“My brain is open!”
In 1999, as the Summer Olympics in Sydney approached, Ben Hunt-Davis was tantalizingly short of being one of the best rowers in the world. The British rowing team was built around one of the greatest Olympians of any era, Steve Redgrave, a man who was targeting the scarcely believable feat of winning a gold medal in a fifth consecutive Olympic games. Most teams placed their best rowers in the “8+,” an event made famous by the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, with a boat that slices through the water fast enough to pull a water skier. But with the British team focused on Steve Redgrave’s crew of four, the British 8+ was for the “nearly men,” athletes who weren’t fast enough and strong enough to row with him. Ben Hunt-Davis was one of a crew of unfancied underdogs even their opponents ignored. “Roland Baar, the stroke for the Germans, wouldn’t have known who I was,” says Hunt-Davis.1
Faced with an impossible task, Hunt-Davis and the rest of the 8+ crew embarked on a team-building project that took the monomaniacal tendencies of Olympic rowers to new extremes. They shut themselves off from the outside world—by which they meant not just evenings down at the pub, but the rest of the British Olympic team. Most of the British crews had a natural rivalry, noting their status on an informal leaderboard. The 8+ crew shrugged at such point scoring; they had no interest in where they stood relative to Redgrave or the women’s 8+ or anyone else. Their crew rules forbade “performance talk” with outsiders; they dismissed the distracting chatter as “talking bollocks to Basil.”2 They even skipped the opportunity to stride out in national colors at the Olympic Opening Ceremony surrounded by superb athletes, cheering crowds, and the TV cameras of the world. They stayed back in the village, focused not on the spectacle or even the British team, but on one another.
Nobody was surprised when Steve Redgrave, the most famous oarsman on the planet, won his fifth gold medal. The next day, Hunt-Davis and his crewmates added a gold medal that had been entirely unexpected: the first British victory in the 8+ since 1912. They had done so by deliberately disconnecting from the rest of the world in an effort to connect with what mattered—one another.
It’s a remarkable story of collaboration, of team-building through isolation. Such strategic isolationism has a long history, most famously in 1519 when the conquistador Hernán Cortés destroyed his own ships on the coast of an unknown land, forcing his men to face the mighty and warlike Aztec Empire rather than return to their homes in Cuba.3 Japanese gangsters sever their little fingers, marking them out as different and making them less able to prosper by themselves. Loyalty to the gang becomes relatively more attractive.
Such strategic isolation can be brutally effective. If you want your teammates to be committed to one another, one way to achieve that is to give them no alternative. The British 8+ crew recognized this and demanded total commitment, because the crew was only as strong as its weakest member. Outsiders weren’t merely a distraction; they were a threat to crew unity because they might tempt a crew member into slacking off. Olympic rowing is backbreaking work even by the standards of other professional sports, and the cost-benefit calculus is asymmetric: the crew member who skimps on the training enjoys all the benefits of doing so, while the rest of the crew must share much of the cost. No wonder Hunt-Davis and his crewmates made a pact to turn their gaze away from the world and toward one another. Collaboration is commitment.
• • •
But there is an alternative view of teamwork that could not be more different, and there is one man who personified the approach so completely that his name is now used to describe networks of collaboration. That name is Paul Erdős.
Erdős was a brilliant mathematician. He was once sipping coffee in the mathematics common room at Texas A&M University when he noticed some intriguing scribbles on the board. “What’s that? Is it a problem?” he asked. It was indeed a problem, and two local mathematicians were delighted with the fact that they had just solved it, requiring a thirty-page chain of intricate reasoning. Erdős didn’t recognize the symbols, because this was a totally unfamiliar branch of mathematics, so he asked for an explanation. He then sprang to the blackboard and immediately wrote down an elegant masterpiece of a solution. It was just two lines long.4
That is a kind of magic, but there have been many gifted individuals in twentieth-century mathematics. Erdős had a more important spell to weave: the Hungarian wizard was quite simply the most prolific collaborator in the history of science. The web of cooperation around the world and across the twentieth century spreads so far it is measured in an honorific unit: the “Erdős number.” People who wrote articles jointly with Erdős himself are said by mathematicians to have an Erdős number of one. Over five hundred people enjoy this distinction. If you wrote a paper with one of them, your Erdős number is two. Over forty thousand people have Erdős numbers of three or less, all spinning in intellectual orbit around this astonishing man.
Erdős’s achievement as the linchpin of so many mathematical partnerships is unsurpassed and perhaps unsurpassable. Think for a moment about his five hundred collaborating authors: each one represents Erdős’s launching into a serious piece of intellectual teamwork—a peer-reviewed scientific paper—with a stranger. He did this, on average, every six weeks for sixty years. In his peak collaborative year, 1987—when he was seventy-four—he formed thirty-five new creative partnerships, one every ten days.5
These collaborations bear little resemblance to the self-sacrificing commitment of the tight-knit rowing crew. They do not have to be unbreakable bonds of comradeship. In fact, they rarely are—with five hundred people involved, how could they be?
