Back in 1978, a house in Sherman Oaks, California, hosted a storm of brainpower that would shape the history of film. George Lucas, who had just cobbled together a movie called Star Wars, and Stephen Spielberg, who had just done a flick called Jaws, met in a small house with the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. Over a handful of days, the three gathered plot points, character quirks, and set pieces for a romp that would become their next blockbuster: a 1930s-style escapade that would recapture the often gritty, often silly pulp yarns of their youth. What would they call it? Oh, something like Indiana Smith.¹

In the course of the conversation, Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan banter about the hero they’re making: he’s as intelligent as he is scruffy, equal parts Clark Gable and Clint Eastwood. He’s a “bounty hunter of antiquities” clad in khaki pants, leather jacket, and felt hat. He’s handy with a pistol but prefers the bullwhip he keeps at his side. He’s an accomplished professor, yes, but he loves adventure.

But what’s most exciting about their conversation, as New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe observes, is the “voyeuristic thrill” of seeing two titans on the make speak with unguarded enthusiasm— the kind of gush where good and bad ideas erupt with equal earnestness.

Lucas, from what we can tell, acts as a graceful leader, guiding the flow of Spielberg’s creative energy. For instance, when Spielberg gets briefly hung up on heaping more and more quirks upon their leading man—he’s got a thing for ghosts, he’s trained in kung fu, he’s a great gambler—Lucas, rather than scoffing at his super eager conversational partner, says that “we might be stacking too much into this character,” that the “thing of it is [that] it’s good if we delineate a fairly clean personality so that it doesn’t become too confused.” Rather than shaming his writing partner, Lucas guides his creative energy, showing an implicit understanding of how our emotional states affect the way we work.

Spielberg’s boyish bursts beget some of the franchise’s most memorable scenes, such as when the idea for the film’s opening action sequence erupts from him: our hero heads into a cave, climbs up an inclined tunnel, and grabs the artifact he’s seeking. Then, all of a sudden, a trap is sprung, and “a sixty-five-foot boulder that’s form fitted to only roll down the corridor” comes right after him, and he has to race out, leaving the boulder to block the entrance to the cave, never to be opened again. Our scruffy professor emerges unscathed—and the audience is enraptured. It’s the most blockbuster of blockbuster scenes, and it burst out of the filmmaker whole.

In another instance, Spielberg sets a scene (which would make it into Temple of Doom) in which Jones falls asleep on a small airplane. He awakens to find himself in freefall and realizing that everybody’s parachuted away. With the situation established, Lucas pulls the action out of Spielberg.

“He’s trapped in this airplane and it’s going down,” Spielberg says.

“Then what happens?” Lucas replies. “One sentence further and it’s a great idea.”

The above scene, we think, shows the magic of the creative process. Whether you’re making feature films or features for a web app, these innovations can arrive either piece by piece or all at once. And this creative process, in both its initial sparks and its conclusive movements, is strongly affected by the way the people work with one another. If Lucas hadn’t been so gently supportive of Spielberg’s ideas, we might never have seen Raiders of the Lost Ark. Thus, if we are also in the business of making blockbusters—in whatever field that may be—we’d do well to learn how to work together in ways that maximize the creative potential of everyone involved.

Our discussion in this chapter is an expansion of the one in Chapter 5. There we noted the strengths of the ephemeral teams of Yammer and the corporation-sized cross-pollination of P&G, combining those ideas into time-bound, goal-contingent teams we call clusters. Here we will combine those clusters with knowledge assembled about the ways people do their best work—with a combination of freedom and rigor. To that end, this chapter will have two acts:

1. First, we will discuss the acting roles that make up the various clusters. These are the roles that do the work.

2. Second, we will consider the rules that hold the clusters together—the new ways to work in a team, how we play the roles and how we are measured.

THE ACTORS

In the same way that an actor can have central dramatic strengths but play many characters, a team member can have a core skill set and contribute in many fashions. When we recognize that a role is a mask, filter, or persona to be tried on, we can work more fluidly and with greater fulfillment. This is the genesis of what we’ll call the acting role. To motivate us, let’s take a look at the problems of the traditional system.

Role as Performance

In 1990 Judith Butler set off a theoretical bomb. The University of California–Berkeley professor released Gender Trouble, a major (and controversial) work of feminist philosophy that had a hand in founding queer theory. In it she introduces the concept of gender performativity, useful to our understanding of how work works.

