Team Science: Building High-Performance Teams with Eduardo Salas, PhD | Ep 42

Is there a way to turn a team of experts into an expert team?

What can business leaders learn from Coach Prime (Coach Deion Sanders, head football coach at the University of Colorado, Boulder)?

Uncover the true magic of Team Science and its profound impact on organizational outcomes in our fascinating conversation with Teams That Work co-author, Eduardo Salas, PhD.

Will you fall into the common myths that hinder efficient collaboration, or rise above with the evidence-based guidance from our distinguished guest? Discover how the art of team planning, action, and learning can revolutionize your workplace dynamics.

Journey with us as we navigate the intricate maze of task interdependence and its crucial place in understanding group and team context. We delve into the Navy's TADMUS program and aviation Crew Resource Management (CRM) and their revolutionary influence on Team Science. 

Finally, we walk you through the essential steps of effective team planning and debriefing, elucidating the importance of a shared mental model within a team. Why is debriefing a game-changer, and how does it reduce unexpected events? We explore, with Eduardo Salas, the immense contributions he has made to the field of Team Science. From his groundbreaking work in aviation to his support of Nigel Thurlow,  Professor John Turner, and Brian Rivera's work on the Flow System, his insights are a treasure trove for anyone seeking to understand the intricacies of team dynamics.

Eduardo Salas, PhD
Teams That Work
Eduardo Salas, PhD on Wikipedia 

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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
Economic...

Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:57

All right, welcome to no Way Out. Today we're going to have one of the most important conversations for leaders, and that's a discussion about team science. For those of you who are struggling with understanding how to create agility, innovation, safety and, of course, resilience. From our podcast, we've been telling folks it's an outcome of better quality, observe-oriented, site and act loops. Now, in case you haven't been following the show, just remember that the OODA loop is really a generic, generative model that explains how living systems perceive, learn, act, plan and, of course, make decisions. Now what does that mean? That means that living systems can include, and should include, a team. So how a team plans, how it acts or executes, and how a team actually assesses or learns and we call that debriefing. That happens to be a team lifecycle. Now I learned that from our guest today, a very important human being in the world of safety, innovation, agility and resilience, and that is Dr Eduardo Salas. Dr Salas, welcome to the show.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 2:01

Thank you, Epaan. Thank you for the opportunity to share some of my insights about team science.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 2:07

Yeah, this is very exciting. So, Dr, last time I spent any time with you was in your office. There you were about to move or change or evolve. Can you give us a little background of what's going on in your world right now as far as what you're doing?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 2:22

Well, I'm at the Department of Psychological Sciences that arrives at university now in Houston, and what happened is I've been chair was chair for seven years. So I stood down in July as chair of the department, where we have a small but very productive faculty around industrial organizations, technology, human factors, cognitive neuroscience. So I stepped down and I'm spending most of my time now writing, mentoring my doctoral students and working on a couple of grants that I have.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:06

Okay, well, that's great, and we're going to talk a little bit about your history here as well, from a perspective that is familiar to many of my friends in fighter aviation. We'll come back to that, but you're using a lot of big words here. I was psychology, human factors. You're not pushing scrum or scaled agile framework, anything like that. You're talking about real science now, aren't you?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 3:27

Yeah, of course you know. Organizational psychology and human factors is the science that helps individual groups in organizations at work. Right? So we are scientists, practitioners that's how I identify myself. So we use the science, psychological science, to improve people's lives at work and we translate the science such that we can provide evidence-based guidance, evidence-based advice on a number of human resources issues.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 4:08

Right. So let's talk about the current condition. Right now. You're working with a lot of organizations. You've worked in healthcare, you worked in aviation, you're working with oil and gas. You're working all over the place. Same with me. I've been all over the place as well and, from my perspective, generally there's a lot of headwinds out there. When we start talking about team science and teaming, it's not necessarily people push back against it, it's the assumption that they already know what it means because they read a book or they've had a scrum master come in to teach them something. So the current condition is such that, in my view, people do not want to put any effort into this because it's natural. We already know how to work together as teams. Therefore, why do I need to do this? That's my perspective. I can't really hear what you're seeing out in industry as well.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 4:54

