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[Music]
[Applause]
What happened on September 23rd, 1999?
This is the day that the Mars Climate
Orbiter went on a mission to Mars and
actually failed considerably. This was
this device that NASA sent over to Mars.
It was designed to measure the weather
on Mars and also to serve as this
communication device for the Mars polar
lander which was supposed to arrive a
couple months later. It just completely
failed. It hit the atmosphere, burst
into a million pieces, leaving the folks
who worked at NASA befuddled, upset,
pretty pissed off. These are not them.
You have to use your imagination a
little bit in this talk. Now, these
things happen. Sending things into space
is tricky business. And quite frankly,
as a psychologist, who am I to judge a
bunch of very smart engineers who work
for NASA for failing and having a bad
day at work? But what makes this story
extra special and super fascinating from
my perspective is that the entire
failure comes down to one thing. failed
communication between these team members
and more specifically
the people working on this project were
not talking to each other about the
right stuff at the right time. It really
is that simple. So I'm going to break
this down for you. So it all started
when they had to calculate the flight
path. So anytime you send something into
space, you have to tell it where to go.
And to do so, you have to calculate the
flight path. Now the folks working at
NASA for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
they calculated the flight path using
the metric system and so they had the
Newton as their unit of force. Those
working at Loheed Martin in the UK, they
were using the pound as their unit of
force. When you're using these two
different systems, the whole thing was
off by a factor of about 4.4.
Now, at no point did the folks at NASA
say to those over in the UK, "Hey guys,
you're using the Newton as a unit of
force, right?" No, no, no, guys. No, no.
we were using the pound. That
conversation never actually happened.
And so we have our first big
communication mishap. Two sets of teams
failed to communicate about basic
information that seemed pretty obvious
to everybody. And just to put things
into perspective, imagine instead of
sending something into space, these
folks were making a cake. Okay? If I
thought I was using a pound of butter
and you thought we were using a kilogram
of butter, that's about 2.2 lbs of
butter, your cake would end up tasting
pretty gross like this one looks here.
Now, before we get too judgy about this,
it sounds pretty silly. We do this all
the time. We walk into meetings, you
know, if we get lucky, there's that
annoying, overly conscientious person
who says things like, "Before we get
started, everyone, let's level set and
talk about, you know, whether there's
ink in the printer at the newspaper we
work or, you know, whatever obvious
thing they want to get on the same page
with." And we usually roll our eyes at
this person and we tell them to stop
talking because we want the meeting to
end soon and we want to get on to the
important stuff. And we say things like,
"We've done this a million times. do we
really need to cover that kind of thing?
And the answer is yes. We should have
that 20 second conversation so that our
probe does not explode when it hits the
atmosphere, but we often do not do this.
Now, the good news is this is NASA.
There is no single point of failure. And
so just because you miscalculate your
flight path doesn't mean the whole
mission is going to actually end in just
a complete failure. And so people
started noticing things were wrong. And
the good news is you can actually
recalculate a flight path. So people
started bringing this up in various
meetings and they even had a conference
about it. But then there was a big
mistake that happened. Communication
mishap number two. The people holding
that critical information were ignored
for a very dumb reason that I'm pretty
sure everyone in this room can
recognize. They did not fill out the
right form. Now all of us know that if
you send a important message over Slack
and everybody was on email or over email
and everybody was on Slack, we just miss
that critical information.
But we don't think that a failure to
fill out the right form is going to be
the difference between our mission to
Mars failing and succeeding. We think
that critical information will
eventually make its way to the important
people at the top. But often this is not
the case. We get very married to our
processes and these can actually be our
Achilles heel in really important group
decision-making contexts. Now, things
didn't end here. There were actually
some last stitch efforts to save this
mission that didn't go so well. Someone
got on the phone with another person.
They sounded urgent about fixing it, but
that person didn't actually recognize
urgency. I think the quote was something
around like they didn't sound anxious
enough and so they weren't taken
seriously. So this miscommunication also
worked around non-verbal behaviors, tone
of voice and so on and so forth. So
there's lots of ways in which this
mission went arry. But I've been
studying miscommunication for over 20
years now. And I have to say that what
actually happened at NASA is much more
the norm than the exception that even
when people are making really critical
decisions, they often fall flat on their
faces and often for these very simple
reasons. And this is the case even when
we give people every piece of
information they need to make the right
choice. So now I want to talk about a
very classic experiment done in social
science. So imagine that you're sitting
in a room with these people and your job
is simple. It's to hire the best job
candidate among a list of four. And we
give you all the information you need.