For Butler, gender is something constructed. Rather than existing intrinsically within a person, gender is created by society and the ways people behave and engage within it. When we say that gender is performative, it means that we’ve taken on a role and that the acting that we’re doing is central to the gender we are. In other words, we walk and talk in ways that “consolidate an impression” of whatever gender we present to the world. In this way, gender is something we infer from our behaviors, rather than a quality that exists without our personal extrapolations.

“We act as if being a man or being a woman is a true reality,” she said in a recent interview, whereas “actually it’s a phenomenon being produced all the time or reproduced all the time.”²

If you don’t consolidate the impressions of the gender that is accepted by your society, you may be in trouble. For Butler, gender is something that’s “policed,” such as in the treatment of effeminate boys and masculine girls. These gender norms, Butler says, do violence.

What kind of violence? Since this is a humble business book, we can’t make exhaustive arguments, but it seems clear that when we perform a gender, it becomes a shell, prescriptively constricting the kind of role that we have. It also feels deeply true that if people are scolded, shunned, arrested, or otherwise penalized for expressing what feels deeply true to them—their concept of self and the way they present and express that self to the world—they will suffer a self-rejection that could, if they are not yet emotionally resilient, fester into self-denial or self-hatred. These are not healthy things. We’ll leave their explication to experts.

But do Butler’s ideas inform the way we regard the workplace? Certainly. It’s useful to think of workplace roles as performative; that is, there are certain accepted (and unaccepted) behaviors for managers, for salespeople, for designers, for technologists. After all, wouldn’t a computer programmer be looked at strangely in a meeting of designers? Or a customer service person in a huddle of managers? Would they not be better served by sticking to the confines of their predefined roles? We think not.

To understand why, let’s look at another field. Lexicography—the art and science of composing dictionaries—supplies us with a useful vocabulary.

Two camps stand on either end of the lexicographic world: prescriptivists and descriptivists. The prescriptivists contend that the definition assigns the proper use of a word, whereas a descriptivist contends that the definition arises from the way a word is used. Why? It’s where the authority lies: to a prescriptivist, it’s within the dictionary; to a descriptivist, the authority is in the speaker. A hard prescriptivist cringes at the fact that text has become a verb in the age of the mobile phone, but a descriptivist would welcome the new use as an evolution of the language. Do we really expect people to say “send a text message to me” instead of “text me”? Probably not.

Similarly, we should identify job descriptions as just that: they are descriptions, not prescriptions. They tell you what has been done in the position, not everything that you could do. This is why, perhaps, people get commended for “acting outside of their job description”: they are acting outside the rigidity that a clung-to title would suggest.

That brings us back to gender. Just as there is, outside of progressive societies, a brutalizing prejudice against people in acting outside of gender roles, there is a less outright violent but similarly inhibiting bias that hangs over the heads of people trapped in job prescriptions. Our guess is that this was part of what undid Blockbuster, as Yammer CTO Adam Pisoni explained in Chapter 5. If people feel they’ll be punished for acting outside their roles—for example, if a designer starts acting like a developer or a frontline worker meets with the managers—they won’t act outside of their roles. And that rigidity becomes the opposite of adaptation, the opposite of doing something new, and the opposite of innovation.

Next question: what does a less rigid but still rigorous form of organization look like?

DECIDING ON YOUR ROLE(S)

We think it looks like a cluster—the goal-driven, time-bound teams we described in Chapter 5. But what shifts us beyond the job prescriptions is recognizing that the role a person has for a given project depends on the project. It neither defines nor inhibits that person’s professional self. Just as there’s a difference between a battle and a war, the role for a project is not the role of a career.

Working in clusters takes into account the deeply relative nature of a specific project: there’s the way you relate to the overall goal, the tasks within that goal, and the way your work relates to that of your colleagues. Your place within the team is inspired by the assignment at hand and the way you’re applying your skills in that context. And once that context—the goal of the cluster—is completed, your role is over as well. This acknowledges that work is a performance; what you’re doing, to borrow the vocabulary of theater, is playing.

You are playing a role in the same sense that actors in Elizabethan England were players. As Jacques reminds us in As You Like It, all the world’s a stage. The cluster (and its project) is the drama at hand. The team members are the players. And as in theater, every drama has its own rules, its own logic, and its own structure. But before we get to that structuring, let’s look at the dramatis personae.

As we stated above, the role is dependent on the work at hand; a single person could have different roles in different clusters, perhaps in a single day. We are not alone in recognizing this inherent flexibility: in his The Ten Faces of Innovation,³ Ideo partner Tom Kelley draws out his various personas (also a theatrical term!). Lou Adler, the human resources expert, has been writing sound commentary on the subject as well.⁴ For Kelley, we’ve entered into a “post-disciplinary world” in which people’s work doesn’t quite fit under titles such as “engineer,” “marketer,” or “project manager.” We need a new vocabulary, Kelley and Adler contend, and we agree. The ways in which we work need new definitions, though what they are and perhaps have always been are roles.

