The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

  He picks an outside table, so we can see the crowd. He chats with the waiter, listening to the specials with warm intensity. Then the eyebrows steeple. “So, what do you want to know?” he asks.

  Cooper’s backstory, like that of most Team Six guys, is idiosyncratic. He was raised in small-town Pennsylvania and grew up wanting to be a doctor. He majored in molecular biology at Juniata College, a tiny liberal arts school that allowed military recruiters on campus just one day a year. He heard of the SEALs from a history teacher and could still recite the line that hooked him: “SEALs are highly intelligent, copious readers.” He was fascinated, and after graduation, he made his way to training. He survived Hell Week, passed Draper Kauffman’s selection process, and made it through another selection to join Team Six in 1993.

  There are many stories Cooper can tell—and many he cannot—about life as a Team Six operator. But when you ask him about building teams, he tells only one story. It happened in Afghanistan on New Year’s Eve 2001, on a desolate road between Bagram and Jalalabad. Cooper was on that road because he had received an order to accompany his commander on a four-person route-reconnaissance mission in which they would drive from Bagram to Jalalabad and back in a single day.

  The road was a nightmare: an explosive-infested, often impassable 110-mile stretch populated by bandits and insurgents. But Cooper’s commander insisted they go, exuding confidence as he outlined the plan: They would ride in an armored Suburban with specially reinforced tires. They would be fast and stealthy. Everything would be fine. Cooper held his doubts, followed rank, and went along.

  From the first miles out of Bagram, things started to go sideways. The road turned out to be worse than expected—in places more like a hiking trail than a highway. The ground clearance on the armored Suburban was only a few inches, so they were slowed to a crawl much of the time. By nightfall, when they finally reached Jalalabad, Cooper figured they would stay and wait for daylight. Instead, the commander announced they would be turning around and driving back to Bagram that night so they could complete the mission as planned.

  Cooper objected—that was a bad idea, he said. The discussion got heated; Cooper and his commander yelled back and forth before the commander finally invoked his rank. Cooper submitted. With a sinking feeling, he climbed in the Suburban, and the group set off into the night.

  The ambush happened an hour later. A convoy of trucks and jeeps rumbled out of the blackness and surrounded the Suburban. Cooper’s driver tried to escape, but the reinforced tires blew out. They were driving on rims, in the dark, with gunfire arriving from all directions. One SEAL operator was bleeding, shot through the leg. It was, as Cooper says, an unmitigated shit show.

  The SEALs had no choice but to surrender, climbing out with their arms raised, sure they were about to be killed. “For some reason, they decided not to shoot us,” Cooper says. “Either they were scared of retaliation, or they saw that we weren’t much of a threat.” The insurgents roared off into the darkness, carrying the SEALs’ weapons. Cooper and his team were able to contact Delta and British Special Forces units, which flew in to rescue them a few hours later. He returned to Bagram with a second chance and a new worldview.

  “That night put me on a different path,” Cooper says. “From that moment on, I realized that I needed to figure out ways to help the group function more effectively. The problem here is that, as humans, we have an authority bias that’s incredibly strong and unconscious—if a superior tells you to do something, by God we tend to follow it, even when it’s wrong. Having one person tell other people what to do is not a reliable way to make good decisions. So how do you create conditions where that doesn’t happen, where you develop a hive mind? How do you develop ways to challenge each other, ask the right questions, and never defer to authority? We’re trying to create leaders among leaders. And you can’t just tell people to do that. You have to create the conditions where they start to do it.”

  Starting that night in 2001, Cooper set out to build those conditions for his teams. His approach to nurturing cooperation could be described as an insurgent campaign against authority bias. Merely creating space for cooperation, he realized, wasn’t enough; he had to generate a series of unmistakable signals that tipped his men away from their natural tendencies and toward interdependence and cooperation. “Human nature is constantly working against us,” he says. “You have to get around those barriers, and they never go away.”