Everyone is handed a piece of paper with
a bunch of information about all of
those job candidates. information like
applicant A is disorganized, applicant B
has strong leadership skills, applicant
C has won many cake baking awards. A lot
of this information is what we're going
to call overlapping information or
shared information. Everybody has it.
But here's the trick. One special member
of this team has what's called unique
information. Special information about
applicant C that only they have. And
here's how this task goes. If this
person does not share that unique
information, applicant C will come
across as the worst job candidate. If
they do share this unique information,
applicant C is going to come across as
the best applicant. So just to be clear,
the only thing that needs to happen for
this team to make the right choice is
that this special person shares the
information about applicant C. The team
hears it, incorporates into their
decision-making, and they indeed pick
the right person. Now, much like the
real world, people don't know exactly
which pieces of information everyone
else has. They just know some is
overlapping and some is not. This is
called the hidden profile task. It is a
very triedand-true task. And researchers
from the University of Southern
California did a huge analysis over 40
years of this and found that most of the
time teams make the wrong choice. By and
large, small teams, big teams, you know,
huge teams, tiny teams, teams online,
teams in person, teams in which the
person who is holding that unique
information is an expert doesn't matter.
And I have actually found in my own
research of about 370 teams, 20%
unanimously pick applic. So the question
is what's going on here? Well, the
obvious explanation and one that we
often see is that teams focus on that
shared information the most. They kind
of throw around the stuff that they all
know. They focus very little on that
critical information about applicancy
that only one person knows. But we also
found something much more basic going on
in the research in my lab. We took all
the transcripts from these conversations
going on teams and we had human coders
read them and code for the presence or
absence of those unique pieces of
information. We also had AI code them in
large language models. And we actually
found that it is very hard to tell if
those special pieces of information
about applicant C are being shared.
Verbatim, not a problem. As long as
someone literally said applicant C is
disorganized, we were fine. But this is
not how people talk in teams. They start
a sentence, they stop a sentence, they
use synonyms all the time. And in well
functioning teams, people will echo each
other's contributions, often restating a
piece of information in a slightly
different way that alters its meaning.
And so what we learned is these critical
pieces of information are incredibly
fragile. They're like little pieces of,
you know, information in the wind that
can kind of blow away. And because of
this, we lose this information, but we
can't actually tell that our
interactions with one another aren't
going as well as we think they are. And
critically, because in these
interactions, everyone is motivated to
make the right decision. No one person
is trying to bulldoze or push their
person through. These team interactions
actually feel good. And so we can be
communicating terribly and not know it
because the red flags that we usually
look for, those interruptions and so on
and so forth, simply aren't there,
making this type of poor communication
just really clever and underneath the
surface of what's going on in these team
interactions.
Now in this study, people are all
speaking the same language quite
literally, but also social scientists
are very good about holding things
constant that could potentially explain
this effect. Use of jargon, use of, you
know, different types of cultural
languages and so on and so forth. But in
the real world, that is not how we talk.
We show up to these interactions using
all kinds of different languages. And I
don't mean that literally. I mean the
local languages that we often develop in
our communities, in our friend groups,
in our workplaces, acronyms, synonyms,
terms of phrases that we use all the
time and we don't even realize it. And
we often call these things hidden
languages. And they are everywhere.
There, you probably have already used 50
of them today without even realizing it.
They're all over our resumes, often in
the forms of random letters strung
together that very few people recognize.
And these are great. They actually make
our lives more efficient and they build
a sense of community. They build a sense
of identity. But if you don't know them,
and most of us know what it feels like
to sit in a meeting where people are
using them and we don't know them, you
feel really stupid and you feel really
left out. And it's awkward to actually
ask people what they mean. Things like,
"Let's get this done ASAP. I hold a BA,
MBA, and I'm the CEO. This person is
very proud." And they're showing it with
all of these letters. Yeet, which I've
learned is a thing. It is both a verb
and a noun. Um, I yeated the ball. I am
yeet. I think that's true. I probably
got that one wrong. That idea is cringe.