From what we can tell, there are four main roles:

1. Ideation roles: dream up, discover, invent, and spread ideas

2. Guiding roles: manage, navigate, oversee, and develop ideas

3. Building roles: implement, execute, and finish turning ideas into processes

4. Improving roles: expand, reduce, and tinker with existing products and processes

We already have discussed the relationship between humility and curiosity. If you seek knowledge from the world, your perceptions will naturally be bolstered and affected, but if you are incurious about the world outside your own perception or your own organization, you will soon find yourself convinced of the rightness of your own way (like, say, Blockbuster). The people who ensure that an organization retains its inquisitive interest have the ideation roles; they are people studying the world and the people around them, ferreting out what could be with a mixture of personal and organizational mindfulness.

Next are guiding roles: the people who can move ideas into implementation. They can navigate the processes, politics, and other assorted red tape that can hamstring quality ideas. A person with a ninjalike sense for bypassing the pitfalls of organizational ossification is a prime example of a guiding role, and every team, if it wishes to turn its ideas into products, needs to develop its guiding skill sets. The person who knows somebody in every department is such a guide, and as we discussed with Larry Miller of Activate Networks in Chapter 5, such people are assets to the organization. In addition, guides are often proselytizers, championing and recruiting others to their projects, as happens in flat organizations such as Yammer. Even a great idea needs its defenders: as we noted in Chapter 5, the Whitestrips needed a guide through P&G in order to come to market.

Then come the building roles: these are the frontline people implementing the strategies developed by people with idea roles. This could be the person laying down lines of code or laying down bricks, writing articles or interacting with customers. Taken visually, these are the builders at the edges of the project with their hands on the projects they’re building or conversing directly with customers.

The improver is the expert at trial and error: when start-ups talk about iteration, they’re talking about trying new features and rapidly improving them. Experiments are especially useful for taking companies into new, possibly nonlinear trajectories—further exploring the ideation role’s suggestions of possible paths. There are many examples: Red Bull’s decision to sponsor a man leaping from space to the earth was a grand experiment, and as a reward for its audacity, it dominated the media. Amazon went down a “blind alley” with Amazon Web Services, and now the business of that cloud computing arm is close to eclipsing the business of its bookselling. But not all great ideas need to be so ostentatious: you can don your improver cap to look critically at any aspect of your organization and find those possible paths.

HOW ROLES MEET CLUSTERS

Roles and clusters are alike in that they both are temporal, fitting the form of the task at hand, using no more structure than is needed to get the job done. How would each set of personas take part in the visioning, ecological, and implementation clusters? Let’s explore it.

The visioning cluster is the group responsible for sketching out the specifications of a process or product. Such a group needs to have a diversity of skill sets within it to have the whole picture of the potentials; recall how you and your friends went into that darkened room and found different parts of the elephant. Idea roles are crucial for their ability to gather all the relevant—and potentially disparate—knowledge to inform the development discussion. But conceptual knowledge is not enough for visioning; you also need to know how to get this process through the various layers of the organization, and that is where the guiding roles come in.

Additionally, we need to attach quantifiable metrics to the work of the visioning cluster and the roles within it. Potential metrics could be tracking how many ideas are created within a specific period, how many advance into a state of maturity, and how many are brought to market. We could track the number of features added to increase users. These metrics lend quantitative rigor to the work of a team and allow leaders to track the maturation of a given project. The decisions regarding which metrics should be used for the cluster should be made at the outset of the project with, of course, everyone’s opinion equally weighted.

Next is the heavily networked ecological cluster. These are the parts of the organization that are most thoroughly interwoven with the broader ecosystem, and so unique challenges are presented. When this is executed well, the interconnected nature of the ecological cluster can have powerful effects: if you recall, the NFL Super Bowl of 2013 suffered a blackout halfway through the championship game. The networks didn’t know what to do. But Oreo did: its “you can still dunk in the dark” tweet was retweeted 15,000 times, showing a rapidly real-time marketing aplomb. The cookie had just celebrated its hundredth birthday, and so manufacturers had a command center with all of Oreo’s agencies assembled for the big game: a cluster of narrative-seeing people working in guiding roles. That way they could respond in real time to the unpredicted events surrounding the game. When the blackout came, they were able to see it as a chance to “dunk in the dark.”⁵

As that example suggests, one of the most immediate roles of the ecological cluster is to increase the presence of an organization’s brand. This is readily quantifiable. The metrics we can use could be the tracking of the size of the audience, the conversion of clicks to interactions to buys, and, in the case of social media, the movement of retweets and shares.