  He started with small things. A new team member who called him by his title was quickly corrected: “You can call me Coop, Dave, or Fuckface, it’s your choice.” When Cooper gave his opinion, he was careful to attach phrases that provided a platform for someone to question him, like “Now let’s see if someone can poke holes in this” or “Tell me what’s wrong with this idea.” He steered away from giving orders and instead asked a lot of questions. Anybody have any ideas?

  During missions, Cooper sought opportunities to spotlight the need for his men to speak up, especially with newer team members. He was not subtle. “For example, when you’re in an urban environment, windows are bad,” he tells me. “You stand in front of one, and you can get shot by a sniper and never know where it came from. So if you’re a new guy and you see me standing in front of a window in Fallujah, what are you going to say? Are you going to tell me to move my ass, or are you going to stand there quietly and let me get shot? When I ask new guys that question, they say, ‘I’ll tell you to move.’ So I tell them, ‘Well, that’s exactly how you should conduct yourself all the time around here, with every single decision.’ ”

  Cooper began to develop tools. “There’re things you can do,” he says. “Spending time together outside, hanging out—those help. One of the best things I’ve found to improve a team’s cohesion is to send them to do some hard, hard training. There’s something about hanging off a cliff together, and being wet and cold and miserable together, that makes a team come together.”

  One of the most useful tools was the After-Action Review, the truth-telling session we referenced in Chapter 7. AARs happen immediately after each mission and consist of a short meeting in which the team gathers to discuss and replay key decisions. AARs are led not by commanders but by enlisted men. There are no agendas, and no minutes are kept. The goal is to create a flat landscape without rank, where people can figure out what really happened and talk about mistakes—especially their own.

  “It’s got to be safe to talk,” Cooper says. “Rank switched off, humility switched on. You’re looking for that moment where people can say, ‘I screwed that up.’ In fact, I’d say those might be the most important four words any leader can say: I screwed that up.”

  Good AARs follow a template. “You have to do it right away,” Cooper says. “You put down your gun, circle up, and start talking. Usually you take the mission from beginning to end, chronologically. You talk about every decision, and you talk about the process. You have to resist the temptation to wrap it all up in a bow, and try to dig for the truth of what happened, so people can really learn from it. You have to ask why, and then when they respond, you ask another why. Why did you shoot at that particular point? What did you see? How did you know? What other options were there? You ask and ask and ask.”

  The goal of an AAR is not to excavate truth for truth’s sake, or to assign credit and blame, but rather to build a shared mental model that can be applied to future missions. “Look, nobody can see it all or know it all,” Cooper says. “But if you keep getting together and digging out what happened, then after a while everybody can see what’s really happening, not just their small piece of it. People can share experiences and mistakes. They can see how what they do affects others, and we can start to create a group mind where everybody can work together and perform to the team’s potential.”

  Cooper uses the phrase “backbone of humility” to describe the tone of a good AAR. It’s a useful phrase because it captures the paradoxical nature of the task: a relentless willingness to see the truth an
d take ownership. With an AAR, as with Log PT or a Harold, group members have to combine discipline with openness. And as with a Log PT or a Harold, it’s not easy. But it does pay off.

  After his revelation on the road to Bagram, Cooper spent the next decade leading teams, mostly in the Middle East. He gradually rose to Team Six’s highest enlisted rank of command master chief, which placed him in charge of the entire group’s training. In March 2011 he and another Team Six leader were summoned by Admiral William McRaven, commander of Joint Special Operations Command, to CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia.

  McRaven got right to the point: “We think we’ve found Osama bin Laden.” He then outlined the plan. Team Six operators would fly into Pakistan in stealth helicopters, fast-rope onto the compound’s roof, and kill the Al Qaeda leader.

  Cooper listened, his attention drawn to one element: the stealth helicopters. He knew they were attractive to McRaven because they were invisible to radar and would thus allow the team to travel undetected through Pakistani airspace. But Cooper also knew they were untested in combat, and that special ops history was littered with disasters caused by using untested tools in combat. So he spoke up.