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So, with my colleague, scott Tannenbaum, we call that a myth. So there's a couple of myths out there in organizational. One is that collaboration, teamwork, comes naturally, which is not the case. You have to develop, you have to manage it, you have to support it, you have to reinforce it. So that's one.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 5:22

And the other one is I usually get organizations that say, oh, we already do this, and then, when you take a deep dive into this, what we're doing this already, it's not even close. And so one of the things that I try to do, we try to inform them about, educate them about the science and why the things that they think they're doing is not what the science is saying. So that's the second thing. And probably a third myth out there is people say I don't have time for this, we have a business to run, and so, with the help of the science, again, we provide evidence suggesting that, for example, team work leads to better safety, leads to innovation, leads to satisfaction at work, leads to a number of very good outcomes in the organization, and so Well, there's a lot of still interest in fostering collaboration and teamwork. There's still some resistance around those three things, those three myths that I just explained.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 6:43

Yeah, but there is a hunger for organizations to create this teamwork because they, I believe they understand that it's the interactions, it's the behaviors of that complex adaptive system that they have that actually matter. So we know that right now there's a lot of teams in name only. Because we see it right, we can actually go in there and be pretty good observers of it and see what teamwork looks like. But these myths seem to get in the way. And then you also have a lot of folks selling panaceas and frameworks and things like that, where they'll convince leaders that, hey, you need to spend two days learning this thing. That is nothing more than a team lifecycle. You spend more time on that than you would on focusing on actually developing true teaming skills. So there's a lot of headwinds out there. I'm not saying they're right or wrong, they just are, but that's kind of what we're seeing as well. So I want to go back to current condition. Why do we need teams? I mean, what's going on in the world where organizations need teams?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 7:42

Yeah. So the organizations that want better teaming, better collaboration, better teamwork is those organizations where human performance, reliability is needed. So if there's a fault line or there's an error in how people coordinate things, bad things happen there may be an accident, people die, could be a costly mistake, and so forth. So the organizations like Aviation, oil and Gas, nasa, health Care, they do see the value because errors are costly.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 8:34

So that's one side and there's another side in the corporate world these days that basically there's been data published by economists in the last 10 years that clearly suggest that innovation and knowledge generation comes from multidisciplinary teams, and so now there is a big interest in the corporate world to again foster collaboration and to understand collaboration, because they know that breakthroughs come from multidisciplinary teams. So that's why, at least in the 40 years that I've been doing this, organizations in the industry that I just highlighted, one teaming, one teamwork, one collaboration. And there's also now a movement in academia around the science, of team science. Essentially, if innovation and knowledge generation, like I said, comes from multidisciplinary teams, how can we improve collaboration at universities, scientists, you know. So there's also now a significant movement across the country not across the world around science teams.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:10

Right, yeah, you know, right before COVID hit. I think this is coming out of Microsoft, it's coming out of IDO, IBM, Deloitte, Gallup, out of LinkedIn. It says that the one thing that gives organizations a competitive advantage are these non-technical skills, these soft skills, this teamwork skills. It goes by different names team, science, teaming. We are not taught these things, and I know this from my background in fighter aviation. You're not really taught these things in high school or in college, right? They're kind of assumed. So if these things give you an advantage and what I'm hearing from you is this is starting to be injected into curriculum in higher education then don't we have a big problem when we look at corporate America and say, hey, you actually have to take some time and learn this as well, right? Is that true?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 11:03

Yeah, but I will tell you again in the 40 years that I've been doing this. You know, though, 20, 30 years ago nobody cared about this, only the high reliability organizations did, but lately there's a lot more interest in trying to foster, understand, collaboration. In COVID, change is a workplace right, so now people are distributed, virtual, and they still need to interact with people, they still need to collaborate, they still need to, you know, be part of a team, and so COVID also the pandemic has created a lot of interest in teamwork.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 12:00

Darius, I ask you right now we're still in the current condition. What do you stand on? Distributed work? You know, working remotely versus the working together collectively.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 12:11