In 1973, Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist, introduced the paradoxical idea of “the strength of weak ties.” Granovetter looked at a simple sociological question: How do people with good jobs find those jobs? To answer it, he did something new: he looked at the structure of their social networks. After all, as the cliché goes: it’s not what you know, but who. Granovetter observed that the most irreplaceable social connections were the distant ones. Jobs were often discovered through personal contacts, but not because they were handed out by close friends. Instead, the jobs were rooted out by following up leads from distant contacts—old acquaintances from college, perhaps, or colleagues from a previous job. More recent data-driven research—for example, using millions of mobile-phone call records—backs up Granovetter’s claim that the vital ties are the weak ones.6
This seemingly paradoxical finding is obvious in retrospect. In a clique, everyone knows everyone and all your friends can tell you the same gossip. The more peripheral the contact, the more likely she is to tell you something you didn’t know.7
Paul Erdős was the quintessential weak tie. He made the connections that nobody else could. He never stayed long in any particular university department or in any particular home. He was peripatetic, staying as a houseguest with one mathematician after another—his motto was “Another roof, another proof.” His travel schedule was relentless. Erdős’s biographer Bruce Schechter describes an itinerary:
From Budapest to Moscow, then to Leningrad, back to Moscow and on to Beijing by way of Irkutsk and Ulan Bator. After three weeks in Beijing catching up with old friends . . . Erdős caught a flight to Shanghai, then boarded a train to Hangchow. Another flight took him to Canton, from whence another train, this time to Hong Kong; then he flew to Singapore and finally on to Australia.8
That was 1960, “and that wasn’t even a particularly busy year.” Before the Internet, Erdős was a one-man hub through which the world’s mathematical insights flowed. During the iciest moments of the Cold War it was Erdős who linked mathematicians in the Soviet bloc to those in the West. And Erdős would step off each plane to be greeted by a welcoming committee of mathematicians, to whom he would announce, “My brain is open!”
Open it was. Erdős loved different branches of mathematics, and was often able to help a colleague focused on one type of problem by talking about a related advance from an entirely different field. This was partly a unique cognitive gift: Erdős could move around a hotel room full of mathematicians like a grand master playing simultaneous chess games, discussing progress, offering breakthrough suggestions, then moving on. But it was a preference as well as a skill: Erdős loved to connect with other people through mathematics.
Erdős was not your average sofa-surfer. Although he joked that a mathematician was “a machine for turning coffee into theorems,” he relied on amphetamines for his prodigious output. This homeless, drug-dependent genius was an exhausting houseguest. If he wanted something to eat at four o’clock in the morning—and he often did, since he never cooked a meal for himself in his life—then he would get out a couple of saucepans and bash them until the owner of the house woke up to provide some service. He owned very few clothes, although his vest and underpants were made of silk—these needed to be hand-washed frequently, and not by Erdős. He couldn’t drive, so his hosts were forced to drive him. He couldn’t even pack his own suitcase. People found him impossibly demanding; it was like caring for an infant.9
And yet, everyone loved working with him. Years after his death, papers continued to be published listing Paul Erdős as a coauthor, as the seeds he planted continued to bear fruit.
• • •
Sociologists have a term for these different kinds of collaboration. When Hunt-Davis and his crewmates focused purely on one another and the task ahead of them, cutting themselves off from the temptations of the outside world, they were building up their “bonding social capital.” Paul Erdős restlessly traversed that outside world with a plastic bag full of the latest mathematical offprints, bringing news from Beijing to Princeton to Manchester to Budapest—and from set theory to number theory to probability theory and back—and created “bridging social capital.” We can think of bonding as the tidy-minded approach to collaboration. Minimize disruptions, distractions, obstacles; identify what you have to do; focus your energies on doing it as effectively as possible. It’s analogous to the hill-climbing strategy, while the itinerant genius Erdős personifies the random leap.
In some circumstances, it may be appropriate to focus only on bonding: when it is absolutely clear how the goal needs to be achieved, and hard work is needed to put theory into practice. As we saw in the last chapter, elite sports is one field where there is relatively little scope for radical new approaches. If Hunt-Davis and his crew had sealed themselves off from the outside world for years on end, they might well have missed out on some useful advance in understanding nutrition, or an improved design of rowing machine. But for a few weeks or months of intense preparation, lack of contact with the outside world wasn’t likely to deprive them of game-changing new ideas.
In many other circumstances, however, bridging takes on more importance. While Hunt-Davis showed that hard work could propel eight second-tier rowers to the pinnacle of their sport, second-tier mathematicians are unlikely to crack the hardest theorems by locking themselves away. What they need is a flash of inspiration, of the kind Erdős could swiftly conjure over coffee in a faculty lounge.
Most tasks require a combination of bonding and bridging: flashes of inspiration to identify the right approach, and long effort characterized by selfless teamwork to put it into practice. That means a compromise between bonding and bridging—a willingness to allow a degree of messiness into a tidy team. This chapter is all about why getting the best of both approaches can prove very challenging indeed.
• • •
If we’re looking for a petri dish to examine the nature of teamwork in the twenty-first century, a computer game isn’t a bad candidate. Game design requires a marriage of skills—visual, audio, and narrative artists work with skilled software engineers alongside commercial functions such as finance and marketing. The technical possibilities are always changing, and for many games it is important to take full advantage of the very latest technology. Like a Hollywood movie, a game is an extended yet temporary project with plenty of freelancers and ad hoc teams.
