The Power of Debriefing: An Insight Into Effective Teamwork with Scott Tannenbaum, PhD | Ep 41

We're thrilled to have Scott Tannenbaum, PhD, a distinguished expert in the field of team science, joining us for an insightful conversation that will definitely pique your interest. Get ready to gain a wealth of knowledge as we delve into the heart of team evolution, the power of feedback, and the art and science of debriefing. From the tech industry’s retrospectives to the military’s debriefing practices, we scrutinize different sectors' approaches and uncover secrets to team improvement.

Let's dissect the importance of psychological safety in a team – a factor that could make or break success. We discuss the impact of asymmetrical power relationships and how leaders can foster a psychologically safe environment for everyone to thrive. Going beyond the scope of an individual, we explore how leaders can set their team up for success, and even delve into NASA's ingenious practices that enhance role clarity.

Wrapping up our chat, we touch on the rise of rapidly formed teams, the significance of behavioral markers, and the importance of simulation in team development. We shed light on how traditional solutions for intact teams might not always apply to the rapidly changing team structures in today's workplaces.. So if team effectiveness, debriefing, and psychological safety are on your radar, let this podcast be your guide to mastering these vital aspects.

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Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:57

All right, mark. One of the most important aspects of John Boyd to the loop is three feedback loops that are within it, and we know that from James Gimmien, who's been on the show, and different neuroscientists that feedback loops are more important by a factor of 10 than feedforward loops. So today's guest is here to talk about probably the most important aspect of teamwork and that's the debrief. That was feedback loops. How do you improve future performance? And our guest today recently received the Joseph E McGrath Award from the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research and this award is pretty cool because it's been received or achieved by other folks, including Richard Hackman, eduardo Salas and Amy Edmondson and I believe John Matthew is that right, scott, it's great Scott.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:52

Tannenbaum yes, all right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:54

So our guest today is Scott Tannenbaum, thrilled that he's here with us today. I want to share a little bit of background on how I learned about Scott's work, because it's a very important. When I transitioned out of the military and looked for a civilian job, remember I was charged with stomping out all the bad scrum and agile out in industry by Jeff Sutherland, who said, hey, we need guys like you to come out and help us build high performing teams. So what did I do? I looked at some very important work that I was familiar with, and that book that I came across was something known as developing and enhancing teamwork in organizations evidence-based best practices and guidelines.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 2:34

Now, you would think that people in an industry that are there to build high performing teams, to create agility, resilience, innovation and safety, would look to science-based approaches to understand how to build effective teams. That's not what I saw and that's what we're not seeing in industry right now. So Scott Tannenbaum's work has been a huge influence on what we've done. In fact, the t-shirt I'm wearing right now says teamwork over frameworks. There's a reason for that we want to build our teaming skills, and one of the key aspects of that is the most important team event, which is debriefing. So, with that being said, scott Tannenbaum, welcome sir. Is there anything that you'd like to let our listeners know about you that I missed?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 3:19

No, I just appreciate the invitation to join you in marketing. One of the interesting things about teams is that we all have experience with the best teams that you were on weren't necessarily the best teams on day one, and really teams become great by doing, by learning, by adapting and adjusting. And while a few teams do that naturally well and a few leaders do that naturally well, without some structure and some intentionality around it, very often it doesn't happen. So simply having experience doesn't guarantee learning and that really sets the stage for why teams need to debrief. If I look back at the history of debriefing, the military probably has led the charge on this and you go back and in the military, as you know, they talk a lot about after action reviews and hot washes and cold washes, and it's kind of, I think, built into the architecture of the military. So I'd say one of the leaders in debriefing, both in terms of frequency but also in kind of figuring out what works and doesn't work. I've seen a lot of that in the military and I guess in some ways it's not really a surprise in that the military is one place that spends, let's say, 98 or 99% of their time getting ready for the 1% or 2% at the time when they need to be in combat, Whereas in corporate settings they spend 2% of the time getting ready for the 98% of the time doing the work. So I've noticed that the military tends to be really good at this.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 4:54

Other industries that do this pretty well, certainly the tech industry. If you think about kind of agile programming process, that includes things like scrums and sprints. Their debriefs look different, but at least the concept of kind of quickly huddling up, discussing what's working, discussing what's not working, figuring out today's plan, trying to make sense of what happened yesterday, that's kind of again built into almost now the DNA if you look at agile programming. But interestingly, while programming groups in tech might be doing it, it doesn't mean that that permeates through the rest of the tech organization. So it doesn't mean that the finance group is doing it or that the marketing group is doing it, even though the programmers themselves might be.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 5:38

We've certainly seen a little bit more of this debriefing in more high reliability settings, Contrary to your familiar. When I say high reliability, what I mean is that organizations where the consequence of failure is greater and we work with a lot of those over the years, whether it's deep sea saturation, dive groups or folks that are in mines, for example or you'll recall when the coast of Concordia sank over Italy, that cruise ship many years ago. There are these types of jobs where if it's not done well, people die, and that kind of ups the game. So in those industries we start seeing a little bit more traction. But I would say that there's a real room for improvement in industry as a whole to do this more often, more rigorously and with greater attention.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 6:31

While there's so much to unpack there. Number one, I want to start off with a 2% 98% rule. 98% of our time in the military is getting ready, right, and you pointed out that 2% of the time in industry is they had that opportunity to get ready. So what matters in that 2% is the quality of work you put into it, right, it's not the let's go do a bunch of nonsensical things. You have very limited time to focus on what works, and I believe that's what we're talking about today. So, when it comes to effective teamwork or debriefing, this is the podcast you need to be listening to. Believe me on that, okay.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:05

The next thing is when you pointed out scrum and agile. What we see in the agile space is there is a lot of pseudoscience with with regard to effective retrospectives what they normally call them inside of a, you know, scrum or any type of agile framework. That pseudoscience is. It's okay. It gets them doing retrospectives. It gets them to do debriefs. Are they effective? I'll argue that they're not. They're probably not really effective. And why is that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:37

My belief is inside the agile community, they've taken that. And then we've had Alistair Coburn on here, who is one of the signatories of the agile manifesto and he brought this up as well. They took a pseudoscience path. They should have taken the high reliability path, and that came from Alistair Coburn. So, going back to your high reliability view of the world, I absolutely agree with you. We work in high reliability industries now and a lot of them are talking about debrief cultures and how important that is. And then sometimes we see the creep. You know that that pseudoscience creep in from the agile community. So that's that's kind of my view on that. And then I do want to bring up something else Business leaders, executives Are they debriefing, and should they be?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 8:23

Well, the answer to your second question is absolutely One.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 8:28

Interesting happens too as leaders move up organizational pyramids, they get less and less informal feedback. This is true across industries. If people point out to me that sometimes they see a disproportionate percentage of let's call it dysfunctional behavior of leaders higher up, higher up the chain, and the question is are they is it their personality, or are folks that are Machiavellian or neurotic? Are they moving up? And the answer is I don't believe it's an inherent trade. I believe that when we stop getting feedback, we start demonstrating more dysfunctional behavior. So when I'm a junior level first line supervisor, my team members are telling me what's going well and what's not going well. At least if I'm doing a decent job, they are. And as I move up to middle management, I'm still getting some feedback, both top down and bottom up. But as we move up that organizational pyramid, what happens is people feel less comfortable providing me with, let's say, frank feedback about this, and unless I create some mechanisms for that to happen, I am not learning what's working and not working, and if I'm making some of the decisions, I'm making ill informed decisions or uninformed decisions in some way. So your question is should, should leadership and leadership teams be engaged in this? The answer is absolutely In part because they're not getting the natural feedback that sometimes allows for self correctional along the way. I think it's really interesting when we look at kind of lead teams of leaders, right. So now, what I'm talking about here are teams that are made up of leaders.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 10:05

I do a lot of work with C-suite teams, you know, ceo and direct reports and organizations and on a day to day basis they're not necessarily working shoulder to shoulder. Contrast that with, like manufacturing flow right. If we're on an assembly line together every day, we're working shoulder to shoulder. The reliance as things get passed down, the line is very clear. But in a senior leadership team what happens is you've got someone who's responsible for finance, someone that's responsible for manufacturing, someone that's responsible for marketing or human resources. They all report into the CEO.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 10:38

