The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

  The person I met who best embodied this process was named Roshi Givechi.

  Roshi Givechi works at the New York office of IDEO, the international design firm headquartered in Palo Alto, California. IDEO’s place in the modern world is a little like that of Bell Labs. It has designed, among other things, the original Apple computer mouse, insulin pens for diabetics, and the standup toothpaste tube. It has won more design awards than any other company in history. The group consists of six hundred people who are divided into small teams and tasked with meeting challenges that range from designing global plans for disaster response to building a smartphone-charging handbag and everything in between.

  Officially, Givechi is a designer. Unofficially, her role is to serve as roving catalyst, involved in a number of projects, helping the teams navigate the design process. “When teams are stuck, or if there’s a tough dynamic, Roshi is like magic,” says Duane Bray, an IDEO partner. “She’s incredibly skilled at unlocking teams, asking questions that connect people and open possibilities. The truth is, we don’t quite understand how she does it, exactly. We just know that it works really well.”

  Givechi, a small woman in her forties, wears flowing skirts with large pockets. She has dark, curly hair and quick, dark eyes with smile-crinkles at the corners. On greeting, she makes no attempt to charm—no jokes, no extended small talk. She projects none of the energetic theatricality you encounter with many people in creative work. Instead, she radiates a contented stillness, as if you’ve met many times before.

  “Socially, I’m not the chattiest person,” Givechi says. “I love stories, but I’m not the person in the middle of the room telling the story. I’m the person on the side listening and asking questions. They’re usually questions that might seem obvious or simple or unnecessary. But I love asking them because I’m trying to understand what’s really going on.”

  Givechi’s interactions with her teams take place largely in what IDEO calls Flights, regular all-team meetings that occur at the start, middle, and finish of every project. (Think of them as IDEO’s version of the BrainTrust or AAR.) Givechi approaches each Flight from the outside in. She does her research, mostly through conversations, to learn the issues the team has been wrestling with, both from a design perspective (what are the barriers?) and from a team-dynamics perspective (where is the friction?). Then with that landscape in mind, she gathers the group and asks questions designed to unearth tensions and help the group gain clarity about themselves and the project. The word she uses for this process is surfacing.*1

  “I like the word connect,” Givechi says. “For me, every conversation is the same, because it’s about helping people walk away with a greater sense of awareness, excitement, and motivation to make an impact. Because individuals are really different. So you have to find different ways to make it comfortable and engaging for people to share what they’re really thinking about. It’s not about decisiveness—it’s about discovery. For me, that has to do with asking the right questions the right way.”*2

  When you talk to Givechi’s colleagues, they point out a paradox: She is at once soft and hard, empathetic but also persistent. “There’s an underlying toughness to Roshi,” says Lawrence Abrahamson, an IDEO design director. “She doesn’t present an agenda, but of course there is an agenda behind that, and it’s gentle guiding. And one of the biggest tools in her toolbox is time. She’ll spend so much time, being patient and continuing to have conversations and making sure the conversations are progressing in a good direction.”

  “There’s always a moment with Roshi,” says Peter Antonelli, a design director. “There’s a spirit of provocation constantly at play, to nudge, to help us think beyond what’s immediately in front of us. And it usually starts with questioning the big obvious things. It’s never confrontational—she never says, ‘You’re doing the wrong thing.’ It’s organic, embedded in conversation.”

  Watching Givechi listen is like watching a skilled athlete in action. She listens chiefly with her eyes, which have a Geiger-counter-like sensitivity to changes in mood and expression. She detects small changes and responds to them swiftly. If you convey a scintilla of tension about a subject, she will mark it and follow up with a question designed to gently explore the reasons for that tension. When she speaks, she constantly links back to you with small phrases—Maybe you’ve had an experience like this…Your work might be similar…The reason I was pausing there was…—that provide a steady signal of connection. You find yourself comfortable opening up, taking risks, telling the truth.

  It feels like magic, but in fact it’s the result of a lot of practice. As a child, Givechi would use a cassette recorder to capture her voice reading her favorite books over and over, fascinated by the way tiny shifts in tone and timing could transform meaning. As a college student, studying psychology and design, she volunteered to assist the blind, and she wrote her college thesis on dance and choreography. She uses the idea of dance to describe the skills she employs with IDEO’s design teams: to find the music, support her partner, and follow the rhythm. “I don’t see myself as the conductor of the music,” she says. “I’m more of a nudger. I nudge the choreography and try to create the conditions for good things to happen.”

  A year ago IDEO decided to scale Givechi’s abilities across the organization. They asked her to create modules of questions teams could ask themselves, then provided those modules to design teams as tools to help them improve. For example, here are a few:

  • The one thing that excites me about this particular opportunity is

  • I confess, the one thing I’m not so excited about with this particular opportunity is

  • On this project, I’d really like to get better at

  The interesting thing about Givechi’s questions is how transcendently simple they are. They have less to do with design than with connecting to deeper emotions: fear, ambition, motivation. It’s easy to imagine that in different hands, these questions could fall flat and fail to ignite conversation. This is because the real power of the interaction is located in the two-way emotional signaling that creates an atmosphere of connection that surrounds the conversation.