In modern working life, most projects are more like designing a computer game than solving a mathematical theorem or winning Olympic gold.
So when three sociologists wanted a case study of how teams produce products that are both original and commercially successful, they turned to the computer games industry. The three researchers, Mathijs de Vaan, David Stark, and Balázs Vedres, were also attracted by the rich data that was available about the game industry. They were able to assemble a vast database of the artists, programmers, and other individuals who had worked on computer games between 1979—the birth of the commercial game industry—and 2009. The data described 12,422 games, and the 139,727 different people who had worked on them.10
One crucial advantage of this approach was that they were able to develop a much more dynamic view of collaborative networks. Typically, when social scientists analyze networks they look at a snapshot of relationships at a given moment. Analyzing the gaming data set, however, revealed teams of designers and engineers forming and splitting to work on one game after another.
The researchers also had access to financial information and critical reviews, and they were able to develop a detailed picture of each game, identifying more than one hundred different stylistic elements—for example, whether the game was first person or third person, 2-D or 3-D, a shooter or a flight simulator. In short, they were able to understand both the best games—the “game changers” that were stylistically original, while also being critical and commercial hits—and the structure of the teams that created those games.
Think about what that structure might be. In some ways, making a great computer game is like training for a top rowing race. It requires bonding: focus, and trust, and commitment. Team members need to understand each other quickly and well. There is no room for free riders, or for disloyalty. But viewed another way, a great computer game is like a great mathematics paper. It requires bridging: the clever combination of disparate ideas. So what does a network analysis of great computer games reveal? Are they put together by tight-knit teams? Or created by a far-flung and diverse network?
The answer: neither, and both. What de Vaan, Stark, and Vedres found was that the outstanding games were forged by networks of teams. The social networks behind these games contained several different clusters, groups of people who had worked together many times before and so had the trust and commitment and mutual understanding necessary to pull long hours in pursuit of a shared goal. But the networks were also diverse, in the sense that each of these teams was different from the others, having worked on very different projects in the past.
This is not conventional social bridging, where a tidily packaged idea is carried from one cluster of people to a distinct cluster of people, where the idea can be used profitably in a fresh context. Instead, the researchers were uncovering creative tension, where two or three tightly bonded teams with very different creative histories had to find a way to work together over an extended period to produce something quite new. That sounds exciting, and it’s not a shock to hear that the cognitive diversity of the teams was an asset, nor that close-knit teams could achieve remarkable things.
But the greater effectiveness of networks of diverse teams, knitted together at what Vedres calls “structural folds,” comes at a cost. “Structural folds shorten the lifespan of teams,” he says. “They fall apart much quicker. The instability comes from different sources. Maybe there are concerns about loyalty, or perhaps just scheduling conflicts. But such groups fall apart much faster than a random baseline.”11
Attempting to put two tight-knit teams together in a single organization can present the organization’s leaders with a severe headache—as a remarkable adventure from the 1950s demonstrates.
• • •
On June 19, 1954, eleven boys were collected by bus from Oklahoma City and journeyed to a Boy Scout campsite at Robbers Cave State Park, a quiet, densely wooded area forty miles away from the nearest town. (It had once been a hideout for Jesse James.) The boys had never met but they had plenty in common—white, eleven years old, all from Protestant families of modest means—and before the bus had even collected them all, friendships were beginning to form. Loosely supervised by adult camp counselors, the boys chose their bunks, and around the campfire after supper they looked forward to three weeks of adventure—camping, swimming, boating, baseball, and treasure hunts.12
The boys were soon exploring the hills and woods around the two-hundred-acre campsite. It was humid and uncomfortably hot, but the group soon found a perfect spot in which to swim. They decided to build a causeway and a diving board, and worked together to carry rocks in a human chain, alternating their sweaty toil with dips in the cool of the river. They cooked hamburgers outside at their hideout rather than returning to the campsite mess hall. To help the boys who were nervous swimmers or divers, the group would form a ring of swimmers around the board to support their anxious friends. Soon, the group vowed, “We will all be able to swim.” Working together, they carried a canoe up to the swimming hole, dug a latrine nearby, pitched tents as a storm approached, spotted a rattlesnake, and planned an overnight hike.
The counselors occasionally stepped in with a task for the group, such as a treasure hunt with a cash prize for the group to spend together. But these interventions were rare: the adults tended to watch from the sidelines, giving the boys space to make their own decisions.
What the boys did not realize was that each decision, comment, or disagreement was being painstakingly recorded by the apparently inattentive adults. They jotted notes down in shorthand and completed them in the evening after the boys had gone to sleep. The group was part of an experiment, a masterpiece in manipulation and one that would later be called the “forgotten classic” of social science.13 The experiment was being supervised by a group of researchers led by a social psychologist, Muzafer Sherif.
There was something else that the boys hadn’t realized. A day after they had arrived at Robbers Cave, another group of boys very much like them had arrived and set up camp on the other side of a hill. The second group was having just as much excitement, building a rope bridge over their swimming hole, performing campfire skits, solving a treasure hunt, and—with the help of adults—killing a poisonous copperhead snake that slithered into their camp. Despite occasional disagreements, most of the boys were having a glorious time. But the two groups were unaware of each other’s existence.