But on a day to day basis, their team, what they have in their mind is their team, it's kind of their functional team and so on, and then periodically they get together and they call themselves a senior leadership team, but without them pausing to talk about how they're working together, what's working, what's not working, where are the communication breakdowns? Where are the coordination requirements that are needed, you know, among members, outside of meetings, it's very easy for these teams not to perform very well. So I'm a very strong advocate, pancho, of leadership teams need this and in part because when we work with leadership teams and they start doing this, and they do this well and they recognize the value in it, what do they do next? They realize the importance and they start cascading in the organization. So they then start doing it with their teams, etc. From a cultural perspective, when we ask people to engage in debriefs and they look up and the teams above them don't do it at all, it sends the signal that debriefing is not as important, even if we're saying we want you to debrief.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 11:38

Right. So executive debriefing is absolutely critical to set the tone in an organization, and that's what we see, as many organizations say you need to do agile, you need to use scrum, you need to use plan brief, xqd brief, while we just kind of sit back and not change. Now there are egos involved with this. The higher you go up in an organization, I think you have more ego, and I think there's actually a study out there that says leaders have a tendency to look like psychopaths. They don't want to hear the truth. That's at least the perspective or perception of leadership is. They start to filter out things and that's just the nature that you talked about. When it comes to debriefing in an organization, is it true that leadership needs to start it? Do they have to be the ones that lead this?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 12:29

So I'm a bit of a believer here in any port in a storm, and by that I mean we need successes and toe holds. I mean, research is really compelling on this. You're familiar with it, right? We've done meta-analytic work. We've combined the results of a bunch of prior studies. There have been other folks that have done it, even since our meta-analysis, and it's pretty clear teams that engage in periodic, systematic, structured debriefs opera from other teams by an average of 20 to 25%. And I can share with you a study that we did where we got 40% improvements in studies that we did with prospective commanding officers. So the evidence is clear that it works.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 13:17

But people need to see it. People need to see successes. So it's great if I can get into an organization and we can start working at the top and they then provide air cover for other folks to be able to engage in it. But sometimes we're not able to start there and sometimes we look for OACs in an organization, right A place where there's a receptivity. Maybe it's a leader in the middle of the organization who realizes that if their teams to be better, they're going to need to be able to reflect, they're going to make sense of what's going on. They need to adjust. They've got to get into the cycle of kind of you know adapting and we start working with them and in some cases there's been like enough successes there that all of a sudden it catches the eye about the folks etc. So yes, in a perfect world I'd love to see you know, john Bart, who are early and particularly in the top of the organization. But it's not the only way to get to the end point. We can enter in through some other places.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:23

Okay, you brought up something about the structure and it's that's pretty important in all this. We talk a lot about shared mental models, repertoire schemas, all associated with John Boyd's that in order for us to create some type of flow in an organization, we need to gravitate towards these attractors, these good practices. Now, a good practice in debriefing is a structured debrief. Now, that doesn't mean to me that it's the same every time. It means that we can plug things into it. We kind of got a skeleton there, but can you walk us through what you mean by what a structured debrief and how? That's how important structure is when it comes to leading debriefs.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 15:05

Maybe a way of thinking about it is start by thinking about what is what? Does non-structured debrief look like? Right? And again, I suspect many people have had this experience. So you know, we've been doing some work together and I said, okay, let's huddle up. How's it going around here? What's working, how's it going? And so then what happens is the people who are most?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 15:23

threatened. They don't speak up right. Junior people don't contribute. When they do start talking about things, they tend to gravitate towards very technical sorts of things. We've seen this across professions. You know medical teams will start talking about you know, the case itself and the disease symptoms, et cetera, and engineers will talk about things like tensile strength and what are they using. You know the right engineering approach to something. But what teams don't naturally do is they don't talk about teamwork-related phenomenon when we let them do debriefs on their own. So this sort of unstructured that says, hey, anyone who has a point of view, you know, weigh in. That's that does not work.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:07

Scott on the idea of focusing on teamwork one of the. I don't know if I have this accurate. If you don't understand teaming skills, then how can you reflect back on them and see what you're doing? Right and wrong, right? Is that true?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 16:24

So I would say that the more we understand what really drives team effectiveness not the myths, right, but what the science tells us really drives team effectiveness better equipped we are to target our conversations to those things that matter, right. Having said that, we can still provide structured guides, discussion probes, questions to help teams that maybe aren't deeply immersed in the science of teamwork, to increase the likelihood that during debriefs they're engaging in conversations about the right things. So again, the example of task work versus teamwork is that you know, we know from the evidence, that teams do better when they don't just talk about task work like did we get things done properly, you know, did we produce the results? But how we work together is equally important. If they're not aware of that, we can still provide them with structured questions. So they talk about things like you know. Were we sharing information effectively prior to this or should have been notified about something sooner To get them also to go from reflecting backwards? This is partly we guessed about structure right.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 17:38

To me, the structure is if I'm leading a debrief, I'm setting the stage to make the team aware of why we're doing this and kind of the ground rules for it. I am posing questions so that my team is talking more than I'm talking. I'm getting them going on this. I am having them reflect back on the work that we've done to try to make sense of it, and then I'm making sure that I'm calling the question as to what does that mean to us? Do we continue doing what we're doing? Do we do something differently? Because I've seen too many debriefs where the discussion is great, no one calls the question like what does this mean for us and are we going to do things differently? And it was just kind of a wasted 30 minutes around it. So structure kind of set up, reflect back, then look forward. It's kind of one of the structures that seems to work pretty well.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 18:27

So, scott, the question about looking back at what happened. We talk a lot about situation awareness. You write about it in your books understanding what happened in the past. Right, that's pretty critical. If we don't understand how to work together as a team, if we don't understand what we're looking for, it's very hard to reflect back on what happened yesterday, a week ago, a month ago. So can you talk a little bit about that from a cognitive science perspective and an IOC perspective, about how important it is to reconstruct or recall what happened, and less about the attitudes and beliefs about what we're doing in the future?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 19:03

Yeah, so in complex organizations and these days almost all organizations are complex there's a lot of moving parts. Um, maybe we could even talk about this a little bit later. But even the definition of what is my team isn't always clear. What team am I on isn't always clear in the organization either. So to simply say we have experience, we can quickly huddle up and then almost immediately decide what to do going forward is unrealistic, because we're also seeing different things. People on the team typically are seeing different things that they're touching in different parts of the offense. So we enter into this debrief with having had different experiences, even though we're on the same team. We enter into this with different underlying assumptions perhaps and this is particularly true in like cross-functional teams, where people come from different backgrounds and are asked to work together the way they even make sense of the world and process things are different. So we can anticipate there to be different perspectives, different interpretations, different lenses, which is why it's insufficient just to quickly huddle up and say so okay, what should we do differently? What should we do the same? Let's boom, because we're answering that question from different lenses. So the first piece has to be this kind of reflection back and to be in a position where we not only can say this is what I saw, but this is kind of what it means to me, this is what I think it means for us as a team. So other people on the team can say that's interesting. I saw that, but I interpreted it differently, because there that's where we start to get the building of, and we tend to use the term shared mental model, perhaps a touch differently than you, but I think they overlap right. Shared mental models to us are the extent to which people on the team end up on the same page in some way, right.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 21:01

So a good example of this is with regard to priorities. I see this a lot in corporate settings, more so than any place else. But there's, we get a cross-functional team. We assemble the team. They come from different areas. They come in believing they understand what the priorities are for the team. They start working.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 21:19

It turns out that they actually have different ideas about what the priorities are, so it creates some problems for them. They get back together and someone start from the during the debrief starts talking about the problem that the team has and why they're not getting things done, but the getting things done part that they consider to be most important is different, what other people on the team consider to be getting things done. So it's not like try harder, it's not like listen to me. It's that until we have a shared understanding about what's important, about what the current priorities are, it's really difficult for us to coordinate as a team, collaborate, communicate effectively. We cross talk around this and we can only get to that by kind of reflecting back on what happened and what we think happened. And our interpretation and much of what happens at the beginning of debriefs is a bit of sense making right to interpret what's going on before we talk about. So what do we?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 22:07

do about it? Yeah, so we're using multiple OODA loops. Everybody has an OODA loop. They perceive the world differently, they have a different perception of what happened. We want to leverage those different perspectives to reconstruct a reality that we can move forward on, and I think you hit on something as well, and that is what are we trying to do. What are you know? And it's I think this connects back to your comment about the team structures If we have a low level of task interdependence, just random people in a room and you take them to a debrief, they're not going to have a good experience because they don't have a common history together.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 22:40