Yeah, I think there's a place for it. I mean, you know there's some. All depends on the task, right, the task interdependency. You know why we need to be a team. So in some cases distributed team is appropriate, in other cases it's not. But I don't think organizations are now driven by the nature of the task. They're driven by people who want to. Given what happened in the pandemic, they want to stay at home, they don't want to commute, and so now you know what I see more are kind of hybrid teams. You know some are distributed, some are not, but you know it has a place.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 13:04

I will also tell you that the kind of things that we know from the science, it's when you're in a distributed environment it makes it a lot more difficult to force that collaboration, for example, trust, to build trust. It's better when you're in person I see your face, I see your non-verbals, I hear you better. When you're distributed, it's a much challenging thing to obtain, not impossible, but it's just more challenging. In my view, in a perfect world you would need an analysis of why we need to be distributed. Is it okay to be distributed? Yeah, but these days I think it's either the economics or people wanted to stay home. Work at home.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:02

Yeah, in your book that you wrote with Scott Tannenbaum Teams at Work you actually talk about task interdependence. I'm just going to share something. Hopefully this works briefly. It's something that we borrowed from Scott Tannenbaum several years ago and I think it's been modified in your book as well. Here we have a little bit of a degree of task interdependence on the left side. Can you talk a little bit more about why you use this type of thinking, not only in your book, but to help people understand what team is needed?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 14:33

Yeah, sure, because all teams are not created equal and teams are. We in our science to some degree make a distinction between a group and a team and we put them in this continuum right that you see here. So on one side you have a group and on the other side you have what we call a team, and what connects them is this continuum, is the level of task interdependency, and task interdependency the higher the task interdependency that is, I need your expertise, I need your information to complete the task that to us, it's a team. A group is a set of individuals that might go into a room to brainstorm about a problem for a couple hours and they disband. There's no interdependence.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 15:25

And so in the science, it matters where you fall in this continuum, because depending where you fall or where you are, different competencies matter. So when you don't have any task interdependence, I don't need you, I don't need your information, I don't need your expertise. Usually what matters is civility, right, let's get along. But on the other side, when I do need your expertise, when I do need your information, we can hate each other, but we still need to fly the plane, we still need to take care of the patient. So task interdependence is the driver of the requirements in the team. It's the driver of all. What is it that you need? What competencies you need in order to succeed? And in some of the high reliability organizations that I work with, like Health Care for example, the nature of task interdependence varies, which makes it a lot more challenging. So sometimes the teams have high task interdependence, like when they are in the OR, let's say, and then after that sometimes there's little or no interdependence. So this dynamic is what makes it sometimes more challenging to manage teamwork.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 17:08

So I'm thinking here when you look at a group on the left side of the continuum, thinking like a baseball team or a wrestling team, just as an analogy. They still have to know the basics of teamwork right, or teaming or the team science, correct.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 17:24

Yeah, but it's kind of sequential in various. It's sometimes when you're batting you're doing something and they did division, but when you're defending you're doing something collective. So that's why baseball or so forth, it's somewhere in the middle or to the left. Football, on the other hand, or soccer or those kinds of sports, it's completely interdependent. We need everybody's expertise or role to help. All right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 18:01

Hey, so you brought up football and I don't want to go there right now, but I'm a huge fan of University of Colorado. I went to school there. I want to use that as a quick analogy. What happened is they took 86 players, brought in 86 new players. Roughly, they have a completely new team, new coaching staff. How can they actually become a high-performing team? And then can you do the same in an organization? How do you approach building teams and organizations?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 18:26

Yeah, I saw the game this past weekend, so that was amazing. But what would be interesting to find out is what is the coach doing? Coach Prime, I think it's actually.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 18:40

Yeah, it's Coach Prime.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 18:41

yes, yeah, what is he doing? From what I see, this is now a surface. He's a great motivator. He demands a lot, it seems to. Performance Demands participation and getting engaged.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 19:03

