How to Create High-Performing, High-Trust Teams with Dr. Colin Fisher

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Created: 3/25/2026 4:46:02 PM
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Hey, all. This is Abel James, and thanks so much for joining us on the show. Have you ever sat in a pointless meeting wondering, what are we even doing here? Imagine if meeting up with fellow humans felt less like a slow motion train wreck and more like a great jam session where everyone's locked in, connected,
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and creating something truly inspirational
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that none of you could have created on your own. Some call this concept the mastermind where your group becomes more than the sum of its parts, creating something altogether more expansive and at its best transcendent.
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On today's show, we're here with Doctor. Colin Fisher, professor, jazz trumpet player, and author of The Collective Edge, talking about the real science of group dynamics, creativity,
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and leadership.
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Colin has spent his career studying why some teams become far more than the sum of their parts, while others spiral into dysfunction, groupthink,
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and soul sucking meetings that could have easily been an email. If you've ever watched a brilliant team of superstars underperform and fail spectacularly,
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this conversation will give you a totally new lens on how human dynamics actually work and how to build teams that launch you into the stratosphere.
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Now there have been a lot of exciting things going on here in Austin, Texas. I am completely under slept, but also full of energy. I've been playing a lot of live shows, lots of music, and we have more events coming up soon. So if you'd like to come join and and thanks to all of you who have, it's been so much fun the past few weeks.
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Make sure to follow me on my newsletter at abeljames.com.
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That's abeljames.com.
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You can also find me on Substack, abeljames.substack.com.
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And it may surprise some of you to learn that I, I did start another Instagram after Instagram got rid of our large account that we had for like ten years. I finally started up another one mostly just for music. So if you'd like to follow some of my music, make sure to follow Abel James Bascom at Abel Jams
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on Instagram. I'm also on X Abel James,
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Primal Noster. Make sure to check that out.
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I'm able on there or able James and lots, lots more coming soon. If you'd like to join our upcoming challenges and community meetups and all of that, be sure to also sign up for a newsletter or join wildrx.com.
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Look forward to seeing you there. Alright. On this episode with Colin, we're about to dig into how to handle the person who sucks all the air out of the room without making it personal.
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Why 60% of a team's performance is decided before the first meeting even happens. What jazz improvisation can teach us about flow, trust, and spontaneous collaboration at work, why the lone genius is a myth of marketing, this one is really interesting,
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why we desperately need to talk about what AI is already
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doing to our teams right now, and much more. Let's go hang out with doctor Colin Fisher.
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Welcome back, folks. Doctor Colin Fisher is a professor, speaker, and author of The Collective Edge. His academic research on group dynamics,
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creativity,
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improvisation, and leadership has been published in leading academic journals. Also a pro trumpet player, doctor Fisher can sometimes be found melting faces off at jazz jams throughout London. Thanks so much for joining me on the show, doctor Fisher. Thanks so much for having me, Abel. Looking forward to it. So let's let's start with the music thing. What
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did at least part of your lifetime playing a heck of a lot of music teach you about group dynamics and why some
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seem to be more than the sum of their parts and others far less?
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I mean, I think it was because it was so mysterious even as a musician
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to predict
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what groups were gonna click and which ones weren't.
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And it was really clear to me that it was not just about talent
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and expertise,
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that there was other secret ingredients beyond that.
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But it seemed
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so, you know, ephemeral and hard to get your hands around that I ended up basically devoting my life to trying to figure out
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what predicts
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when groups are going to become more than the sum of their parts
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and what predicts when they're going to fall apart.
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And from
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there doing academic research on this, I've learned so much about that question,
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but I think
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there's teaching and learning to go both directions.
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From being a musician,
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I learned a lot about
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other kinds of groups and the advantages that we have in music, especially in jazz.
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When we have these really well defined roles, we have all this shared knowledge, we have a whole culture that's built around that music that we have to rely on. And that now working with people
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who are in organizations,
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a lot of times they don't have those same things
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and that a lot of what's going to make your groups better is your ability to build those things for yourself.
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I would imagine too, one of the advantages of music is at least in a decent group, you get moments of extreme kind of clarity where you're all free of your individual selves, there's that group dynamic that you can kinda rise about. And sometimes it's just for a few moments that you get there, and then it all falls apart again.
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That can be sometimes more difficult to conceptualize in the boardroom or, you know, in, like, a work situation.
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But I think you can get there too when you're all in flow and you're all contributing and that sort of thing. So what's going on when you're experiencing that on stage with, with a tight group, like, as you explained in the book, like you're sitting in with a group that you don't normally play with. What's going on there?
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Yeah. I mean,
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whether it's going to be amazing
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or just
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fine that I don't think you always know going in, but I think there is something in your mindset that as you say, like when you've accessed
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these kinds of collective flow states,
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where
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all of you are creating something that no one of you could have ever imagined before getting together,
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you sort of know that that's out there, you know, that that's an option,
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and that there's
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a skill to kind of the openness
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that you have to have when you go on stage. Actually, this isn't in the book, but I wrote an article about
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the paradox of trying not to try
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as a jazz musician,
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where you develop a practice of very
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intentionally
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letting go of that kind of goal directed intentionality.
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And I think that is something that
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musicians tend to be good at, that, you know, high level athletes tend to be good at, that people who are in these kind of real time collaborative performance situations.
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You have to have an intention to
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let go of that intention once you're performing.
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And that definitely is a meta skill that I
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think researchers
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are just now scratching the surface of how we systematically
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get into that. But that's definitely a big part of of the learning and something that I think I bring
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with me to other kinds of groups.