Both groups had decided to give themselves a name and a flag. The first group were the “Rattlers” and the second, the “Eagles.” After a few days, some Rattlers heard the Eagles playing baseball on “their” ball field. The staff explained to each group that there was another group of boys in the camp, and soon the Eagles and the Rattlers were eager to compete with each other on the baseball field. The camp staff suggested a series of contests—baseball, tug-of-war, tent pitching, a talent show—with a trophy, medals, and much-coveted Swiss Army knives for the winners.
The trouble began almost immediately. The Rattlers arrived early for the game, considering themselves the home team. They planted a “Keep Off” sign and a Rattler flag on the baseball diamond. Dark threats of revenge were muttered against any Eagle who disturbed the flag. Then the Eagles approached, carrying their flag on a pole and singing the ominous notes of the theme from Dragnet, a popular TV show of the day. The groups sized each other up, and then the name-calling and jeering began, followed by the chanting of insulting songs about the other group. “You’re not Eagles, you’re pigeons!” yelled one Rattler, and the Rattlers went on to win the game. Smarting from the defeat, one Eagle stole a glove that a Rattler had left on the field and threw it in the river.
A bitter rivalry developed. Occasional displays of sportsmanship became less and less frequent, replaced by jeers and insults. The Eagles and Rattlers ate together in the mess hall, but they segregated themselves and threw food, paper cups, and taunts at each other.
The experimenters had been planning to create some artificial friction between the groups, but they abandoned that plan. It wasn’t necessary: the boys needed no provocation to go to war.
After supper on the first day, the Rattlers defeated the Eagles at tug-of-war. The Eagles were despondent until someone noticed the Rattler flag on the ball field. Without delay, the Eagles ripped it down, tore it up, burned it, and rehung the charred rag. When the Rattlers discovered their desecrated flag, brawling began, and the adults had to intervene to break up the fight and persuade the boys to play another game of baseball.
This time the Eagles won. They celebrated with supper, comedy skits around the campfire, and then a well-earned sleep. But before midnight, the Eagles were shocked awake by the revenge of the Rattlers, who burst into their hut, overturned their beds, ripped down the window screens, and stole comic books and a pair of jeans belonging to the de facto leader of the Eagles. (The next day, the jeans appeared on a flagpole, daubed with insulting slogans in bright orange paint.)
More raids followed from each side, and with the Eagles wielding socks stuffed with stones, the staff had to step in to prevent serious violence. The staff fudged some of the competitions to keep the series of contests close, but beyond that, no manipulation was needed: the two groups had grown to loathe each other.
When the Eagles won the overall contest—with a trophy, medals, and much-prized pocket knives—at least one of them was so happy that he wept. The Eagles ran to their swimming creek and leaped into the water in celebration. This was a mistake: the Rattlers raided again in their absence, overturning beds, heaping personal possessions in a mess, cutting boats loose to send them floating down the river, and stealing the precious pocket knives and medals. Confronted later by the furious Eagles, the Rattlers announced that they would gladly return the knives and medals to their opponents.
All the Eagles had to do was to get down on their bellies in the dirt and crawl.
We now have the answer to an old question. Are children vicious and violent, as portrayed in William Golding’s unforgettable Lord of the Flies? Or are they the cheerful do-gooders portrayed in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books? Muzafer Sherif discovered that children are both. The boys were creative and mutually supportive, until confronted with a competitor group. Then they became insular, violent, and cruel.
Now, children are not adults, and one would not expect adults to fall out over a mere game.* But it is striking how easily tribal loyalties emerge in adult contexts. Sometimes the consequences are far graver than anything a group of boys could produce: What are most genocides if not tribal conflict carried to the worst extremes? But more often, we grown-ups suppress our tribal feelings. We naturally divide ourselves into tribes (we’re the marketing department, they are the accounting department). Even if we rarely steal from these rival tribes or insult them to their faces, the annoyance we feel is quite real, and often owes more to our tribal feelings than to any genuine offense the accounting team may have committed.
One instructive study was conducted by the legal scholar and policy wonk Cass Sunstein, with two social psychologists, Reid Hastie and David Schkade. The three researchers assembled participants from two quite different cities: Boulder, Colorado, where people often lean to the left (it’s known jokingly as “The People’s Republic of Boulder”) and Colorado Springs, which is well known as a conservative stronghold. Participants were privately asked their views on three politically heated topics: climate change, affirmative action, and same-sex partnerships. Then they were put into groups with others from their town, and asked to discuss the issues as a group.14
Before these discussions, as one might expect, the people from Boulder tended to espouse left-wing views while the citizens of Colorado Springs tended to favor the views of the right. But there was a broad spread of views among each town’s citizens, and a substantial overlap between the groups: some people from liberal Boulder were to the right of some people from conservative Colorado Springs.