Even though they sit in the same room, they may not be working together. And one of the analogies you use quite often and I think it's in your talk at NASA where I saw this first that's your spectrum of task interdependence, right. So the more task interdependence we have, probably that's where we need to use more debriefing more frequently, because in a soccer team or basketball team or where we have what is known the dynamic reallocational resources people moving around monitoring each other they may be task saturated. That is essential to being in a team. Is that task interdependence? What are the dangers of forcing people to use a debrief if they have a low level of task interdependence. Let's say, like throwing scrum on a bunch of people that don't need to use scrum right Context.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 23:31

Yeah, I say our debrief process needs to be fit for purpose right, there's there. It always needs to be structured right. It always needs to focus on both teamwork and task work. It always needs to ensure that team members are able to speak up and offer a point of view. But then the structure, which includes things like frequency and what we focus on, needs to be fit for purpose. And so I do think there's a place for debriefing in lower interdependency teams. It just shouldn't look the same as it does in a high interdependency team.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 24:04

And so you know if you'll accept kind of the sports analogy a little bit, right, you know I think about this continuum and we wrote about this in Teams that Work. You know the book that I did with Ed Salas. You know it can range anywhere from kind of on the far left of this, from a wrestling team through a baseball team, through a soccer or football team, you know, in terms of increased interdependency. Now, if I think about a wrestling team, the way we determine if the wrestling team wins or not is each of us does our individual tasks, right? I wrestle. When I'm wrestling, you can't help me, and at the end we add up our points, right? So this is kind of like regional sales teams, and I've noticed sometimes what happens a regional sales team calls themselves a team, but there's such low interdependency that they're really not a team in the classic sense. But having said that, they can still have a debrief discussion that talks about the obstacles to performance that they're seeing in the field and what are they're seeing trends around this and whether anything different in the product would help them be better at selling. So if the debrief is targeted on that, well, that makes complete sense. But if the debrief is asking them to do this kind of deep thing about coordination, collaboration, cooperation et cetera, on some teams all that is needed is civility and it's not getting in each other's ways. But as you start moving a little bit from left to right on that continuum and you think, for example, of a baseball team I'm a big Red Sox fan, even though I'm from New York, so you know I follow baseball.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 25:44

Baseball is an interesting phenomena because there's a chunk of that of what we do in baseball. That's a pure individual task. When I am batting, there is next to nothing that you can do to help me, right, I mean, unless you're like the Astros did a few years ago they were cheating and stealing signs. Right, but typically a baseball player. When they're batting, it's an individual task, but when we're pitching and catching, the pitcher and the catcher have this ongoing coordination that's required. And if I think about a ball being hit to a shortstop, it has to coordinate with the second baseman. It requires tight coordination, but it may only involve three people on the team around this.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 26:22

One of the things that I'm noticing in a variety of settings is how work is. In some cases is this series of somewhat individual tasks punctuated by these periods of when teamwork is truly needed, kind of like a passing the baton in a relay race. And if we don't handle those coordination points really well, it doesn't matter how well we're doing things individually. Therefore, that type of debrief needs to focus on what can we do to help you be successful individually? And let's talk about those coordinated points, those punctuation points where coordination is really required and how did that go and what happened well and didn't go well, and how can we prepare for that Versus, as you said, a soccer team, a football team, a basketball team. This is ongoing coordination. The nature of the debriefs need to be more frequent, deeper, etc. But it's not that they don't. We shouldn't do debriefs across the continuum. We just can't expect one size to fit all.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 27:18

Hey Scott, I can't remember if it's in one of your older books or one of your writings, but the higher you go up in an organization, the higher the task interdependency. And sometimes those closest to the customer in an organization may have a lower task interdependency. It's just a nature of work. They are working with the customer but they're not working laterally with members of their team. Can you speak to that? Is that essentially true that the higher you go in an organization, the C-suite, highly interdependent, work, bad at debriefing?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 27:46

So I'm going to say not necessarily. I think the degree of interdependence is very much about the context that you're in and I can see teams lower in the organization that are designed in such a way they truly do need to work together shoulder to shoulder. I gave the example of maybe in a manufacturing setting. In some cases, in some aspects of healthcare, like if we're talking about on the ward and we've got people that are kind of manning the ward together, that may be higher interdependency. So not necessarily level in the organization. But you're absolutely right in that the degree of interdependency influences a lot of things. In fact it influences when we look at the research, when we try and go for and take an evidence-based approach. We look at the research, the findings, for what's important in higher interdependency teams may be different than what's important in lower interdependency teams. So, regardless of where they are in the pyramid, the extent to which we need to rely on one other, how often, under what circumstances really needs to drive the way we do things.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 28:50

I want to shift over to psychological safety. Now. Psychological safety has picked up a lot of steam in the last five years. A lot of people are talking about it. In fact, years ago we were talking about it and getting laughed at because, as aviators, in our culture of debriefing, a senior aviator in an instructor in a training command would get up and show fallibility and talk about things that they did wrong on their flight and that coming out of college we'd never seen that before, right, and that you kind of learn over years that that's just normal. So when we shifted out of the military and started coaching organizations on psychological safety, we got laughed at. They're like what is this nonsense? And then, of course, all the stuff that came out of Google and Amy Edmondson over the last five or seven years has kind of exploded that thinking Now, how important is psychological safety, not just in debriefing but in creating teams? That's one of the questions. And the second question is can you walk us through how and who needs to help create that psychological safety within a debrief?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 29:54

So, very succinctly psychological safety is a big deal. It's a big deal Before. I started by saying teams aren't great on day one. You can only be great by experiencing, reflecting, learning and adapting. Well, how can a team learn from their experiences and adapt if people are uncomfortable sharing what they're seeing? How can a team improve if I'm unwilling to admit I don't know something? How can you be effective as a leader if I'm not willing to tell you that I'm confused about something or that I disagree with your point of view? So psychological safety is one of those fundamental things that underlies effectiveness of teams and it doesn't matter the industry and it cuts across the board. High interdependency, for sure, but even in these middle interdependency teams, if I'm not comfortable being able to speak up because I only interact with you very infrequently and you haven't given me a signal, it's okay. How do we handle these things that pop up in these points where we really need true coordination? So I'm going to say psychological safety is super important and I also want to differentiate between allowing people to speak up and creating an environment where we encourage people to speak up, to admit they don't know something, to ask questions, et cetera. So I talk to leaders sometimes and they'll say to me I don't understand it, scott, I allow my team to speak up and when I do that, they don't give me anything. So what do I do here? And the assumption, the underlying assumption there is that they have nothing to contribute. Perhaps, or I've done what I'm supposed to do by saying it's okay to speak up. Allowing people is insufficient. You have asymmetrical power relationships and the military has that. You count the strides, you know who's in charge. You see this in healthcare really clearly. There's a hierarchy and everyone knows the hierarchy around this. So it's insufficient to simply allow your team members to be able to speak up. That's true in the case of a debrief. If you simply do a debrief and go okay, what do you think Insufficient? You've got to create a context where it's okay. But even outside the debrief, on the day-to-day basis of how a team operates around us, allowing is insufficient around us. So leaders can do things.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 32:19

First of all, the research on psychological safety very compelling. You alluded to the Google study which shows as the number one predictor of team effectiveness. Amy Edmondson has done great, great work in this space as well, but you know that analytic research that's looked at psychological safety shows, the teams with higher psychological safety do a better job of information sharing. They do a better job of learning. They show more what psychologists like to call organizational citizenship behaviors. In other words, they're more willing to go above and beyond kind of their basic job responsibilities because they're comfortable being able to do that. So, not surprisingly, performance is better in teams that have high psychological safety.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 32:59

