the overall effectiveness of the team, the degree to which those teams are meeting the needs of their clients, the degree to which those teams are becoming more capable as a performing unit, the degree to which the teams are a site for the learning of individual members. If those conditions are in place they do a lot better on all three of those, if not they do a lot worse. That's different than actually changing the conditions. So say you've got a quite mature experienced team for which the conditions are not in very good shape. You can't just come in and say oh well we'll just change all of these now. You have to wait for some time when so to speak the balls go in the air for some other reason and you can bring them down in a different configuration. That's why I favor and give a lot of attention to getting it right in the first place, to getting the conditions in place for a new team that is just starting out because once they're there then they are very often not so easy to change. About half way through the team's work for example teams tend to have a midpoint transition and a lot of the balls do go in the air and that would be a chance where you can revise and improve some of the conditions but if the team is in the middle of the work, they're in the execution phase, there's not going to be a lot that you can do. So at the outset is the most powerful time to get the conditions in place and when something happens to throw things into a little bit of disarray down the road that's another time when you can do it.

Some leaders, we saw this particularly with senior leadership teams, if they've got a team that's mature, experienced, it's not doing very well, the conditions aren't necessarily in good shape, they will have what they call a re-launch so that they can restart an old team and make some changes in the task or in the direction or in the membership or in the norms and say okay that old team is no more. We're going to have a new team, we're going to give it a new name and we're going to start it from scratch. It's a kind of desperate but often effective way of trying to get some fundamental changes made in a long term team that isn't doing so well.

Rachel Salaman: Professor Richard Hackman thank you very much for joining us.

Richard Hackman: You're very welcome, it has been a pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Professor Hackman's book again is "Collaborative Intelligence, Using Teams To Solve Hard Problems."

I'll be back in a few weeks with another expert interview, until then goodbye.