  “The word subtle is the key,” says Abrahamson. “She’s unassuming and disarms people because she is so open and listening and caring. Roshi has the ability to pause completely, to stop what must be going on in her head, to focus completely on the person and the question at hand, and to see where that question is leading. She isn’t trying to drag you somewhere, ever. She’s truly seeing you from your position, and that’s her power.”

  “The word empathy sounds so soft and nice, but that’s not what’s really going on,” says Njoki Gitahi, a senior communication designer. “What Roshi does requires a critical understanding of what makes people tick, and what makes people tick isn’t always being nice to them. Part of it is that she knows people so well that she understands what they need. Sometimes what they need is support and praise. But sometimes what they need is a little knock on the chin, a reminder that they need to work harder, a nudge to try new things. That’s what she gives.”

  “She’s really listening, hearing what you said and asking what it means, digging deeper,” says Nili Metuki, design researcher. “She doesn’t let things stay unclear, even when they’re uncomfortable. Especially when they’re uncomfortable.”

  Whereupon we must ask: What is inside that pause, that Nyquistian moment of vulnerable, authentic connection? That is, can we peer inside this moment and see what’s really happening underneath?

  That’s a question Dr. Carl Marci has spent much of his career exploring. Marci, a neurologist who teaches at Harvard, first became fascinated with listening in a medical school class that featured a series of non-Western healers. These healers were unconventional, employing a spectacular range of methods that were scientifically dubious—for example, giving massage where the hands didn’t touch the patient, or administering drops of water with concentrations of ingredients that approached zero—and
yet they achieved remarkable results. One reason, Marci came to see, was the connection the healer formed with the patient.

  “What these healers all had in common was that they were brilliant listeners. They would sit down, take a long patient history, and really get to know their patients,” Marci says. “They were all incredibly empathic people who were really good at connecting with people and forming trusting bonds. So that’s when I realized that the interesting part wasn’t the healing but the listening, and the relationship being formed. That’s what we needed to study.”

  Marci invented a method in which he videoed conversations while tracking galvanic skin response—the change in electrical resistance that measures emotional arousal. He discovered that for much of the time, the arousal curves of two people in conversation bore little or no relation to each other. But he also found special moments, in certain conversations, when the two curves fell into perfect sync. Marci called these moments concordances.

  “Concordances happen when one person can react in an authentic way to the emotion being projected in the room,” Marci says. “It’s about understanding in an empathic way, then doing something in terms of gesture, comment, or expression that creates a connection.”

  One of the concordance videos included Marci himself. He is seated in a chair facing an older man in a gray three-piece suit, who happens to be his therapist. Marci is describing the day he proposed to his then-girlfriend. The machine sits between them, capturing the fluctuations of the inner landscape and projecting them onto the screen in the form of a pair of brightly colored, shifting lines: blue for Marci, and green for the man in the gray suit.

  MARCI: We like to go to Bread and Circus and get their vegetable samosas. I said, “Well, I’ll treat, we’ll get some of those.” So she figured we were going to have a picnic up there or something.

  GRAY SUIT: [series of small, affirming nods]

  MARCI: The second thought she had was maybe, we’ll occasionally go up there and watch the sunset, she said maybe there was something funky going on in the sky.

  GRAY SUIT: [big, definitive nod]

  MARCI: And she said literally, for like a nanosecond, she entertained the idea that I was going to propose, but [the idea] went out faster than it went in.

  GRAY SUIT: [sympathetic nod, head tilt]

  MARCI: So she gets up there and she’s all dressed, looking stunning as she always does, and she says, “What’s up?” In hindsight she was looking for food and couldn’t find it.

  GRAY SUIT: [small smile.]

  MARCI: I said, “Come sit.” I recited the first stanza of the e. e. cummings poem, and it goes, “Being to timelessness as it’s to time, love did no more begin than love will end.”

  GRAY SUIT: [head tilts upward, eyebrows up]

  MARCI (continuing to quote): “Where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim, love is the air the ocean and the land.” And I said, “You are my air, and my ocean, and my land.”

  GRAY SUIT: [head tilt, smile, nod]

  MARCI: And it was just the most touching thing, because she realized what I was doing as I got the ring out, and just wept in a way that was so sincere and so earnest, and she was so overwhelmed. It was touching. It was nice. She was psyched.