And the three biggest predictors of psychological safety from the meta-analytic work is peer behaviors, leader behaviors and role clarity. And if you don't mind, let me just say a word or two about those. So role clarity is kind of an interesting one, because when I share that information with leaders sometimes they say so how does role clarity relate to psychological safety? So let's think of a situation where we have role ambiguity. So you think it's appropriate for you to do something and I don't think that's part of your role. So what do you do? You step in to do that, thinking you're doing the right thing and I slap you on the wrist for it. So A you learn, not a safe place for me to step up and try and do things around here and vicariously, other people on the team learn the same thing. So it's not that we need role rigidity. Role rigidity like we can't change roles, you can't flex. We just need role clarity, which means things like sometimes there's places where there's going to be role flexibility, but we're all aware of it. So this is why role clarity has this kind of subtle benefit Aside from it helping in coordination, it actually allows for better psychological safety.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 34:12

But leaders also play a disproportionately large role in establishing psychological safety, right, and it's both the things that we do kind of in advance. But maybe as important or equally important is what do we do when someone says I don't know something? What do we do when someone says, boss, I made a mistake? What do we do when we say I'm confused? The response to that greatly influenced the extent to which there's a degree of psychological safety. And you know some organizations. You mentioned them. They're a lot of work with NASA, right, and over the years NASA's worked very hard to kind of boost psychological safety in their organization. Because you go back in time to when they had problems, you know safety problems and some of the safety problems were a direct function of a lack of psychological safety, right. So the things that I do as a leader, when you take, when you demonstrate the courage to ask a question or admit you don't know something. That's an opportunity for me to really boost psychological safety or to kill it. And team members learn vicariously from watching others too. So it's not just the one-on-one piece, but the third predictor that's sometimes kind of overlooked is we think about psychological safety as it's the leader's responsibility. But again, if you don't mind the sports analogy, you know the locker room also has to take care of itself, and the extent to which peers close down other peers or make fun of them and they don't know something will have a huge effect on psychological safety as well. So long story short, psych safety is a big deal and everybody on the team plays a role in it.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 35:44

You know, sometimes organizations will say we have to create a culture of psychological safety as an organization, and I don't disagree with that. But psychological safety is a team level phenomenon. I can create psychological safety in an organization, in a team. In an organization that does not have psychological safety it's harder, but I can do it. And we can have an organization with high psychological safety and still have pockets of leaders who are squelching psychological safety in the groups. And the way I point this out to people is. I ask them to reflect on the various teams that they're members of and ask them about the psychological safety that exists, and can they see differences? And almost everybody can point to say well, this team yeah, really easy to speak of this team, I'm super careful, I don't step out. So isn't that interesting. Same organization, same culture, different degrees of psychological safety. What's different? And the difference is what's happening local, at the team level. You were saying you had an example too, or an observation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 36:49

Yeah, so I took a lot of these lessons and I applied them at a major airline and then at a manufacturer and I'd just give you a couple of quick stories.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 36:56

And this connects back to the team level, psychological safety. When I did this up in Seattle years ago, the group of people I was working with some of them came out of the debrief crying, and it's not because I was mean, it's because they were essentially rivals within a team, they weren't friends, and then they broke down barriers by being vulnerable and doing this. I wasn't expecting this and I'm a former fighter guy in aviation and I'm walking out and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna lose my job now. That didn't happen. It's pretty neat to see those barriers break down and friendship emerge out of that. Same thing happened at a large manufacturer. We were working with an executive level group on some products and they wanted an effective debriefing technique. So we walked them through that and the same thing. It's amazing to see what can emerge out of these effective approaches, these structured approaches. And it's not to say that you have to cry in a debrief, that's not what I was saying. They can become emotional. It's interesting In the debriefs I came from, they could last four hours and they were very, very harsh Because, again, the type of work I was involved with years ago.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 38:15

Your life depended on it. You had to pay attention to what's going on so you can improve future performance. That's the bottom line there. So I have seen this work and then I've seen approaches that are out there fail miserably because they do not allow for what you just described. It's all about games and gamesmanship and playing different things and different cartoons and doing these things, and we're like what are you doing? Do you do this normally? And I understand a little bit of research behind that. However, it's the effective, structured approaches that really bring performance out and effectiveness out, and that's what I've seen. So I just wanna thank you for all of that information you gave us in the past and then let you know that I have seen people cry, and it was not because I was being mean, but I saw some great relationships out of that as well. So a lot more to pull out of the debriefing side of the house Psychological safety.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:16

You talked a little bit about the importance of the rules, and I thank you for that too. One of the challenges most organizations and I'll use agile approaches right now most of the time they put people in roles where they really they're not in a role. It's a group of people that have this role of a product owner or a product manager. It's always a group that's leading something. Therefore, nobody's leading anything. Can you walk us through? We talk a lot about mission command on the show, where one person a mission commander or a product owner or a leader has 51% of the vote. How important is that when you talked about your role, clarity as far as having that 51%, or does that matter at all?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 40:04

So I don't think it's one size fits all. I will say that when we need to be in a position to make quick decisions based on rapidly changing information with high consequences the decision to have high consequences it's difficult to have. Like everyone gets to say we're gonna do turn taking, each person's gonna get a chance to weigh in. That can't happen right. In those circumstances it's important that there be some clarity about who owns the decisions around it. But not every team has that makeup to it as well. So teams that have kind of a little bit longer I like to think about all teams have this kind of cycle of work that they do right and teams that operate on a bit slower cycle, teams that may not have the immediate consequences, teams for which compliance is insufficient and we truly need commitment right In those sorts of things.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 41:12

I do wanna have a structure that has a little bit more of a shared leadership component to it. Again, when I say shared leadership here, I am not saying abdication of responsibility, I'm not saying there's not a formal leader. I'm saying at times, different people need to step up to be able to demonstrate some leadership type behaviors around this. So the 51% I understand what you're saying and in some contexts, if it makes sense but I don't know that I would take that model and plug it in all places and assume we work equally well.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 41:42

All right. So the idea of distributed leadership is critical in this because let me go back to fighter aviation there are times when one person has more situational awareness about what's happening that they make a decision for the group, and that's not because they don't have to go and ask and ask, hey, mother, may I? Or anything like that. They just make a decision and later they come back and reflect on it to see why that was made. So we're big proponents of distributed leadership, which I think you are as well, and of course you get into boundaries banners in your book with Eduardo Salas. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit later. Okay, so we covered seven of your points, I believe. Minimize the time between performance and feedback. I think that's critical. I think hopefully that's clear. We have covered both teamwork and task work.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 42:26

Yeah, and if I could say a quick word about that, if I could say a quick word about that. And part of the reason for that sooner is better, like not waiting too long is we just have cognitive limitations as humans? Yeah, and to be able to remember something that happened a month ago, two months ago, it's just we're gonna distort the picture, so that's why that's critical to them.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 42:47

No, absolutely. One of the things we talk about and one of the things we demonstrate in classes is a simple thing is hey, y'all drove here today. What color car did you park next to left and right? Well, it doesn't mean they didn't pay attention, it's just, it's a cognitive load. Their brain doesn't need that to survive, so that gets pushed out. But guess what, the next time they come in the next day, they know what color car they parked next to. It's kind of interesting how that works, right, so I concur with you there. The second thing I think you covered as well cover teamwork and task work. The percentage I've seen that you gave in the past about 40, 60, 40% task work, 60% teamwork. Do you still stand by that? Is that how you still view it?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 43:27

So you're gonna hear a recurring theme for me today, right? Which is it depends on the team is a fit for purpose question. So what I will say, the red flag for me is when I'm running 80, 90% task work, that's a red flag for me. There could be a time when, during a debrief, we can get by with 30% teamwork. But if you're not talking about the teamwork thing, if you're not surfacing it, I think it's a mistake. So typically it probably does fall in that 40 to 60 range, but it's not kind of a hard rule.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 43:54

So how about this? You know, in fighter aviation we spent a lot of time talking about our crew, resource management, human factors or teaming skills, and that kind of goes away after time because it's just a normal thing, and then we get into more technical aspects of fighting and employing the aircraft. That it's majority of the focus is on the employment, the technical side of things. So I think the same thing is true in organizations. When you build the teaming skills up and you go through this, you may see that natural shift more towards the technical skills, especially in this if it's in a complex environment. So yeah, I kind of use the 40, 60 rule to start off with. But I agree with you there, it depends on the context as well.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:31

We talk about structure. Structure debriefs are critical, creating psychological safety. We talk about reflecting backwards to understand what happened and then look forward. There's this great saying that we bring up in here all the time If we misremember the past, we can't improve the future. So that's a great one Balance, inquiry and advocacy. I believe that connects back to debriefing. Do you have anything else to add on that?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 44:55

Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. I'm starting to find this is kind of a secret sauce for being an effective facilitator of debriefs, and so when I talk about advocacy and inquiry, advocacy is something like so we need to involve Joe sooner on this. The next time this happens, right, I'm advocating what the team needs to do, right, maybe it's based on my expertise, maybe it's based on my point of view. Advocacy is kind of guiding the team, directing the team, advising the team. Inquiry is just what it sounds like.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 45:34

Inquiry is asking questions to draw things out from the team, and when we either feel like we can't do any advocacy, some people have, I think, inappropriately been taught that their role as the leader of a facilitator of a debrief is like don't have a point of view, just draw things out. They're missing the opportunity to serve as a failsafe, an alternative point of view, an advice giver. So I don't want to ignore that. But often the opposite happens, which is someone with deep expertise whether it's because of their position, authority or because they're a trainer, deep expertise comes in and they're spending the entire time telling right.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 46:19

And so to me, this balance between advocacy and inquiry is the mindset that I want all facilitators to have, whether they're the team leader or someone helping out a team when they do debriefing. I want to lead with inquiry. I want to get the team involved, but it's A-OK if I have expertise to weigh in with a point of view. I just want to do that selectively and I've discovered that over time, as I've become better with inquiry, I'm able to get teams to self discover what I might have had to advocate about before. So I do a little less advocacy because I think I'm a bit better at inquiry, but I always have in my back pocket. My job is to help this team learn what they need to learn and get better. If they're not bringing something up, I will. So that's what I mean by balancing those two.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 47:05

On facilitation. You brought this up a moment ago. You write a lot about leaders need to learn how to do effective debriefing and understanding of structure everything we talked about and you also just pointed out. You can have a facilitator in there. One of the things we try to do is we try to build that capability within the organization. I will show you, I'll demo, do and teach. We'll demonstrate how to do an effective debrief, we'll help you do it and then you'll need to teach to somebody else. How important is it for leaders to learn how to do this, and should they be dependent on external consultants to come in and facilitate this all the time? Maybe a loaded question?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 47:41

Well yeah it is.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 47:42

But I just tell you our organizational philosophy. So I've run a consulting and research firm for 35 years the group for organizational effectiveness and our philosophy has always been we use the phrase inside first, but that means for us is our first choice is always to build capabilities inside the organization and not build a dependency outside. Now, there's some things that it makes sense to have an outside consultant, facilitator, researcher involved in, but I want as much as possible to leave behind a capability in the organization. So very much aligned with you on this right, in a perfect world, I would want all leaders to learn how to do debriefs. You know, it's as if, like you teach someone how to do an agenda for a meeting. We should also teach them how to do debriefs. But, as in business settings, what we typically teach managers is first, we teach them how to manage individuals right, how to manage a person as they move up in the organization. We teach them business management, how to manage a business.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 48:44

But the piece that we tend to overlook quite often I see this in large corporations too is preparing them to lead a team.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 48:50

Leading a team is not identical to leading an individual right, and part of leading a team is being aware of what really influences team effectiveness, and part of that is being then able to lead a debrief. So in a perfect world, I'd like enough leaders to know this, but we don't live in a perfect world. So that means having people inside the organization who can help some leaders who currently don't have that kind of leadership and have that capability. And building a cadre of internal consultants is something that we've been doing for the last number of years with a lot of organizations. How do we get focused inside the organization so that they then do what you do right, which is now again an inside consultant working with a group, helping that group, but at the same time preparing the leader so that they can step away as the facilitator and allow the leader to do them on an ongoing basis as well. I think it's kind of a fundamental leadership skill. It should be a baseline for leaders, and almost doesn't matter what industry.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 49:43

But generally the reason they don't do that is they just don't have enough time, right, it's not in their interest to learn how to do this.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 49:49

Um. So time is probably the number one most often stated purpose or obstacle to doing effective debriefs. I'm gonna say it's also a matter of how we define the role of leader in the organization. That, if I define the role of leader in the organization is I manage a team of seven individuals and I'm taught how to do performance management. I'm taught how to do career counseling. I'm taught how to do what do you do with a performance problem, that my role becomes that right and between that and doing my other work it feels like my plate is full.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 50:26

So part of this is, early on in leaders' careers, to kind of do a little bit of a mind shift. That says and part of your role, one of the key functions you do as a leader is you're gonna lead a ton of teams in your career and team leadership is a little bit different, and so we need to build that kind of muscle as well. So it's both the time thing and also like what is my? Is this even kind of my role? Am I supposed to be doing this or not?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 50:50

And earlier you talked about kind of doing a deep like a four hour debrief, and it's great to have those capabilities right To be able to do the deep dive, you know, really looking very carefully, but we also need to be able to do some debriefs that are quicker. But just the reason that you described right, because sometimes there's value in doing a 20 minute debrief, but it's got to be structured well and the leader needs to know what they're doing and you can't try and boil the ocean in the 20 minutes to overcome that obstacle of like I don't feel like I have enough time to do this. It's just is it something that's important? Is it part of your role and will you have the intentionality to carve out 20 minutes to do that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 51:30

You bring this up in fighter aviation, a 30 second engagement could lead to an hour long debrief. 30 seconds right. A two week sprint doesn't need to be an hour long debrief. It could be 10 minutes, it could be 20 minutes. A five minute stand up could lead to an hour long debrief. It just depends right, depends on what the environment is and the context. So I do like that line of thought.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 51:54

I wanna talk about some interesting tools that may be out there for folks to help them on guided self correction and improving team performance and help them with debriefing. One of the tools that we've seen is from Gary Klein and it's just a little card. That's situational awareness. You pause everybody and you have them fill out some things. You can do this during a training session or during a week or whatever it may be, or during a stand up or during a meeting, and it's just to capture their individual perceptions of that time. That in situ capture of where they are. That's pretty nice. We use that quite often. The other one that's out there and I think you're very familiar with this are behavioral markers, and can you walk us through what they are and how they work and share some insights on how you're using them now. If you're still using them.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 52:41

So first of all I wanna do two things. I wanna say I like Gary Klein's work, so I think it's great, and I think having kind of a structured way of unpacking stuff is great. Talk to me for a moment, when you say behavioral markers, what you mean. So we're making sure we're talking about the same thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 52:58

Yeah, so my understanding of markers are that teamwork is observable. Therefore you can measure it, meaning that we can have good examples of, or a good example of, what good teamwork looks like and, at the same time, have a poor example, meaning hey, I wanna amplify the good things, like showing up on time, having my computers up or computers down, having technology ready when we started an effective meeting. We have a good structure, we have an effective planning process, we can observe leaders use things like red teaming techniques to mitigate cognitive biases, to solicit input, feedback from folks rapidly. So there's many things that we can observe when we're coaching and helping build capability in our organization. So that's what I mean when I talk about markers is the positive and negative examples of what good and bad look like.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 53:45

Yeah. So I think it can start with an understanding of what drives team effectiveness. I think that's where it starts. So, organizations that we've worked with in a number of cases and these are places like in the Anderson, cleveland Clinic, microsoft when we work with them, we've worked to identify what they consider to be the drivers of team effectiveness, and it's influenced both by what the research has told us, but also there are boots on the ground experience around this, and typically what that means is establishing a framework of some sort. Sometimes it takes the form of a competency model, sometimes it's behavioral in nature, but the idea is that these are things that, in our organization, will make a difference in how teams work. When you have that as a foundation, it logically sets the stage for a variety of things. It helps the leader be on the lookout for things that they should be doing, so it can be used in leader and manager education so that they're aware of, like, this is the stuff, this is eye on the prize stuff. But it also obviously sets the stage for the type of debrief conversation that you're able to have Now. What you're describing is taking it a step further and be able to say, for this key area. How does this manifest? How does this show up? What are the observables around this? What is an example of what good teams do and what less effective teams do? Around this, and, depending upon what your model is that you've considered to be the key drivers, based on the research in your organization, that kind of dictates which of these things should be fleshed out and so on.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 55:18