That leaves the implementation cluster: those tasked with bringing the vision to fruition. Although ideation role skill sets obviously need to be involved to inform the discussion, the majority of the action here will be carried out by the building roles. If we revisit the origin of Crest Whitestrips, we can see that there were team members involved who championed and then piloted the new idea through the labyrinths of P&G, a masterful example of system-navigating guidance. When we’re faced with such red tape in our own working lives, we need to seek the institutional knowledge that will help guide us through bureaucracy and have the interpersonal skills to build consensus along the way.

Of course, implementation doesn’t end there: there’s the selling of a specific product. This is one of the most readily quantifiable fields. Although the ecological cluster’s branding efforts created interest, that interest doesn’t imply conversion to sales. With the implementation cluster, you’re tracking buys and other critical actions. The success threshold will depend on the organization, but you must agree on that before the cluster begins its work. As you continue, you can count the number of leads that are converted into sales and other metrics.

HOW: BONDS

But how should we move within those clusters as those actors? With velocity. Velocity—the ability to make and implement decisions rapidly—is one of the keys to iteration and innovation. Velocity has many inputs, one of which is the bandwidth provided by quality relationships. In this way, fostering relationships fosters innovation.

CONCERNING COLLABORATION

Anyone who has felt dejected after an overdose of ill-run brainstorms wouldn’t be surprised to learn that collaboration earned a very bad name during the World Wars, though the extent to which it was initially besmirched is shocking. Taken from the French collaboration (stemming from the Latin collaborare, joining the prefix for together and the root for work), the word entered English in 1860. During World War II the term earned a severely negative connotation, as a collaborator was someone who worked with occupying Axis forces, especially in France.

But collaboration happened long before the nineteenth century. There’s a wonderful quote attributed to Charles Darwin: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Although this aphorism has had its detractors, the history of human progress is largely that of less and less violence and greater and greater collaboration.

Collaboration has become an increasing part of the way business operates. Although there was once an adversarial relationship between the organization and the “consumer” it was trying to hoodwink, the present era of relentlessly shared information has forced (at least consumer-facing) companies to be as transparent and customer-centric as possible. As Jeff Bezos once said, as a company, you can be either fundamentally with or against the customer.

Let’s focus on collaboration in the workplace. As with any informed discussion, we will need to define our terms. Let’s take our definition from the organizational psychologist Leigh Thompson, who wrote that “true collaboration often calls for periods of focused, independent work interspersed with periods of intense, structured team interaction.”⁶

This, we think, is the most satisfying description of the collaborative process. There is a rhythm to collaboration. In the same way that music becomes meaningless if you never hear silence, conversation becomes meaningless if you never have the ability to withdraw into yourself; similarly, if you dive into a life-changing book but never write to or speak to someone about it, you impoverish your understanding of the subject.

When done well, collaboration captures the experience of these two fundamental forms of work: there is a certain “diving deep” feeling to work that we immerse ourselves in when we work in solitude that is known to people—from writers to accountants to scientists—who enjoy finding themselves immersed in the timelessness of an empty office in the late evening, flooded with the feeling of immersing themselves into the complexity at hand. There is something profoundly old about this kind of working alone. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, describes the hero’s journey as a process of separation from the collective, followed by the securing of some life-enriching physical or immaterial object, followed again by a return to society. This is a process at the center of our wisdom traditions: Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane alone, Siddhartha Gautama went alone to the Bodhi tree to complete his search for truth. As these leaders exemplify, insight is often harvested from meeting the richness of one’s internal life—but the journey is not complete if you remain in the wilderness. Whether that knowledge was found within yourself while you were behind the wheel of your car or atop a mountain, you need to bring it back to the people.

Coming back to the people often represents some of the most beautiful images in man and nature: the orchestra moving as a single swift organism, the basketball team working as a constellation of athletes, the colony of ants developing an emergent intelligence together that they never would have touched alone. This is the hallmark of a highly functioning team: as the saying goes, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the quality created is greater than the quantity assembled. How is this made manifest in an office setting? The craft of journalism may provide some insight. In the Art of the Interview, veteran radioman Martin Perlich talks about how the finest interviews are ones in which a “current of truth” moves between the interviewer and the interviewee.⁷ In the highest functioning group discussions, then, a similar current of truth will run through the room. But this need not be left to the whim of conversational mood: as we’ll outline in Chapter 7, there are ways to structure face-to-face sessions for maximum potency.