I just see that from the silence, but it will be interesting to see what he does behind the scenes on a day-to-day basis. But my guess is that he creates a culture where the team matters, that all of them matter, and I think what was amazing to me in the game was how quickly they were I mean, it was a great game back and forth, back and forth, and they never give up. They kept going. From what I saw in the silence, he motivated them and so forth. So motivation is a very powerful predictor of performance. And he uses that word believe, if I recall correctly. So in our science we have something, a concept, called collective efficacy. So collective efficacy is the confidence that the team has that they can do the task. So if I believe, if the team believes that they can perform, they can achieve the goal, then what happens is they persevere, they keep going. So I'm speculating a little, but I think that's what happened there in the game.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 20:22

They can't believe that they can come back, and the word that he uses, believe, believe that resonated with me to equate confidence and motivate them that they can keep going, and then so this collective efficacy construct in our science is one of the most powerful predictors of team performance. Again, confidence, the collective confidence that the team has that they can do the task.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:54

So I want to build on this more. You also have coaching as one of your seven drivers in here, where you look at leadership. So when we're coaching organizations, we actually want to build internal capacity and capability for that coaching. We don't want them to be dependent on external consultants. That's a big thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 21:10

Something else we'll suggest and I don't know if you agree with this and that is we like to take people through a cycle of destruction and creation. That is, don't give me a team or teams that are groups that have been together for a while. Let me have a group of individuals who are more than likely going to work on something in the future and let's build a high performing team that way. To me, that's what we're seeing with the University of Colorado a huge cycle of destruction and creation, and then back into that coaching, that collective efficacy that you pointed out there. And then my view is they're already coming together with the capabilities they have, the knowledge and skills of their tasks, if you will. But it's that teaming aspect, that cooperation and coordination, those interactions that are being built up by those coaches. Would you agree?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 21:56

with that. Yeah, so the reason why we labeled this, one of the reasons we labeled this coaching, is because, roughly, or to make it a little more simple, you know what you want team leaders to be is to be good coaches. What do the good coaches do, maybe like Coach Prime, which is they promote teamwork, they reinforce teamwork, they care about you, right, and they develop you and they push you and you give you feedback. So that's what good coaches do and that's what we want our team leaders to act like like a good coach that promotes, develops scares, and when you have that, then the coach becomes, to some degree, the glue of the other teams, right? So you have the capability which Coach Prime apparently overnight, changes that, and then now you motivate them, right, you make him believe in all of those things. So the coach matters, the team leader matters. In teams live or die by what the team leader does.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 23:20

Right. So I want to take a step back. You spent 40 years doing this. Over your lifetime You've worked with a lot of people that had big egos, that looked down and said I don't need to learn this teaming or human factors thing. I want to go back in time and kind of take some lessons that you've learned and then bring them forward to today. So let's go back to. I think you were doing some work with the tactical decision making under stress with the US Navy and, of course, aviation crew resource management. Walk us through what were some of the big lessons you've learned in the implementation of that teamwork training then.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 23:52

Yeah, so there were a number of lessons learned. So this tactical decision making under stress program TADMOS was essentially the office on naval research response to the US has been since the incident in the late 80s, and so what we learned we did that for 10 years is we learned the importance of science evidence. We collect a lot of data with experts, with experts in performing real tasks. So we deviated from the team science a little bit by working with experts in our. You know, what we wanted to do is the question we were answering at the time was how do we turn a team of experts into an expert team? And so data helped us to. The Navy gave us access to the experts, right, so we collected data. So the access was there was, I think this program had. It was one of the biggest behavioral science programs of the time in the in the 90s, early 90s. So we were surrounded by critics that will give us feedback, critics that will say, no, don't go to the left, go to the right because it's better. So critics. The other thing that we had a solid theoretical foundation, you know, in the reason I say that is that long time ago psychologists said there's nothing more practical than a good theory, and so we use, you know, the share mental model idea, this in we were able to convince the commands that that that this year mental model, this theory that we were posing it matters, and then so, and then we collect that data. But probably the best thing we did was we show two things. One is that we can, we can train, we can have. The same goes. We can train all dogs to get to learn new tricks. And so we collected data with experts, with hundreds, of hundreds of hours either in aviation or in command and control, and we were able to show that they can learn the skills.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 26:30