  “With all due respect, sir,” Cooper said, “I would not use those helicopters on this mission. I would plan something else in parallel. If we can’t go with something else, then I go with the helicopters.”

  “We’re not changing the plan now,” McRaven said.

  Cooper decided to keep pushing. He wanted to get this on the table. “Sir, I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you what I thought.”

  McRaven raised his voice. “We’re not changing the plan now,” he said.

  “In that moment, I was pretty sure I was getting fired,” Cooper tells me later. “But I wasn’t going to keep my mouth shut.” He pushed again.

  McRaven shut him down again. The discussion was over.

  Cooper walked out of that room facing a problem: How do you follow an order that carries what you consider to be an unacceptably high risk? In essence, he was in precisely the same position he’d been in back on the road to Bagram on New Year’s Eve 2001. Should he follow the order or defy it?

  Cooper chose a third path. He accepted the use of the stealth helicopters and also started preparing in case they failed. In the ensuing weeks, the SEALs built replicas of Bin Laden’s compound in North Carolina, Nevada, and Afghanistan. In each place, Cooper ran downed-helicopter scenarios over and over. He simulated crashes outside the compound, inside the compound, on the roof, in the yard, hundreds of yards away. Each was essentially the same: Partway through the operation, Cooper would surprise the team with the order “You’re going down, now.” The pilots would autorotate the helicopter to the ground, and the team would then attack the mock compound from wherever they happened to be. “There were never any right or wrong answers; they had to self-organize and deal with the problem,” Cooper said. “Then we’d do an AAR, talk about it, and figure out what had happened and what we could do better next time.”

  The downed-helicopter drills were not easy. They demanded a high level of attention, cooperation, and improvisation. In the AARs that followed each drill, the team members repeatedly went over what went wrong, owned mistakes, and talked about how they might do it better. “We ran so many that it became a joke among the guys,” Cooper says. “They were saying, ‘Hey, Coop, can we please run another downed-helicopter scenario?’ ”

  On May 1, the White House sent the order to launch. The two stealth helicopters lifted off from the U.S. air base in Jalalabad. At the base’s command center, Cooper, McRaven, and other commanders gathered around the screen to watch the drone video feed. In the White House, President Barack Obama and his national security team leaned in, watching the same images.

  The mission started smoothly. They made it through Pakistani airspace undetected and approached Bin Laden’s compound. But as the first helicopter attempted to land, things went wrong. One helicopter skidded around in the air as if it were on ice, veering and spinning toward the ground. The other helicopter, which was supposed to land on the roof of the main compound, saw the problems and veered off to land outside. (The explanation that later emerged was that the high walls of the compound created downdrafts that disrupted flight. The rehearsals had all been done at mockup compounds with chain-link fence, not solid walls.) Then things got worse. The first pilot, unable to keep altitude, crash-landed in the courtyard, lodging the tail section on the wall and tipping the helicopter on its side, burying its nose in the soft dirt. In the command post, the generals stared wordlessly at the screen. For three or four seconds, the room filled with an unbearable silence.

  Then they saw it: Team Six operators pouring out of the downed helicopter, just as they had in the drills, going to work. They got moving and started working the problem—pickup basketball at its finest. “They didn’t miss a beat,” Cooper says. “Once they got on the ground, there was zero doubt.” Thirty-eight minutes later, it was over, and the entire planet had an opportunity to appreciate the team’s skill and bravery. But in all the celebration, it’s easy to miss the deeper skill, the chain of training and AARs that laid the foundation for that moment.

  From afar, the Bin Laden raid looked like a demonstration of team strength, power, and control. But that strength was built of a willingness to spot and confront the truth and to come together to ask a simple question over and over: What’s really going on here? Cooper and his team did not have to go back again and again to work on downed-helicopter scenarios. But they succeeded because they understood that being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable.