After the discussions, the range of political views sharply changed. First, people were emboldened after discussing controversial issues with people who tended to hold similar views, and their views became more extreme. The Boulder groups moved a long way further to the left, and the Colorado Springs groups moved a long way further to the right. This was true not only of what people said in public, but also of what they told the researchers in private. Second, the diversity within each group was suppressed, so the spectrum of opinion was much narrower. The Boulder groups converged on left-wing views, of course, and the Colorado Springs groups converged on right-wing views. Given these two shifts in the groups’ views—more extreme, with less internal variety—the inevitable result was that the groups became sharply divided from each other. Where once there had been a substantial overlap between the residents of Boulder and Colorado Springs, now that overlap was much reduced. Adults can be tribal, too.
In one way, the Eagles and the Rattlers had a big advantage over many adults seeking to work together: they were homogenous. They were from the same city and the same race, religion, and class—and of course they were all eleven-year-old boys, with all that that implied about a shared love of baseball, hamburgers, and exploring. Many adults need to find a reason to cooperate based on far less common ground.
• • •
It’s now widely recognized that cognitive diversity is a recipe for creativity and an antidote to groupthink. Indeed, the very word “groupthink” was popularized by a psychologist, Irving Janis, to describe a process whereby like-minded people make bad decisions without seriously examining them. Keen to maintain a friendly atmosphere within the group, they self-censor their own doubts and do not challenge each other. Since the group is full of smart people, each one feels confident that the group must be making a smart decision. Each one abdicates his own responsibility to think critically, assuming that others are doing the hard thinking for him.15
Back in 1951, two decades before Janis published his ideas on groupthink, another psychologist, Solomon Asch, had carried out a famous set of experiments exploring conformity and dissent. Asch found that people would sometimes suppress their own judgments in order to agree with a unanimous group, even though the group was clearly in the wrong. (The group was made up of actors working for Solomon Asch, surrounding a single, rather confused participant, unaware that he was being set up.) The cure for this groupthink? Even a single dissenting voice broke the spell, and the experimental subjects felt much more able to express their own dissent.16
More recently, complexity scientist Scott Page published The Difference,17 a book that uses a mathematical rather than a psychological framework to explore similar questions. Page showed that in many problem-solving contexts, “diversity trumps ability.” For example, if you already have four brilliant statisticians working on a policy problem, even a mediocre sociologist or economist may add more to your team than another brilliant statistician. If you’re trying to improve your tennis game, you may do better working with a tennis coach, a nutritionist, and a general fitness trainer rather than three tennis coaches. And, adds Page, “There’s a lot of empirical data to show that diverse cities are more productive, diverse boards of directors make better decisions, the most innovative companies are diverse.”18
The logic behind these results is that when dealing with a complicated problem, even the smartest person can get stuck. Adding a new perspective or a new set of skills can unstick us, even if the perspective is off-the-wall or the skills are mediocre. The fresh input works much like the Oblique Strategies employed by Brian Eno or the random leaps used by silicon chip algorithms. It’s the difference itself that helps.
“If we’re in an organization where everyone thinks in the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place,” says Scott Page. But people with different problem-solving skills will get stuck in different places. “One person can do their best, and then someone else can come in and improve on it.”
While this all sounds very reasonable, the truth is that facing up to these different views can be messy and awkward. For example, in 2006 the psychologist Samuel Sommers examined the decision-making processes of juries, some all-white and some racially mixed. (These were mock trials based on real cases.) Deliberating the case of a black defendant, the mixed juries did a better job of working through the information presented to them. This wasn’t just because the black jurors brought a fresh perspective to the deliberation room. It was also because white jurors were less lazy in their thinking when black jurors were present, citing more facts about the case and making fewer mistakes.19 People think harder when they fear their views may be challenged by outsiders. Other researchers have found similar effects. For example, when experimental subjects are challenged to write an essay, they write better, more logical prose when told their work will be read by someone with different political beliefs rather than someone like-minded.20
When deliberating with a group, then, we should be seeking out people who think differently, who have different experiences and training, and who look different. Those people may bring fresh and useful ideas to the table; even if they do not, they’ll bring out the best in us—even if only by making us feel awkward and forcing us to shape up. That messy, challenging process is one we should embrace.
Unfortunately, this is not something that comes naturally, as demonstrated by three psychologists who recently published a fascinating study of group dynamics. Katherine Phillips, Katie Liljenquist, and Margaret Neale challenged students to work together in groups to solve a murder mystery problem.21 The groups were given various materials about a murder—witness statements, alibis, and a list of three murder suspects. Their task was to figure out who committed the crime. In some cases the groups comprised four friends—members of the same college fraternity or sorority. In other cases the groups were made up of three friends and a stranger.
Given what we’ve been discovering about the advantages of cognitive diversity, it may not be a surprise to hear that the groups that included a stranger did a better job of finding the murderer. As with the diverse juries or the essay writers who expected a political challenge, the stranger provoked the friends to raise their game. The friends were more careful about exploring their own conclusions, paid more attention to the newcomer and to the task at hand, and were more willing to change their views. Assumptions that might have been allowed to ride among friends had to be examined carefully under the scrutiny of a stranger.
What is more, this effect was large: groups that had to accommodate an outsider were substantially more likely to reach the correct conclusion—they did so 75 percent of the time, versus 54 percent for a homogenous group and 44 percent for an individual.
