Book Review: "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" by Daniel Coyle

By -
I enjoyed reading "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" by Daniel Coyle. It has lots of great stories about groups in various fields (SEALs, sports teams, corporate environments, creative companies, aircraft crew and more) and the various (often subtle) attributes that makes these teams successful.

Key takeaways for me were:
  • Safety is the foundation on which strong culture is built.
    • Our brain is obsessed with psychological safety and we require lots of signalling over and over to feel safe.
    • A sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build.
  • Patterns of interaction of successful groups that have good chemistry often include:
    • Close physical proximity, often in circles
    • Profuse amounts of eye contact
    • Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs)
    • Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches)
    • High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone
    • Few interruptions
    • Lots of questions
    • Intense, active listening
    • Humour, laughter
    • Small attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors etc.)
  • Vulnerability tends to spark cooperation and trust.
    • If you send a signal you have weaknesses then the recipient often relaxes, connects and starts to trust.
    • Good teams often do a lot of extreme stuff together. A constant stream of vulnerability gives them a richer, more reliable estimate of their trustworthiness and brings them closer so they can take more risks. 
  • After action reviews / Retrospectives after a mission or initiative are useful to improve team success.
    • Discuss and replay key decisions, talk about mistakes, learn, ask why several times. 
    • The goal is not to assign credit or blame but rather to build a shared mental model that can be applied moving forward.
    • A good after action review structure is:
      1. What were our intended results?
      2. What were our actual results?
      3. What caused our results?
      4. What will we do the same next time?
      5. What will we do differently?
  • Things to consider for an initiative:
    • What excites me about it.
    • What I'm not so excited about with this.
    • What I want to get better at with this initiative.
  • Leaders should ask their people:
    • What is one thing that I currently do that you'd like me to continue to do?
    • What is one thing that I don't currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often?
    • What can I do to make you more effective?
  • Ideas for action include:
    • Over-communicate expectations
    • Deliver negative stuff in person
    • Listen like a trampoline (gain amplitude through repetition such as asking the question in multiple ways)
    • In conversation, resist the temptation to reflexively add value. After a scaffold of thoughtfulness suggestions can be made.
    • Have action reviews, brain trusts etc.
  • Communicate a clear consistent beacon of purpose.
  • High-purpose environments are dug out of the ground, over and over, as a group navigates its problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast changing world.
  • Adopting a "What worked well/Even better if" feedback process is a good approach to encourage fixing problems and working together.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Solution: Getting macOS Messages to work with Google Chat / Talk / Hangouts in High Sierra

By -
Image
The Messages application wasn't working for me on macOS and I was wanting it to work with my Google Chat / Talk / Hangouts service. It appears that with macOS High Sierra a workaround is required. After struggling to get it going I finally got it going after some searching on the Internet and trying a couple of supposed fixes. What ended up working for me were the instructions on  https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/gtalk-messages-solution-found-high-sierra.2073393/ with a couple of tweaks. The tweaks were required to support 2FA which is enabled on my account. The instructions, repeated here so that I can find them again if required and to assist others having the same problem, are as follows: Go to System Preferences / Internet Accounts and delete your google account. Open Terminal and run the following commands (Warning: This will delete your history!): find ~/Library/Preferences -name "*iChat*" -delete rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Messages rm -rf...
Read more

Using Raspberry Pi as a Time Capsule to backup a Mac

By -
Image
Time Machine is the built-in backup feature of OS X. It keeps a copy of all your files, and remembers how your system looked on any given day so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past. Apple sells a device called a Time Capsule, but rather than buy one of these I opted for a diy approach using my  Raspberry Pi  and so far it seems to be working well. My setup consists of: Raspberry Pi Model B running Raspbian connected via network cable to a router MacBook Pro running OS X Yosemite v10.10.1 connected via Wifi to a router External 2TB drive (with separate power) attached via USB to the Raspberry Pi It was relatively easy to setup following the instructions at  http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=47029  . I am reiterating the instructions here just in case the page disappears (with a couple of additions I needed): 1. Start with a clean installation of Raspbian, configured for your network 2. Power down your Pi, con...
Read more

IT & Enterprise Architecture Conference 2015 - Day 2

By -
Today was the second and final day of the IT & Enterprise Architecture Conference 2015. Below is a summary of my key notes. Going beyond IT. What EA can really mean for your organisation John Pearson, Business Architect, IAG Consider the Demand vs Supply side of architecture IAG is using traditional TOGAF domains (Information, Application, Technology Infrastructure and Security) with business architecture being used to better align with the demand from the business Enterprise Business Motivation Model (EBMM) - Accenture, Nick Malik ( http://www.motivationmodel.com/ ) anchor diagram for business architecture using to understand change impact Bake business architecture approaches in early in the architecture journey Understand the business, its priorities and where value can be added Understand architecture capabilities in service to the business Understand key stakeholder n...
Read more