  “When we talk about courage, we think it’s going against an enemy with a machine gun,” Cooper says. “The real courage is seeing the truth and speaking the truth to each other. People never want to be the person who says, ‘Wait a second, what’s really going on here?’ But inside the squadron, that is the culture, and that’s why we’re successful.”

  The Nyquist Method

  Back in the early part of the last century, well before Silicon Valley, the world’s foremost hub of invention and innovation was located in a series of large nondescript buildings in suburban New Jersey. It was called Bell Labs. Originally formed in 1925 to help build a national communications network, Bell Labs grew into the scientific equivalent of Renaissance-era Florence: a wellspring of group genius that lasted until the 1970s. Led by Claude Shannon, a brilliant polymath who liked to ride through the halls on his unicycle while juggling, Bell Labs and its teams of scientists invented and developed the transistor, data networking, solar cells, lasers, communications satellites, binary computing, and cellular communication—in short, most of the tools we use to live modern life.

  Midway through that golden age, some Bell Labs administrators grew curious about the reasons for their own remarkable success. They wondered which Bell scientists had generated the most patents for their inventions, and whether those scientists had anything in common. They began by examining the Bell patent library, where patents were kept in binders organized alphabetically by the scientists’ last name.

  “Most of the binders were about the same size,” recalls Bill Keefauver, a lawyer who worked in the patent office. “But some binders stood out right away because they were fat—much fatter than everyone else’s. Those were the supercreative people who had filed dozens and dozens of patents. There were about ten of them.”

  The administrators studied those ten scientists, hunting for the common thread. Did the supercreatives share the same specialty? The same educational background? The same family background? After considering and discarding dozens of possible ties, they discovered a connection—and it didn’t have to do with who the supercreatives were. It had to do with a habit that they shared: the habit of regularly eating lunch in the Bell Labs cafeteria with a quiet Swedish engineer named Harry Nyquist.

  This result came as a surprise, to say the least. Not because Nyquist wasn’t well known—he was, having pioneere
d important advances in telegraphy and feedback amplification. But in a place famous for its dynamic and eccentric leaders, Nyquist was the opposite: a mild, gently smiling Lutheran known mostly for his tranquil reliability. Raised on a Swedish farm, he approached his work with old-world discipline. He awoke at precisely 6:45 each morning, departed for the office at precisely 7:30, and was always home for family dinner at 6:15. His most idiosyncratic habit was occasionally taking the ferry instead of the subway on his commute home. (He enjoyed the fresh air.) He was so ordinary as to be nearly invisible. In other words, the most important person in one of the most creative places in history turned out to be the person almost everyone would overlook. Which is why it’s important to look a bit more closely at his skill set.

  Nyquist by all accounts possessed two important qualities. The first was warmth. He had a knack for making people feel cared for; every contemporary description paints him as “fatherly.” The second quality was a relentless curiosity. In a landscape made up of diverse scientific domains, he combined breadth and depth of knowledge with a desire to seek connections. “Nyquist was full of ideas, full of questions,” Bell Labs engineer Chapin Cutler recalls. “He drew people out, got them thinking.”

  “Nyquist was good at a particular kind of activity that Bell really encouraged in those days,” Keefauver says. “People in all kinds of disciplines, on all kinds of projects, talking about their project with someone who’s working on something entirely different, to put a new light on things. People like Harry Nyquist could capture what someone was doing, throw some new ideas at them, and ask, ‘Why don’t you try that?’ ”

  When I visited groups for this book, I met a lot of people who possessed traits of warmth and curiosity—so many, in fact, that I began to think of them as Nyquists. They were polite, reserved, and skilled listeners. They radiated a safe, nurturing vibe. They possessed deep knowledge that spanned domains and had a knack for asking questions that ignited motivation and ideas. (The best way to find the Nyquist is usually to ask people: If I could get a sense of the way your culture works by meeting just one person, who would that person be?) If we think of successful cultures as engines of human cooperation, then the Nyquists are the spark plugs.