The problem comes when we ask a different question—not how well the group did, but how well the members of the group thought they’d done. The answers are remarkable. Members of diverse teams didn’t feel very sure that they’d gotten the right answer, and they felt socially uncomfortable. The teams made up of four friends had a more pleasant time and they also tended to be confident—wrongly—that they had found the right answer.
When it comes to picking our own dream team, we seem incapable of figuring out what’s good for us. The diverse teams were more effective, but that is not how things seemed to people in those teams: team members doubted their answers, distrusted their process, and felt that the entire interaction was an awkward mess. The homogenous teams were ineffective and complacent. They enjoyed themselves and wrongly assumed that because their friendly conversation was smooth and effortless they were doing well.
Observing small groups in the real world points to similar conclusions. Consider the research of sociologist Brooke Harrington, who studied the stock-picking investment clubs of 1990s California much as an anthropologist might study the wedding customs of Uzbekistan. This was a fascinating time, when world stock markets were booming, media coverage was fervent, and people clubbed together to learn about investing in stocks and to invest money as a group. These investment clubs weren’t purely social, like book clubs; with substantial sums of money invested, the clubs were often incorporated and had formal rules of governance.22
Unfortunately, the clubs were often fun. Clubs of friends made far worse decisions than clubs formed—for example—through the workplace, where club members do not necessarily know one another outside the monthly club gatherings. As Harrington zoomed in on a small number of clubs, sitting in on month after month of investment meetings, it became clear why this was. The “friendly” clubs would make decisions aimed at preserving those friendships rather than picking the best stocks.
For example, one friendly group decided not to invest in Bombardier simply because one member thought the company was an arms manufacturer. In fact, the company largely makes trains and civilian planes, but the group wasn’t prepared to even discuss whether Bombardier was or was not in the arms business. “Why run roughshod over the feelings of members?” said one member of the club. “If there’s strong opposition, we can’t push.”23
Harrington noticed that the groups of friends made poor financial decisions in order to keep the group itself running smoothly. While the less social investment clubs would have voted down unappealing investment proposals, the sociable clubs would postpone sensitive decisions to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. Cash accumulated rather than being profitably invested, because when faced with a tough choice, the group’s decision would be: “Let’s discuss it another time.”
Here’s an example of the kind of conversation they were avoiding, which took place at a meeting of a non-sociable investment club, Portfolio Associates. A club member was doing a poor job of explaining the strengths and weaknesses of his recommended investment. “We’re falling short of our mission—we need data and analysis,” commented another member. “You’re being kind of picky—I worked hard on this,” was the defensive response, and the conversation grew tense. The idea was promptly voted down, and one member muttered, “This used to be fun.”24
Harrington witnessed the entire discussion and noted the sour mood. But Portfolio Associates had superb financial results. As with the mixed student teams working on murder mysteries, Portfolio Associates did brilliantly and had a miserable time.
It makes sense that for most teams, there must be a trade-off between the cohesion of a rowing team and the radical openness of an Erdős network. The trouble is that we systematically get the trade-off wrong. Faced with a choice of more cohesion versus more openness, our temptation to be tidy-minded means we’ll go for cohesion every time. Cohesion makes us feel more comfortable. We mistakenly think that diversity is getting in the way even when it’s helping. Like Carlos Alomar in Berlin, we don’t enjoy the disruption, we don’t believe the disruption is useful, and it may be months or years before we finally realize how much we gained from what seemed at the time to be an awful mess.
• • •
The modern world is full of opportunities to meet new people. We rarely take them. We’re timid about whom to date, whom to hire—even whom to schmooze with at corporate networking events. A clever study by two psychologists, Paul Ingram and Michael Morris, was built around just such an event. It was a mixer, an evening of drinks and chat for executives. Ingram and Morris invited a range of high-powered consultants, entrepreneurs, bankers, and other businesspeople to the event in New York. About a hundred showed up. Almost all had emphasized that their aim was to meet new people rather than hang around with old associates; they told the researchers they wanted to build new ties, or expand their social network.25
What they actually did was rather different. The scientists were able to track exactly where people went and whom people chatted with during the party, thanks to a digital tag that each attendee had been given to wear. The tags revealed that people were making a beeline for people they already knew and then staying close to them. When they did meet strangers, they did so because those strangers were friends of friends. As a result the new acquaintances tended to be from the same industry.
(No wonder that two other researchers, sociologists Howard Aldrich and Martha Martinez-Firestone, recently concluded that contrary to their reputation, most entrepreneurs aren’t terribly creative. One reason: most entrepreneurs hang out with other people who are exactly like them.26)
Of course it’s human nature to spend time with your friends. But what’s striking about this research is that people said they intended to do exactly the opposite. People went to a networking event with the expressed intention of expanding their social networks, and they didn’t even try. Those that did meet new people encountered only friends of friends, perpetuating old cliques.
In principle, the modern world gives us more opportunities than ever to forge relationships with people who do not look, act, or think the same way that we do. Travel is cheaper, communication is free and instantaneous, and a host of tools exist to help us reach across previously unbridgeable social divides. But what do we do with these opportunities? We keep our social networks nice and tidy by seeking out people just like us.