But before we get there, let’s take a deep look at the way we interact.

LOVE YOUR COLLEAGUE?

Barbara Fredrickson is the amiable principal investigator at the University of North Carolina’s Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab. She has made it her life’s work to understand what’s happening inside us when we experience emotions such as joy and love, and her sunny findings shine light onto the nature of creative workplaces.

What’s the place for joy, love, and other gooey emotions in the workplace? The key, again, is to understand what we’re optimizing for. If we are seeking innovation, what we want are as many priming factors as possible that can relax our inborn and unseen mental rigidity and expand beyond the cocoon of my view and into something more aerial, more aware of the group as a whole, including the customers or users, those unseen partners to workplace conversation. Interestingly, positive emotions have this function.

At the center of Fredrickson’s research is what she calls “broaden and build theory,”⁸ which explains the evolutionary adaptive value of positive emotions. What she set out to uncover was the mysterious place of positive emotions in our evolutionary history. For some emotions, the adaptive role is easy to spot: fear clearly leads to the urge to run away and anger leads to the urge to attack, but what evolutionary use does love serve? And how could that value be applied to our working lives?

Rather than providing the immediate impact of helping you to run for your life and live another day, positive emotions act as a form of long-term investment. According to Fredrickson’s research, love, joy, and empathy allow people to have a wider inventory of possible actions: rather than being locked in to a fear or anger response, you can choose another action. Also, the experience of positive emotions allows you to take in the broad contexts necessary for systems thinking, plus they help promote psychological resilience.

Also, and crucial to our conversation in the business space, positive emotions build what a psychologist would call social resources and a layperson would call connections. In Chapter 5 we talked about Activate Networks and its research into the power of relationships: the way the quantity and quality of a person’s network predict the success of that person’s team. Shared positive emotions, then, are a way to increase the bandwidth of those connections. We all experience this anecdotally: the colleagues you feel a closer bond with are the ones you’ll be more apt to entrust with responsibilities. In addition, if the business fails or you lose your job, it’s these close connections—these partnerships—that you’ll rely on as you move into your next phase. Because when you share a positive emotion with a colleague, you’ll each invest in each other’s well being.

As Fredrickson describes, emotions are not simply something that happens in cognition, strictly a feeling, but a mind and body event. The research of Uri Hasson, a Princeton psychologist, is revealing the multilevel mirroring that happens between people when they are getting along: their bodies mirror each other, and their brain activity does as well. To Fredrickson, these are micro moments of positivity resonance.

What does that have to do with the way to work? Plenty.

“Creating these micro moments of positivity resonance with your work colleagues unlocks the collective capacity of the team or the organization by helping everybody expand their mindset,” Fredrickson said in an interview with us, and “develop their skills for learning, co-learning with one another, and as a side benefit to that perspective, to enjoy work more and become healthier in the process.”

Armed with this knowledge, how does this affect the way we work? The key is to seek out—and be responsive to—potential instances for making micro-moment connections. One of the insights that Fredrickson has is that you can have such an instance of positivity resonance with anyone, whether it’s a stranger on the subway, a family member, or a coworker. It’s a matter of showing kindness and receiving connection. After experiencing these micro moments, we have a desire to invest in one another’s welfare.

We can train ourselves to get better at this connecting stuff. In one of Fredrickson’s most notable experiments, she asked the subjects to record the positive connections they experienced throughout the day. Over time an upward spiral emerged: the more people were noting their positive emotions, the more likely they were to experience them. We can infer, then, that making note of positive experiences is a way to prime future positive experiences, which in turn prime more future positive experiences, which in turn increase psychological resilience and build social bonds. This is a great argument for narrating one’s working life, which is something we’ll talk about in depth in Chapter 7.

In this case of connecting, mindfulness plays a tremendous role: we cannot hope to make these moments of connection if we’re not attending to the people around us. Whether or not you’re texting as you talk to someone, being distracted—or waiting for your turn to talk rather than receiving what the other person is saying—undermines the potential for connection. This is a place for what Thich Nhat Hanh calls deep listening: just as a mindfulness meditation is an exercise in observing your thoughts and the way you react to them, deep listening is a practice of observing a person’s speech and mannerisms and the way you react to them. When we listen deeply to the other person, we can hear that person authentically. And again, that authentic connection is the foundation of partnership, and that partnership builds a commitment culture—the most adaptable and resilient form of an organization.