You know I talked earlier about kind of having some structure to your debrief. So one of the things that we've had some success with is building kind of contextualized debrief guides. It could be one page, but it's like if we're talking about doing a debrief, a post-surgical debrief, there's a few key points in which this team can get in trouble or can do well around this. We want to guide conversation, to be focusing on those sorts of things. So putting together kind of the one page you know Gary has kind of something that's, I think, more general in nature, which is great, but sometimes these contextualized ones as well to be able to do that. But it's based on the model, it's based on the markers, it's based on what's identified has been critically important in the organization for that type of team.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 56:05

Interestingly, you know where some of this has come from historically is where we saw a lot of debriefing take place is in simulation-based training, right, so that you know if you reflect back on, kind of from your military career, right, you know you do simulated combat in some way. And then, of course, if simulated combat, there's then opportunities to talk about what happened, and if we did something wrong, no one dies in the simulation, so it's a good place to practice. I can remember back in the 80s, when we first started doing this, very often what we saw was what I would describe as free play, meaning we created this kind of cool test bed and we let folks go ahead and do what they wanted through it, and then we hoped that they would learn something from it, but the assumption being like, if you just get to do stuff that's similar to the work you do, you're gonna get better and free play doesn't work particularly well.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 56:55

Free play doesn't work particularly well because you could be reinforcing bad habits, so it's less of just like go do.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 57:00

And then the simulation community started saying, well, if we want people to build these skills, whether it's individual or teamwork skills, we have to build things into the scenarios that require the team to do that in order to be able to process it successfully, which lends itself to what we call either markers or targets that you could identify in advance. So, as an observer, now I know partway through the simulation this is gonna happen to the patient or this is gonna happen, the enemy is gonna do this, and I'm in a position to say the team should respond in this way. And that then becomes a setup for the debrief conversation and say, okay, when this happened to the patient, what did you do? Why? Why did that happen? What would happen if that? What would you do if that happened in the future, in real life scenarios? Right, we're not in simulation, we can't create those events, but we can still be alert for the markers, which is what I think you're alluding to, and how important is a simulation when teaching or coaching leaders on how to lead effective debriefs Is it?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 57:59

do you use that as a way to get to that? So we talk about tactical decision games, adult learning, experiential learning activities. We've used tools like GEMISIM. We use things like planks. Anything that allows has a high level of task-adjusted dependence. It could be low fidelity, it could be high fidelity. How important is that in your view in helping not just build effective leaders who understand how to debrief, but build an effective team?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 58:25

So research on simulation-based training is pretty positive when they're designed properly. So if it's and you alluded to kind of this, I mean you necessarily use the word fun, right. But sometimes you've seen kind of team exercises that are really more about the we're gonna have fun together. I sometimes refer to that as edutainment. Right, it's supposed to be educational, but it's mostly about entertainment, and if it's not structured properly, it's kind of like we had fun for the hour. That was cool, but there's no transfer of that to kind of real world. So I think the key to the use of simulation whether it's low fidelity or high fidelity, it's the work that's done in preparation. That's super important that what you're selecting in terms of an exercise or what you're building in terms of a simulation, will evoke the needs that we want to have a team try and work through. Because where the learning takes place is not so much in the doing of the exercise but rather in the debriefing of what happened, to take the insights and the lessons and then to make sure that that last piece of so what does this mean? How does this translate then into our real world when we go back on Monday and we're working in a team that does this other sort of task. How does this translate into it? Now, clearly, in places like aviation, clearly in places like healthcare, military combat et cetera, it's a worthwhile investment to build out these kind of more sophisticated simulations. The consequences of mistake are great. There's an opportunity to run a lot of people through similar over times of the investment that you make upfront. But I'm glad you also brought up the concept of low fidelity simulations, because not every simulation needs to be this high fidelity, multimillion dollar kind of facility around it.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:00:21

We've even had some pretty good success using it's more of a scenario based or a vignette based, where it's cognitive practice rather than physical practice. Right? Example oil industry. You know We've got a team that's split between being onshore in Houston and offshore on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and they need to coordinate. They're connected by video, but they're in two different places and it's subject to fault lines because of it, right? So what we do is we create a scenario that's realistic in nature and we would start and we'll connect it with video and then we'll say, okay, so this is happening on the rig. Okay, who notices this and what happens? What are you thinking and doing when you notice this.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:01:08

Here's another piece of information. Now, what, hey? At what point do you reach out to Houston? And in the course of doing that, we surface things like well, I can't call the chemical engineer at midnight, they'll be offended. And the chemical engineer is, like you realize, it's like a million dollars a minute here. When this is going on, of course you should call me around. So even though there was no technology, no sophisticated simulation, it was a chance for the groups to cognitively practice. We've let them kind of surface, build some shared mental models about how to handle key things and then reach agreements about what to do going forward should something like happen in reality a week, a month or a year later. So yeah, when properly done, I'm a fan of that, scott, on the oil and gas industry.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:01:52

we know that years ago, as a run of Flynn did some work with IOGP on 501 and just basically bringing them in human factors, crew resource management to plan it to our platforms out at sea In your example you just gave. Why can't we take those lessons that we put on the platform and bring them over to the business To bring them back to Houston, can you?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:02:16

Well. So I think there's a ton to be learned from what we've been doing with high reliability organizations to transfer into, you know, let's call it more typical business practices. So any of the kind of crew, resource management, all that stuff started in organizations and settings in which there's safety risks involved in it. But the carrying over of some of that, the way it shows up, it's less of a sophisticated simulation when we're working with, let's say, a group of business executives and it's more scenario based types of things. But the lessons learned from what we've done in high reliability organizations very much inform the way we implement those things and the actions and what we're trying to get them to take out of it, even though it may not look the same, even though there's not a simulator per se. So, yeah, I think you can take lessons from on the El Rig and you know if I put my research hat on for a second right you know I've split my career between providing advice to organizations and trying to crack the code by doing research on what drives team effectiveness on this.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:03:28

And you know, from the research side, we're often looking for what I would call analogs, like what are situations that I can learn something about that. I can then transition and translate that to other places. So you know we do work with NASA on mission to Mars. Well, you can't study teams going to Mars because nobody's going to Mars right now, but we know it's gonna be tough and we know we have to crack the code on it.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:03:51

So, for example, we've been studying deep sea saturation dive teams, like, for example, in the Bay of Bengal. Why? Because they're put into this hyperbaric chamber and for 28 days they don't leave the chamber and they're living close to one another, they're working close to one another, they take shifts where they go out, which is just like an EVA walk in space, but they're underwater doing this. And so we said, okay, we can study them and what we can learn from that we can then share back with NASA so they have some insights and lessons learned. So I think the same kind of transfer process and continually looking at what can we learn from the high reliability organizations what does transfer to a finance team or someone else in a business setting and what doesn't?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:04:35

And some doesn't. Yeah, I think one of the biases out there is functional fixness. We always look at things for the function and not the features. Right, and that's inherent inside the OODA loop as well is we want to look outside and go who's doing well, and that's why we started this conversation off with who's doing well around the globe when it comes to effective debrief. Now, going to Mars, this is really cool One. You get to work with NASA and work on these particular problems. In our current context, we know that teamwork is critical. But going to Mars, what I'm just curious more than anything. So one of our buddies is gonna lead the Artemis mission here soon. I think Artemis too. He's a commander, former Tomcat guy, so I got to spend some time with him in Houston a few years ago to look at crew resource management and space flight resource management. I think they caught that, but is it still? Are you still using space flight resource management? Is that what it's called when you're teaching astronauts how to work together?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:05:36

It's not a term I use, but I have heard it used.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:05:38

yes, when we do go to Mars, they're gonna be living in tight quarters for a while. What's more important the personalities of the individuals or how they interact? I'm kinda curious on how they're gonna select folks to go to Mars.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:05:50

So, first of all, nasa has come a long way in the way they select people from the early days, right From the right stuff, type of early alpha, individually strong, primary focus. That's what it was in the old days. The NASA has been very aware for a long time that the right candidates are a mix of these individual excellence and collective orientation. That putting a group of alpha, high performing people who have no collective orientation or limited collective orientation into a tight quarter, basically putting them into a Winnebago and launching them into space Winnebago with no windows and launching them into space for three years is not the right recipe for success around this. We need both and this is something that, while I'm talking about NASA, I think some of this applies well, this applies elsewhere too.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:06:47