Consider a study of college friendships conducted by Angela Bahns, Kate Pickett, and Christian Crandall.27 These psychologists compared the way students formed friendships at small college campuses, of around five hundred students apiece, with the friendship structure at the University of Kansas, which has a student population of a medium-sized town. The researchers sought out pairs of people who were chatting in the student union or cafeteria, and gathered details about students’ age, sexual orientation, and ethnicity along with more fine-grained information such as how much they drank, smoke, or exercised, and what they felt about issues such as abortion, and their attitudes to Arabs, gay men, and black people. And they were asked about their friendships.
With twenty-five thousand students to choose from, the University of Kansas offered a far greater range of views and lifestyles than the smaller colleges did. In principle, then, friendship networks at the large campus should be far more diverse. They weren’t. On the larger campus, students were able to seek out their ideological twins; on the smaller campuses, people made friends with people very different from them.* Forced by circumstance to befriend people at least somewhat different from themselves, they did so. And they made the friendships work: friendships at the smaller colleges were actually closer and lasted longer than those at the larger university. Offered a wider choice of friends, students at larger schools chose sameness. It’s astonishing how widespread this tendency to homophily can be, and it can be both deep-rooted and absurdly superficial.*
But while our attraction to people who share our outlook is not new, what is new is that we’re far more able to indulge that desire. Women are now far freer, better educated, and better paid, which is good news. But one unintended consequence of that freedom is what economists call “assortative mating.” Executives with MBAs used to marry their secretaries; now they marry other executives with MBAs.28 And just as people choose ever more similar spouses, they also choose ever more similar neighborhoods in a process called “assortative migration.” In the United States, neighborhoods are increasingly segregated—economically, politically, almost any way one cares to look at the data.29 We have an unprecedented choice of news outlets. Americans, Canadians, Australians, and Brits can easily read The Times of India or The Japan Times. But we don’t. Instead, conservatives watch Fox News and liberals watch MSNBC.30
There’s the Internet, of course, a cornucopia of news and opinion, but we sample its riches selectively—often without realizing how the selection is made. Consider the way that the troubles of Ferguson, Missouri, were covered by social media in the summer of 2014 after a police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed a young black man, Michael Brown. Night after night of confrontation between police and protesters barely made a ripple on Facebook. The most likely explanation for that is that Facebook is set up for sharing good news. You signal your approval of a post by clicking “Like,” which feels like an inappropriate response to a photograph of a masked protester or a line of riot cops. Because such photographs aren’t “Liked” much, Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t tend to display them much; Facebook users might also self-censor, avoiding grim and controversial topics.
In contrast, Ferguson did trend widely on Twitter, which posts an unfiltered feed and offers “retweets” instead of “likes.” But the story here is not much more cheerful. Emma Pierson, a young statistician based at Oxford University, dug into the data and found that tweets about Ferguson were clearly divisible into two groups, the “blue tweets,” which claimed that Brown’s death was an outrage and the police response to protesters was oppressive, and the “red tweets,” which claimed that police officer Wilson was being scapegoated and the protesters were looters. (Many of the tweets made false claims, which were rapidly retweeted.)31 Pierson’s analysis showed that the two groups, with very different views of the world, barely interacted.32
From the middle of one of these groups, surrounded by outrage expressed by like-minded people, it is easy to believe that the world agrees with you. Of course the Internet is full of contrary viewpoints that might challenge our assumptions and encourage us to think more deeply, but few of us realize that we might have to get out and look for those viewpoints. In the words of author and digital activist Eli Pariser, a “filter bubble” exists to give us more of what we already believe. It is sometimes hard to see that bubble for what it is. When our stream of social media updates fits tidily into our preconceptions, we are hardly likely to mess it up by seeking out the people who disagree.
The pattern repeats endlessly: we gain new choices about whom to listen to, whom to trust, and whom to befriend—and we use those new choices to tighten the circle around us to people who are more and more like us. Given a larger social map to explore, we pick the tidiest corner we can find. We use a large, diverse campus to meet people exactly like us. At a networking event, we stick with old friends even though our explicit aim was to meet new people. And when we are forced into the discomfiting position of working with strangers, we disparage the very team dynamic that is bringing us success.
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Traditionally, corporate attempts to promote collaboration have emphasized “team building.” These efforts are fine up to a point, but we can’t expect too much from them. Most team-building attempts simply involve hanging out together, or participating in some fairly trivial activity. That didn’t help at Robbers Cave. Muzafer Sherif arranged for the Eagles and the Rattlers to play games together, watch films together, and eat together. None of this activity broke through the atmosphere of mutual loathing. In each case, insults were hurled (followed by chunks of mashed potato, when available).
So if we want to embrace a messier social setting, to get out of our bonding comfort zones and start bridging, too, what do we need to do? Four lessons suggest themselves.
The first, and most straightforward, is to recognize this tendency in ourselves to spend time with people who look and sound just like us. Instead we need to find the social equivalent of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: people with whom or places or situations where we won’t be able to avoid new kinds of interactions. Perhaps it’s as simple as joining a new group, learning a skill, or engaging in a pastime with strangers. Perhaps it’s taking an extended trip to a distant city, a place where everyone is a stranger. Or perhaps it is being a little braver at the next networking event.