But to me, at the personal level, I think what the science that we did during those 10 years and the evidence that we provided and so forth, is what we were able to do, is we change people's mind. That's what I call it change people's mind. So, in in communicating our findings, our discoveries, some of the command commander, some of the team leaders, some of the trainers, got an aha, oh, we need to do this. And so the power really was not, in my view, not in what we found, but somebody said, oh, we need to do something different given that data. And then they, they, then they went back to their units, to their organizations, to their training commands and they did something different. They came from the data.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 27:25

So to me, that was probably not our publications, not our books. It is just that somebody a team leader, again, a trainer, a commander heard about us, read one of our papers, maybe, or heard us speak about this, and said we need to train differently, we need to collect data, measure, measure differently, we need to do something different. So I think that was the most powerful thing in, in, in. I think I can humbly say you know, I think we changed the way Navy did some training, especially in the surface community, yeah, and so I think that that was the biggest one of the big list.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 28:13

But the other thing that was important to us now that I'm remembering is the partnership. So we we learning scientists, team scientists partner with such a matter, experts, right, and all of the all of my colleagues there were 10, 12 colleagues that were doing all this work. We immerse ourselves in their environments, so we swear it with them. You know we got dirty with them when that happened. Then they gave us access, they opened doors to us and that's how we were able to collect the data that we needed in in in to the finance. So it was a beautiful experience and one of the best examples that I can think of in my career about how science can influence practicing, how practice influence science.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 29:09

So when you were working on aviation crew resource management, one of the things you gave the US Navy is a dam class decision making and service mission analysis, communication, leadership, adaptability and situation awareness.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 29:20

One of the reasons I know that so well is one it was burned into my muscle memory as a young aviator. And then two we use it as a model to help explain what team science really is. We added empathy to it, put it around high reliability theory and, of course, john Boyd's Oodleoo, which we all call that high performance teaming. We did that several years ago, so crew resource management shows up in commercial aviation. In fighter aviation, we start learning how to work together as teams. We start performing better. Egos the people that have some of the biggest egos in the world are fighter pilots. Somehow you're able to convince us and our brothers and sisters that we need to do this and it works. We know it works. It saves lives. And then you're at I don't know if I can say the name of the airline that you're at, but you're working with the CEO there and I think it's Dallas Lovefield there, and I believe he sees something that you bring up to the pilots and he says something pretty profound, can you?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 30:13

walk to that? Yeah, so it's interesting, not because I'm going to make a parallel to healthcare, for example. So I think what change you know in the CRM in the aviation world is that at some point the captain, the pilot, realized that when the plane goes down, they go down with the plane. So they had to engage, for example, in healthcare. We don't have that, we don't have that hook. You know, when the patient goes down, only the patient goes down.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 30:42

And so over time in aviation it made it somewhat easy or easier to convince the captain and the crew that they needed to engage and they needed to learn these so-called non-technical skills, the soft skills, because at the end of the day that matters. And so it was until in a couple of mishaps or accidents that a few captains came out alive, like the CUCD pilots. And the first thing he said in the press conference I recall correctly, he said crew resource management save our lives, because, if I recall the incident, a pilot that was in the back came in and helped and so forth. So then there was this anecdote stories, if you will, by pilots, and that also helped and they engaged. So now I don't know if I told you this, but when I first started in 1984, somewhere on there, one of my first breeze to pilots, they threw me out of the room literally because they said we don't need your kumbaya, we don't need your hot top stuff that you're telling us.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:14

And.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 32:15

I frankly thought, I went back to my unit and my boss and I said I think my career is over and they literally threw me out. And then, over time, with data, with all the things that I'm telling you about, and now, 20 years later, 30 years later, there's not a pilot, I think, and then you might validate that that doesn't believe in this.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 32:37