It is almost impossible to team away a true lack of talent. Now I know on a former one of the other podcasts you did, you had someone on talking about the Florida Panthers, right and hockey around this and how they were able to beat teams that they were not quite as talented as, but what I will say is, even the Florida Panthers had all the necessary talent they needed. If you don't have the necessary talent, you can't team it away. The bad news bears do not win right. So when we go to select people, whether it's for NASA or elsewhere, I am looking for people that are capable of doing their jobs, but the research shows that, given equal capabilities, a team that has enough people what we call collective orientation which means they think about the team and not just themselves will outperform teams of the same level of capability. Now NASA is fortunate when they have six openings, they get 9,000 applicants. You can find six really good people and I'll tell you, the people they pick are both individually great, but they also have a collective orientation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:07:56

There's a saying we use, or Dave Snowden taught me years ago, and that's you know, the military takes subpar performers and makes exceptional teams. Industry takes exceptional people and makes subpar teams. Right, and maybe you guys said that as well you and Eduardo Salas, but that's true collective orientation. Okay. So when we talk about hey, when we're inside facilitating a workshop or working with a group, we always tell everybody you're here because you have great technical expertise, we're here to work on the teamwork side of things, which it's not natural. I mean, you're not taught teamwork skills in healthcare or in college, and we see the healthcare industry picking up quite a bit on your work as well. So, collective orientation Can that be trained, by the way? Can you train folks for that?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:08:41

So collective orientation. There's a certain degree of stability to that trait right, so you may have more of a proclivity towards it than I do. So we can do some assessment from a hiring perspective. You know, one of the things that I advocate organizations do is they conduct behavioral based interviews with their job candidates and, in addition to asking questions about what are you doing in these technical situations, they ask tell me about a time you were on a team and it wasn't performing well. What did you do? What did you say? You can quickly get a sense as to whether there's a lot of I, me or those people messed up or, to the extent of versus I thought about what was going on in the team. You can see whether people tend to think team first. Having said that, I can teach people to be better teammates, to demonstrate good team member behaviors, even if they don't naturally score high on collective orientation. It's just much harder to do that when you're talking about a team that has nobody with a collective orientation on it.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:09:41

Not everyone on the team needs to be super high in collective orientation, but you need enough people on your team so that when you start learning about the behaviors it's reinforced rather than it's being a complete outcome.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:09:52

But today most people believe that teamwork is essential and I believe most people believe I believe most people on teams look at their teams as being ineffective. Right, I don't know the percentage on there. So how do we start bringing lessons that come from these high reliability organizations to Houston, to Dallas, to San Francisco, minnesota? What are your recommendations there? How do we knock down barriers to help organizations really improve human performance in this VUCA world?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:10:26

Yeah, so first of all, you may have been referring to the research by Leigh Ann Davy, who found that people report about 90% of people report that teamwork is teams are critical to the success of their organization, but slightly less than a quarter believe their teams are performing really well. So there's this kind of awareness and there's a difference between the awareness that teams are important and the awareness that there's things we need to learn about and to be able to kind of build our capabilities. There's no question that collaboration requirements have increased. Rob Cross and some of his colleagues found that on average in the last maybe 10 years, so there's been a 50% increase in collaboration requirements. The other thing that we've noticed is that and I want to save this for later but this idea of a traditional team is changing too. At Microsoft, for example, the average number of teams that an employee is on at Microsoft at one time is seven. They're on seven different teams, many projects, small things, et cetera, all of this. So everyone knows that teams are important because they're being asked to be on them all, and everyone knows that teams are important to the organizational success because they're seeing them kind of the building blocks of the organization. But it's not just that, everyone's naturally good at teamwork.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:11:50

So now that's back to the second hand of your question, which is what do we do about this? So I'm a firm believer that we now have enough evidence, enough research that's been conducted, but I feel pretty darn comfortable being able to say there's certain consistent drivers that make a difference. And what we need to do is to make sure that people know and when I say people, I mean senior leadership, I mean management and I mean team members, not just the team leader but the team members that they're aware about what the drivers are and that there's not these myths. We've got to dispel the myths. One of the myths is we need to be able to get along. I mean, if we can just get along, we're going to be better. So then teamwork starts being can we go to the pub together or can we celebrate a birthday together? And I like to say look, I don't want to be the bad guy. I'm not saying don't do that, because those are fun things to do and they build a little bit of camaraderie.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:12:50

But if we have a lack of role clarity, if we have different opinions about what the higher priorities are, if we're missing talent on the team. If we're not boundary spanning with folks, we're no longer getting information from other people in the organization going to the pub, it's not going to get it done. So, first of all, what can we do? And I like to think about let's take advantage of existing programs, initiatives that exist in the organization, because trying to get a new program into a corporation is really tough. But if you already have new leader orientation things, if you already have middle management training, if you have built in modules where you're teaching them so they get the foundation of what drives team effectiveness and immediately get them to apply it.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:13:35

So we've had some success with simple self assessment tools, the teams, that workbook.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:13:40

We talk about the seven C's, which are these common drivers that make a difference, and we have folks just immediately reflect on a team and they're able to quickly start saying well, my team is good on cognitions, but it's not doing as well in communications. And to get them to apply this immediately, which then sets the stage for teaching them team self adaptation. And that's where the debriefing piece that we spent a chunk of time talking about because it's so critical, becomes the second kind of toehold in here. So if I can get leaders and team members to know what drives things and how that translates into behaviors, and I can teach them how to engage in conversations about those things and any of the teams that they're in. That's when I start getting the toehold and I start seeing progress. And if you think about it, you know I'm a team member today and my team leader runs a debrief and we surface a few things and something changes and I'm like, dang, that's not bad Because, incidentally, I also have to be heading up a project team.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:14:35

So now I'm my next meeting.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:14:37

I'm the leader and it's like, can I apply some of this to it? And when you have enough successes, the real way to get this to work, as you know, it's like when you have successes you're more likely to keep doing it and spreading it and finding small wins, I think, is really important.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:14:50

Awesome. I got a couple of questions on a couple of points you brought up here. Number one I think it's a comment more than anything, and that is the way you bring this into an organization is you leverage existing practices or frameworks, whatever. So let me rephrase this Organizations that are using hop, human and organizational performance, operational excellence, scrum, agile scale, agile framework, con bond, toyota production system what we're talking about is you can leverage those to use these teaming skills. In there, you can just say, hey, this is not anything new, this is going to make that better. And if you happen to be using all of those business management frameworks or whatever, this is the glue between all of them. It's teaming, teamwork skills, which includes debriefing Any thoughts on that before I come back to the second question.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:15:39

I'm just going to say two thumbs up. I mean introducing something new and complex. I have no sense of pride in the name of the model, the name of the program, the name of the framework. I have no sense of pride in that let's find ways in to get the right information, evidence-based stuff in the packaging that works for them.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:15:59

All right, and now coming back to the seven different teams that you talked about in Microsoft, my view is you should probably be on one team, and that's what we talk about in when we talk about agile manufacturing, agile processes, agile software development is one team. You bring the product to the team, not the team to the product. So that's one way to look at it. What are your thoughts on being on seven different teams? Is it an inhibitor or is it accelerator? What's it do for the individual?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:16:26

Well, we know it's tougher. We know it's tougher, but I would say in some settings it's impossible to be on one team. It's just the nature of the work is such the work is too dynamic and there's too many things going on and have to form a formal team that has not overlapping with other things. It just isn't possible.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:16:49

So if I'm on seven teams and I'm working a large you know Fortune 100 company and I have five different scrollmasters and I have five different ways to do a debrief every week, and then that's multiplied by the number of sprints I have over the year, I'm going through 100 plus debriefs a year that are different. There's no structure to them, it's just evolving all the time. Not only that, I may or may not be on a high on a team that has a high level of task independence. I may be on a few that have low level task independence. So I may be going through this environment where it's just stressing me out as an individual. That's kind of how we see things in organizations right now is, hey, when we talk about structure, self-similar approaches, teaming skills and things like that, it's we want to reduce the energy spend that individuals have in coming to work. Why? Because that's safety. That's actually that's part of psychological safety, in my view. But are you seeing this proliferation of being on multiple teams as a problem for organizations?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:17:47

It can be. But let me be clear now, when I say team, what I mean by this, because I am not talking strictly about the traditional definition of a team. So traditional definition of a team was, you know, there's multiple people, typically with some defined roles, a shared mission, and they remain together for some period of time, and you could, actually you could draw a circle around right like this is our team. And if I ask everybody on the team, you know, is this our team? That they'll give me similar answers. That's again. I'll use the 1950s manufacturing model. There's no question who's on the team.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:18:27