NASA. And sometimes these things
actually disappear just as quickly as
they show up. I'm not allowed to say
cringe anymore, according to my
12-year-old. Now, if anyone's ever gone
to another country, you realize some of
these things don't track. I have a lot
of German colleagues who've told me that
there's a phrase that says something
like it's all train station to me. That
is a terrible English translation of a
German phrase that means something like
it's all Greek, which also doesn't make
a ton of sense. So, we use these phrases
all of the time and they can infiltrate
the ways in which we speak. But one
thing you probably don't realize is just
how quickly they actually develop. And
so, some researchers from Keltech showed
this through this very clever
experiment. They handed people photos of
offices that looked nearly identical to
each other. And in pairs, they had them
describe these photos to one another.
And they looked at how quickly they
actually came up with their own hidden
languages. So, at first they started off
pretty slowly. This one has a computer,
three ferns, a cup of coffee, so on and
so forth. This one has a computer,
headphones, a cup of coffee, a phone.
But over time, and and by over time, I
mean a matter of minutes, they got very
efficient. Team A would call this wall
fern. Team B call this one tidy vibe.
Why? Nobody knows. We just know that
they do it. Team A calls this one lots
of stuff and team B calls this one
wannabe writer. Now imagine that we now
have someone from another team come join
yours. Team A is working well together
and someone from team B joins that team.
What happens? Do they learn their hidden
languages? Do they start over? They
actually get really irritated with each
other pretty quickly for not
understanding one another. Team A says,
"It's wernern. You know the wall fern."
And team B says something like, "Stop
saying wallern. Half of them have wall
ferns. Tell me if there's a tidy vibe."
So, we do not actually realize that
these hidden languages are dominating
our conversations. And they ended up
taking so long to do this. Most of them
actually didn't finish the task at all.
Now, there's this huge theme here in
this talk that we don't know what others
don't know. We don't know if they're on
the same page with ostensibly obvious
pieces of information like whether we're
using the Newton or the pound as our
unit of force. We don't know what the
hidden languages are that they're using.
And we don't know if they are sharing
critical information in the ways that we
think they are. So, the question is,
what are we supposed to do with all of
this mess if we want to make smarter
team decisions? So, I think the first
thing that we should do is be that
annoying person in the room who says
things like, "Let's level set." Which,
by the way, is also a hidden language.
State the obvious. It is a good idea to
start those meetings, to start those
conversations, even if it makes people
roll their eyes. That 20 second
conversation about the obvious thing
that should be going on in that meeting
should happen. And it's okay to be the
one to do it. It's okay to be the one to
make that the norm in the meeting.
realize that not all critical
information appears as such or is
obvious to everyone. So in the research
I talked about, they quite literally
handed people all the information they
needed to make the right hiring
decision. But that is not the real
world. We walk into rooms, we might not
know if our information is critical. We
might think it is, but there's a norm
against sharing it. So imagine for
instance that you are making some really
important decision at work and your boss
is in the room and that boss is arguing
to give her direct report Tom a raise
but you just saw Tom come out of her
hotel room three times that weekend
retreat you guys got back from. Should
you share that information? It feels
critical to you but it could also just
be seen as a nasty little nugget of
gossip if it's shared to the wrong
person. So we often don't know. There
are norms that we could be violating by
sharing critical information. We might
be sitting on something important and we
have no idea because we are new in the
workplace. Don't assume people are
always sharing it. People are actually
more likely to withhold something if
they're afraid that they're violating a
norm or if they're afraid it's not going
to go down as well as they think it
might. It's okay to restate information.
In fact, you should a few times. We
learned that people often assume that
critical information is shared and
that's a false assumption.
Make sure that information sticks. Say
it in the way you wanted it to say, in
the way you wanted it to be heard.
Restate it and do it a couple times and
do it at the end of that interaction so
that you can make sure that your message
actually goes out as intended. It
doesn't get restated even by a
well-meaning member of your team.
And make it comfortable for people to
ask, "What did you mean by that?"
I think most of us know what it feels
like to be sitting on the other end of a
conversation in which a lot of jargon is
thrown around, a lot of acronyms, and we
feel silly asking. But make it a norm to
just say, "What did you mean by that?
What were those letters? What did that
phrase mean?" We will be much less
likely to be annoyed with one another
when those kinds of conversations are
happening. No matter what you do, don't
say Walern. Thank you.
Heat. Heat.
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