Doesn't talk about crews. It's a new generation that has come, and all of the airlines that I worked with. It's now part of the culture to talk about CRM and why it's important and why they need it, and then why they need to refresh it and so forth and so on.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:59

There's a story that I've read and I'm not sure if you can validate it or verify it. You're working with an airline out of Dallas and the CEO the founder of the company said hey, no, this is bullshit. This isn't just for my pilots, this is for everybody in the organization. Is that true?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 33:18

Yeah, they're believers. Again, it matters when somebody like that says we're going to do this In healthcare I've seen that too and CEOs of the healthcare system say we're going to infuse better teaming, better teamwork throughout In the many over the years, the places that are across industries not only aviation, but across industries when the pop leadership supports the concept, then it matters.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 34:07

And as a matter of fact, I tell you that these days, when I go to corporations, I say we know that CRM works, we know that it matters, we know that we can train all dogs to learn new tricks. But big challenge today is how do you sustain the behaviors over time? How do you sustain these cognitions, these attitudes over time? And that's a top management issue. How the CEOs, cfos, you name them the C-suite maintains, sustains these behaviors. They have to create the conditions that lead to people believing in this and keep doing it, and so forth.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 34:56

So the conditions you're talking about. We say, hey, the system drives behavior, the reward systems, the hiring systems, the way people act in that system, that's actually setting the conditions for this. So, Doc, we've talked about the why and the what. I think it's time to dive in a little bit more of the how. And there's a lot of folks running around saying we've got to do these team building activities, these rope courses, and we've got to go do these off-sites and we've got to do that. That's how we build high-performing teams. We don't agree with that. We do see that that is being important. But can you walk us through a little bit of the how you go in and help organizations build these teams?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 35:30

Sure, yeah, I also yeah, I also yeah, I also yeah, I also yeah, I also yeah, I also yeah, I also yeah. So you know, team building is not the same as team training, right, team building, which you described, is you know, you go to, you know the wilderness in North Carolina, you want to die. It's very different. So what the data suggests about team building is what people learn. After two, three days of wanting and dining and doing all this non-work related tasks, they get a little raw clarity, right, they get to know their colleagues, their partners, and they learn about what they do in raw clarity, as we know, and it's important, but that's it.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 36:16

Team training is about skill building. So I'm going to give you very specific competencies. You know psychological safety, collective efficacy, you know all of these things that we talk about, and so they're different, they are different things and they have different purposes. So the way to do this is the most powerful tool that organizations have, as we have discussed in the book in other places debriefing, right. So that's one, but simulation-based team training is another one. So when you put the CRM principles in a simulation where people actually practice and get feedback and get debriefed on these things, right, that's how you do this. So you know, I've written extensively about how do you design, how do you develop, how do you deploy and how do you ensure transfer of team training or CRM, and so there are some organizations that follow that. They have good learning specialists to help them with that. But that's how you do it. It's team training which is different than team building. They all have their place but doing I think, team building is necessary but not sufficient for effective teamwork.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 37:54

Right, right, and we agree. So you know, I think when you and I were in your office standing in Houston a while back, we were talking about the importance of debriefing and then going to the officers' club afterwards, and that's how we still continue to learn. In fact, some of the best learning happened in those arenas, or that atmosphere, or that context.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 38:12

Yeah, we call that the replay at the bar. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 38:17

And that's so. There is a we're not saying not to do these things, we're saying do them. They're insufficient. Focus on these. If you have two, four, six days to do something, or three or four hours, do some type of simulation Doesn't have to be high fidelity, it can be low fidelity. You get in there and my view is let's learn how to plan as a team, let's learn how to communicate, let's learn some closed loop communication tools, some effective communication tools. Let's talk about monitoring each other, that situational awareness. How do we create that? What are the tools that are available to us to do that? And then we move on into the assessing or debriefing piece and how to do that effectively and what we just talked about. There are the three things right, you plan, you execute, you assess. And going back to what I brought up about, john Boogalooop, that's, you know, it's perception. How do we perceive, how do we learn, how do we act? How?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 39:10

do we make?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:11

decisions.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 39:14

I would translate what you're saying into an example. You know, I tell organizations, teams that pre-brief, perform and debrief outperform those that don't. So the teams that have that discipline of pre-briefing, performing and debriefing, they do it. So what industries do that? The military, nuclear power industries, you know aviation by and large. And so that discipline, that routine of pre-briefing, performing and debriefing, if you can do that in your organization and with your teams, hyper-operability success.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 40:06