What has happened last six, eight, 10 years and it's been been accelerated by dealing with pandemic is that there's a lot more, what I'm calling teaming Amy Edmondson's used this term as well which is we're not an intact team, we're not going to be together for a long period of time, but there's four of us that need to work together, we need to collaborate effectively and there's something that's popped up and we need to huddle up and we need to work on this and we got to get it done. And so this is one of the seven teams that I'm on. It's not my formal team, but this pop up. Work has occurred and I'm seeing it in healthcare. We're writing about it right now, about how you know if you go to, if you go to ambulatory care and you go in and you see your physician and they start diagnosing what you have. They then send you out for a test to a specialist when turn sends results to somebody else, who provides some interpretation of those results back to the primary care, who decides that you need to see somebody else. Right, what's the team there? What's the team? Is the team the four primary care physicians that work together all the time? Yes, but you're not dealing with three of them. Is the diagnostician? Is that the? Is that the? You know dosimetrist will? For this period of time?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:19:43

This team was formed dynamically to deal with the particular case that you have. And, to the extent that we're dealing more with teaming, some of our, some of our traditional solutions that we can have and we have an intact team don't necessarily transition right away. So we have to think about in those contexts is how we build transportable team work competencies and transportable teamwork processes. Right, so I become really good at communicating. I become really good at giving feedback. I become really good at conflict management. I take that to each of the teams that I'm on Right.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:20:22

So to the extent that we build some debriefing muscles and there's some common sorts of feels for how the debriefs occur, I can go from project one to my home team to project B and it still feels like reasonably familiar on this. Because I don't think we can put, I don't think we can put the cat back in the bag. I don't think we can say everyone's going to be on one team, even though it may be ideal for performance of that team. It's the nature of the workplace is such that it's going to be more dynamic. So how can we take what we know and make it work when someone is dealing with might otherwise be an overload to enable them to be successful?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:20:58

Is it what you described, just a crew concept, the ritualized form of a team to rapidly come together and solve a problem, to move on, just like what we had in the cockpit right? I mean, I think in commercial airlines right now there are some airlines that the pilots will never fight with each other again for the next four or five years. It's a rapid crew. Is that what you're talking about is a crew concept?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:21:20

Yes, here's the difference. The difference is the pace in which that is happening and the volume of it has accelerated. So that's always been true in airlines, right? People see the, you know, they come in, they see the crew, they think the crew is this crew that's worked together for a while. No, you know, they may have met like walking down the rampway to go into the plane, right? So it's not that these types of teams didn't exist before, these rapidly formed, rapidly disbanded teams. It's just become much more prevalent. So instead of it being kind of a use case that's on the edge, it's becoming more of a core case and we're seeing it like in the oil industry and processing plants.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:21:59

This is how extreme the ranges, from that to like to Microsoft teams to, you know, diagnostic teams in medical. More and more that's happening. And I'll tell you something interesting too If I were to ask people in the cockpit and kind of the flight attendants who's on your team today, they could name the six people. But I work with senior leadership teams and I do this with some regularity and I'll ask them individually who's on the senior leadership team and inevitably I will get different answers. Isn't that interesting the way they're defining the circles, and that's on a team that's relatively stable compared to some of these other teams. So I think, as a field we need to be alert to like, if we're going to be living in this place where there's, in addition to stable teams the stable teams don't go away. All the stuff we've talked about doesn't go away. We also have to think about what do we do for those teams that have these kind of rapid formation. Dynamic membership and things like quick charters, for example, become really important in that context to build early shared mental models.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:23:03

Now, Scott, this has been fantastic. I know we're coming up on time. I do want to leave a few minutes for you to if you have any questions to us about what we're doing or anything about the today show or anything you heard or anything that you would like us to answer. Do you have any questions to us about anything?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:23:21

Well. So that's a question, and maybe more just like a couple of food for thought things, that I'd be interested in your perception on this. So you know, recently, when we were asked to do an update to our book the teams that work in book and to include a, an epilogue at the end, and they said, you know, pick, pick, three themes that you're seeing and the implications of that for for teams around this. And so you know, not surprisingly, you know, one of the things we wrote about was this teaming concept, right, this dynamism that we've got to kind of figure out. The second one is one that I think a lot of organizations are experiencing and it's this dispersion, right, dispersion and flexibility and work. So you know the fact that we've got some people working from home and some people working together, and it's different on different days. You know, we, we all live this grand experiment of how that works during during the COVID pandemic, but organizations are continuing to do that. So you know, as you work on things in your own way and how you think about that, how you handle that, how we advise organizations.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:24:29

And then the third piece is I'm calling them a nht is a non human team members, right, and and what happens when? Now, as AI continues to grow right and we're dealing with intelligent agents, the military has had some of this for a while, but we're looking at battlefield of the future stuff for the army right now and like what is it? How does trust get formed? We know a bit about how it happens with humans. How does trust get formed with non human team members? So, just whether it's your responses now or food for thought for you or in a future episode, particular thinking about kind of teaming, dispersion and non human team, yeah, so human, what we call human machine teaming.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:25:09

There's a lot of work on that already and in fact I think we can have an old episode on. You know, since AI is around, how does human, that human machine teaming work? And then things like if you use AI and marker systems or behavior markers or anything like that, what's that do to psych safety and organization? Right, because if you're being observed by an AI, that's not a good thing, that you know. People react differently if they know they're being observed. Right, but that's something that we take to heart from John Boyd's work as well. Hey, scott, what's what's next for you? Any new books? I know you have the book team that works with this, eduardo Salas. I ran into Dr Salas about three months ago down in Houston, got some time with him. He'll be on the podcast soon Fantastic human being and I think he's leaving his chair position, I believe. But are you doing a what's? What's what's next for you as far as books, writing, traveling, are you going to Mars, by any chance?

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:26:08

Um, so let me start with your last question first. The answer to that is okay, a little too old and maybe a little too, you know, close to over to do that, but so, and I continue to write together a good bit, as I mentioned, this addendum to the book, this prologue to the book, coming out in the fall. So it'll be the teams that work it's kind of the new, new addition coming out to kind of expand stuff that we've done. We've been working a good bit in the healthcare space. You know I remember what aviation was like in the 80s and aviation was a very rich place because of the needs and because of the opportunities and healthcare right now.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:26:50

So we're trying to do a little bit more publishing, actually in medical journals, british medical journal. We published in a good bit in other places Because that's a community that appreciates the value of this but really has some opportunities to be able to to move forward as well. You know, and I do a lot of work with John Matthew so that's another name that you may have seen and John and I have a couple of publications that will be coming out. That continues this kind of work on adaptation and learning, one of the things that we're writing about is, since the majority of learning that takes place in organizations takes place outside of formal classroom settings, how do we accelerate on the job learning Right, even outside the team context? How do we accelerate? We call it informal learning, well that's what we did.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:27:45

That's what we did at the O Club is, you know, you go to your debrief and you go to the club, but that's where the where the real learning happened, right, I mean, that was so important in my previous previous life there, so that's that's fantastic.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:27:58

So anything we can do to accelerate people's ability to do that. Some people are naturally good informal learners, many aren't, so that's another space that we're operating in is we've been testing out some things to get people, before they go into a work assignment where they might learn things, how do we prepare them to get the most out of that experience, what they should be looking for, the questions they should be asking, so they're not just showing up blind. Whom we accelerate their ability to learn from experience. That's an area where we're focusing on a little bit too Great.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:28:26

Hey well, scott, I really appreciate your time. I've been looking forward to this for quite a while, actually since we started the podcast. When we talk about John Boyd's Oodaloop, we can use it for the individual, we can use it for a cell, we can use it for a team. We could put it like you pointed out you could put a we call it a boundary over them and kind of identify the internal workings and the external workings with their external environment. So Boyd's Oodaloop does allow us to do that, and I really like the idea of collective orientation because, you know, at the center of the Oodaloop is orientation, and I think that's absolutely critical in the work that you're doing. Scott, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. I'm just going to keep you on here for another minute while we wrap this up.

Scott Tannenbaum, PhD: 1:29:03

Great Thanks, appreciate the invitation, thank you.