A second lesson emerges from the work of de Vaan, Stark, and Vedres on how networks of different teams were able to come together and produce excellent computer games: we should place great value on the people who connect together disparate teams. These are not just Erdős-style free spirits, but people who have worked intimately with more than one group, whom several teams regard as “one of us.” Rather than play a mere bridging role, they sit in the intersection of the Venn diagram. They are both bridging and bonding simultaneously. “The role of these people is to knit together the teams and to build trust,” says Balázs Vedres.33
This is a tough and undervalued role. Says Mathijs de Vaan, “there is a lot of pressure on these people.”34 And Vedres adds, “It is hard to be a double insider.” It is, however, essential.
A third lesson is to constantly remind yourself of the benefits of tension, which can be easy to forget when all you want is a quiet life. When Samuel Sommers studied jury deliberations, he found that it was the presence of the black jurors that prodded the white jurors into thinking more carefully about the case. De Vaan, Stark, and Vedres argue that creative collaboration is all about a sense of dissonance. You don’t just take a nice, neatly packaged idea from a stranger and put it into a fresh context. It is the ill-matched social gears grinding together that produces the creative spark.
The Sky cycling team won the 2012 and 2013 Tour de France, but then underperformed in 2014. The team’s manager, Dave Brailsford, was wise enough to identify the problem: “We’d been becoming pretty aligned over the last six years working together,” he said of the core team around him. “If you gave us a problem we’d come back with the same answer, [we had lost] the cognitive diversity we had as a group. [Before] when I would say something, they would say ‘bollocks,’ we’d argue a lot, there would be tension but we’d come up with some good ideas, constantly pushing forward.”35
Brailsford also knew what he had to do: rock the boat. “It’s a pain in the arse to do it. It’s going to be stressful, it’s not going to be pleasant, but ultimately you have to rock it from side to side, bring new people in who will question everything, ask why we are doing this, take us forward.” Sky bounced back and won the Tour de France again in 2015.
A final lesson is that we have to believe the ultimate goal of the collaboration is something worth achieving, and worth the mess of dealing with awkward people. Brailsford says that “team harmony” is overrated: he wants “goal harmony” instead, a team focused on achieving a common goal rather than having members get along with one another. When Brooke Harrington watched friendly investment clubs underperforming, she was watching people more interested in staying friends than in achieving financial goals. Brailsford doesn’t seem to be interested in staying friends; he is interested in achieving goals.36
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Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues had provoked a war between two tribes of boys, and some popular approaches to peacemaking—arranging ways for the tribes to spend some time together and get to know each other, like playing games and sharing meals—weren’t working.
So Sherif took a different route to peace, one that began with the camp’s water supply. Water from a reservoir was pumped to a large water tank a little over a mile outside the camp. The camp staff quietly went up to the tank and blocked the flow of water down to the camp by closing a valve and covering it with large rocks; they also prevented water from being drawn directly from the tank by stuffing sacking into a tap. The boys were then informed that there seemed to be some problem with the camp’s water supply—possibly the fault of vandals who, it was said, had caused problems in the past.
As every faucet in the camp ran dry and the boys grew thirstier, the staff led four groups to scour the area for possible faults. Having eliminated alternative explanations, the four groups converged on the water tank and quickly began to figure out the problem: yes, the tank was still full of water; no, the tap didn’t work; yes, the valve had been closed and blocked. Eagles and Rattlers shared tools and took turns and eventually the valve was open and the tap unblocked. The Eagles didn’t even have water bottles with them and were especially thirsty, and the Rattlers allowed them to drink first without protest.
Solving the water shortage did not bring peace overnight—the two groups continued to bicker and throw food at supper—but there were several small gestures of friendship. The way ahead seemed clear: when the two tribes had to work together to solve a mutual problem, relations improved. And so the experimenters continued to manufacture problems large and small, most notably a truck “breakdown” that soon had all the boys tugging on a length of rope to get it started again. The self-segregation that had been such a feature of their meals quickly broke down as the boys mixed together to win their tug-of-war with the truck.
Peace was beginning to break out; soon the tribal identities themselves were blurring. The two groups had agreed to take turns to cook for each other, but then everyone joined in to cook together. When the boys had to pitch tents and each group discovered missing equipment, they turned to each other and swiftly—almost wordlessly—exchanged gear so that both tents went up smoothly.
The message of Muzafer Sherif’s work is that when you give people an important enough problem to solve together, they can put aside their differences. A good problem contains the seeds of its own solution. Rather than lubricating people with drinks at a networking reception, or getting them to play silly games at a team-building event, the way to get conflicting teams to gel is to give them something worth doing together—something where failing to cooperate simply isn’t an option.
At the end of three weeks—one week of tribal bonding, one of tribal conflict, and one of tribal reconciliation—the boys returned home on a single bus at their own request. They mingled together without regard to their old group identities. When the bus stopped at a refreshment stand, the Rattlers remembered five dollars that they had won by vanquishing the Eagles in a “bean toss” contest. They decided that this prize fund would be used to buy milk shakes for both groups. Individual boys paid for their own sandwiches and treats, but those with spare money chipped in to help those who lacked funds.
The distinction between Eagles and Rattlers had been forgotten. All that was left was a bus full of boys who had shared an unforgettable summer vacation.