Yeah, let me ask you this, doc. When we talk about a shared mental model, I know some people are like pro and anti that term or whatever. I'm in the middle, I don't really mind. When we talk about a shared mental model of planning, we can have many examples of great effective planning processes. The problem with that is if we're on a group or on a team and each of us has their own example, we don't have a shared mental model of how to work together. Is that correct? Yeah, what we want to do is we want to inject one effective, good mental model and I'm using good for a reason here, because it can always get better. It's not a best practice, it's a good practice. So we borrow from people that already know how to do this at a high level, emulate it, make it our own and then repeat it throughout either the organization or just a group or however whatever's in your span of control.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 40:58

Is that about right yeah?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 41:00

Yeah, and the same thing is true with debriefing we're talking a lot about. We want to minimize surprise when it comes to working together as teams. So if I go in and I have to learn a new way to debrief, do a retrospective every week, that's actually increasing surprise. It's not good for everybody. We do want to keep things kind of stable but at the same time you and that builds that mental model, that muscle memory where I can go and apply it to a meeting. I can go apply it to a group of people like a babysitter if I need to do it at home, and it scales right.

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 41:33

So yeah, yeah, so you know debriefing. I mean, in my view, we know a lot about the structure of a good debrief. You know one of the elements that you need in a good debrief. I think the challenge with debriefing is doing them. So in aviation it's a lot, you know. It's almost like a mandate, right, and it's routine. Nuclear power industries, also on the at least when I worked with the Navy in the military too. But in healthcare another industry is a lot tougher to do debriefing, especially after you know, let's say, an OR after a surgery. You know, as you know hospitals, you know they do. Their workload is unbelievable and so it's in some industries. It's tough to do a very challenging to do a debriefing, but you know it's lowly. Healthcare is doing that. So so the more you structure the reflection, which is what debriefing does, the better you are. And sometimes you only need three minutes, right, this is not a three hour or deal, it's. You know you just need three minutes to talk about. You know what we did and how can we get better.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 42:59

Yeah, I've had those three hour long debriefs that focused on 30 seconds of a dogfight, right. And for me it's about building that situational awareness. So the next time I go out there I can see what's happening right. So you can't improve the future without understanding the past. And then you know we walk people through how we perceive reality and you know it's a construct that's built inside, top down, inside out, and they start to understand why it's so important to go back and look at what happened, because we all have different perspectives, what just happened, and then we build on that. So there's there's so much more to build on.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 43:31

Doc, I know you got to get running here to a meeting. I just want to thank you and again I want to thank you publicly for all the work you've done over the last 40 years, mainly for the work you did in aviation crew resource management. I know many of my brothers and sisters in fighter aviation are alive today because they sat down and they learned damn class. We, we, we learn it, we go through it every year. We have a class on it every year. We practice it or grade it on it. We debrief it all the time. In fact, debriefing should focus on those teaming skills right, and that's what we've learned.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:00

So I want to thank you for that, I also want to thank you for the the work you did with me a few years ago with the US Navy. When we had the accidents in 2017, the mishaps at sea, we kind of reevaluated what's going on in there, borrowed a lot of your work again, along with Scott Tannenbaum. And then, of course, I want to thank you for your recent support with my colleagues Nigel Thurlow and Professor John Turner. We're thrilled that you got a chance to look at that and really we want to. Yeah, we want the world to know that we're standing on the shoulders of giants. You're one of those giants out there. So if you get an opportunity to learn about teamwork, team science, and if you're really interested in what creates agility, here's your source. As Dr Eduardo Salas, anything for?

Eduardo Salas, PhD: 44:43

us. Thank you, punk. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity to share some of the insights. Hopefully this will be helpful.