  GRAY SUIT: [small, affirming nods]

  Watching the video, the first thing you notice is that the conversation contains several moments of perfect concordance, where the green and blue lines move with a perfect coordination, rising and falling like pennants rippling in a breeze. The second thing you notice is that these moments happen without Gray Suit ever speaking a word. That is not to say that Gray Suit is not interacting. He radiates a steady attention, a poised stillness. His hands are folded on his lap. His eyes are up and alert. He reacts with nods, small expressions. In other words, he is doing what Roshi Givechi does at IDEO, and what Harry Nyquist presumably did at Bell Labs. He is demonstrating that the most important moments in conversation happen when one person is actively, intently listening.

  “It’s not an accident that concordance happens when there’s one person talking and the other person listening,” Marci says. “It’s very hard to be empathic when you’re talking. Talking is really complicated, because you’re thinking and planning what you’re going to say, and you tend to get stuck in your own head. But not when you’re listening. When you’re really listening, you lose time. There’s no sense of yourself, because it’s not about you. It’s all about this task—to connect completely to that person.”

  Marci has connected increases in concordances to increases in perceived empathy: the more concordances occur, the closer the two people feel. What’s more, the changes in closeness happen not gradually but all at once. “There’s often one moment where it happens,” he says. “There’s an accelerated change to the relationship that happens when you’re able to really listen, to be incredibly present with the person. It’s like a breakthrough—‘We were like this, but now we’re going to interact in a new way, and we both understand that it’s happened.’ ”

  * * *

  *1 Halfway through our conversation, Givechi asked me about this book’s title and subtitle. I told her, and she paused—a long, meaningful pause. Then she asked, “Does that subtitle really work?” A few minutes later, after a few back-and-forths, this book had a new and improved subtitle. I’m not certain if I suggested the change or if she did. As Givechi would say, we surfaced it together.

  *2 Robert Bales, one of the first scientists to study group communication, discovered that while questions comprise only 6 percent of verbal interactions, they generate 60 percent of ensuing discussions.

  Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains. And as with building muscle, the first key is to approach the process with a plan. With that in mind, here are a few workout ideas, for both individuals and groups.

  Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often: As we’ve seen, group cooperation is created by small, frequently repeated moments of vulnerability. Of these, none carries more power than the moment when a leader signals vulnerability. As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say.

  I saw a vivid example when I watched restaurateur Danny Meyer run one of his morning meetings with his staff (about twenty people). Meyer, whom we’ll meet up close in Chapter 15, is the founder of Union Square Cafe, Shake Shack, Gramercy Tavern, and a number of other restaurants that together are worth more than a billion dollars. The night before my visit, he had delivered his first-ever TED Talk. The staff meeting began with the group watching a video of Meyer’s speech. Then the lights went up, and Meyer spoke.

  “Can you see my leg shaking?” he asked the group. “I was so nervous, I was shaking like a leaf. I’ve given a lot of speeches, but the TED people wanted something more, something deeper and thoughtful. So I slept about three hours the night before, which is why I have those bags under my eyes. We had a terrible rehearsal, and I kept screwing up the PowerPoint. So it was almost a complete shit show. Except that I’m lucky enough to have some absolutely brilliant help.” He paused and pointed. “Thanks, Chip and Haley. They made the whole thing work. They wrote great stuff, gave me great advice, and kept me together.” Everyone looked at Chip and Haley and gave a short round of applause while Meyer looked on approvingly.

  Meyer delivered the message—I was scared—with steadiness, confidence, and comfort that underlined the deeper message: It’s safe to tell the truth here. His vulnerability isn’t weakness; it’s his strength.

  Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask their people three questions:

  • What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do?

  • What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often?

  • What can I do to make you more effective?

  “The key is to
ask not for five or ten things but just one,” Bock says. “That way it’s easier for people to answer. And when a leader asks for feedback in this way, it makes it safe for the people who work with them to do the same. It can get contagious.”

  Overcommunicate Expectations: The successful groups I visited did not presume that cooperation would happen on its own. Instead, they were explicit and persistent about sending big, clear signals that established those expectations, modeled cooperation, and aligned language and roles to maximize helping behavior. IDEO is a good example. Its leaders constantly talk about the expectation of cooperation. (CEO Tim Brown incessantly repeats his mantra that the more complex the problem, the more help you need to solve it.) They clearly define helping roles and model vulnerability. (Their internal bulletin boards are filled with requests: Does anybody know of a good yoga class? Can anybody help me find a cat sitter for Christmas week?) In case you miss those signals, they are also written in big letters both on the walls of the New York office and in the pages of the Little Book of IDEO, a copy of which is given to every employee. Among the refrains: Collaborate and Make Others Successful: Going Out of Your Way to Help Others Is the Secret Sauce.

  Deliver the Negative Stuff in Person: This was an informal rule that I encountered at several cultures. It goes like this: If you have negative news or feedback to give someone—even as small as a rejected item on an expense report—you are obligated to deliver that news face-to-face. This rule is not easy to follow (it’s far more comfortable for both the sender and receiver to communicate electronically), but it works because it deals with tension in an up-front, honest way that avoids misunderstandings and creates shared clarity and connection.