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But I would say with my work with organizations,
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the chances that that's the level that they're working on with their groups is quite low.
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That the problems that they're having are are much more basic
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than worrying about when they're kinda have these transcendent moments, and they're just trying to have something that functions so their groups are not actively dysfunctional.
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Well, and there can be so many ways that groups are dysfunctional too. Right? For example, and and just to kind of keep with the the music and boardroom
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similarities,
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You know, we're all familiar with being in a group with someone who just wants to be heard. It doesn't really matter. They're not contributing. They're just wanting to be heard. And that definitely applies in music. It can ruin a song. It can ruin a group Certainly happens in business situations as well, where it really only takes one person to just suck all of the air out of the room. So how do you manage when you're in a situation like that,
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in a group like that, especially if you're somewhat responsible for the outcomes? What do you do when you can see that it's clearly dysfunctional and there needs to be some sort of intervention, but it's uncomfortable?
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Yeah. I mean, it's definitely uncomfortable when you have
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people who seem
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unaware
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of
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what the goal of the meeting is, what the group's purpose is, and that they're out there trying kind of for their own glory.
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And that those you know, there's definitely the kinds of interventions in the in real time that are giving feedback to those people to say,
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you know, usually, I think better after the meeting than during unless it's really, really disruptive
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that, hey. You know,
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it's really important that we hear from everybody in these meetings. And I think if you can kind of keep your airtime a little bit tighter,
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we'll be better off on the next one.
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That those are very powerful. We're we're very sensitive to those kind of cues and that even the slightest hint
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that other people are disapproving of the way we're behaving in a group setting
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can be really, really powerful.
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But I think the what's different in the way that I think about it than what the way most people think of it is I would look at that situation, not as an individual,
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a purely individual problem,
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but a problem
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with the system that that person's embedded in.
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That when people aren't
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behaving in ways that are in accordance with group goals,
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it's often because they don't know how they fit into those group goals, that they don't have these clear roles. They don't know
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sometimes what even that collective goal is.
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And that those misunderstandings
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are often
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the kind of source of what we think of as people having these kinds of deviant behaviors in groups
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where we have different understandings of why we're there. And if we don't know why else we're there, maybe we're just there for our own glory. If we don't understand why it's important
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that we
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listen to other people, that we ask them questions,
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that we try to draw the best out of them,
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then it's much less likely that we're going to do those things. So I usually encourage people that if you're seeing a lot of this, and especially you're telling me you've got a lot of those kinds of people in your organization,
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one, I might question your hiring practices,
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but two, I would ask you to go back to say,
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does everyone know why they're there?
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Do they know what the goal is and why it's important?
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And that maybe going back to that discussion
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is going to help us to develop better ways of operating.
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But then even more than that, that we need norms of how we contribute in group situations,
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that we're not made to go into meetings in bureaucratic
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organizations
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that are doing kind of abstract work that's really different than what our brains evolved for. And so it's no wonder we sometimes do things that are not consistent with those goals.
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And so we need to actually be much more purposeful about saying,
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what does a healthy meeting look like? What does interaction
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in this group look like?
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And how can we make sure that that's not just good for one person, but that's good for everybody?
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Oh man, it's bringing up horrible memories of one of the worst meetings of my life. When I, in a former career, when I was paying off my loans, working in consulting, was working with the the US federal government for a while. And I'm not going to give too many details, but we were in the middle of doing research and they flew. They decided just kind of at the drop of a hat to the project lead to fly out the entire team, some of which was based in the Northeast, some was based in other countries,
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a couple dozen people fly them all to Washington, DC in the middle of a work week when we were all responsible for doing other things. We get there on, like, a Thursday or something. I mean, traveled and all these red eyes paying $2,000
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for a flight that should have been 200 because we had to book it all last minute. We get there, and the person who booked the meeting walks into the room,
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like, ten, fifteen minutes late,
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sits down and says, why are we here again?
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The person who booked the meeting. And this is so common
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in every
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organization that it's baffling. But what you explain in your book very well is that most of the work that contributes to great outcomes of said meetings
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really done before the meeting ever happens. It's in the group structure and it's in the group understanding of why you're all there and what you're there to accomplish. I don't want put words in your mouth, so feel free to explain that a little bit better than I just did. No, I mean, was great. I think that's
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the thing that people end up doing is, you know, when they have an experience like, like you did to go, oh my God, this guy who booked the meeting, he's a problem.
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Or to think,
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you know, what we've got to do is we've got to fix
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these individuals or we've got to fix the kind of surface problem that occurs during the meeting. But like, if we're in a meeting where no one knows why we're there,
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of course, it's going to look dysfunctional from the outside. And the idea is not to like
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manage the conflict that emerges from a meeting that was pointless in the first place.
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The idea is to prevent that from ever happening.
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And
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my colleagues and I think about this in terms of what we call the sixty, thirty, 10 rule,
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which is that 60% of a group's performance
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is determined by its structure.
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By structure, I mean its goals,
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its composition,
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the tasks that's given, and these norms of behavior in the group.
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And most of that work
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is before the group ever exists.
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When we're thinking about who's going be on this team, what's it going to be responsible for?
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What are the specific goals it's going to have? That stuff is almost all before the group exists,
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but then 30% of how a group's going to perform
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is determined in that very first meeting.
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And I think this is something people find really surprising is how important
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those first meetings are.
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And it is because, you know, as social creatures,
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we really want to fit into
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almost any group or social situation that we're put into.
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And that when we don't know how to behave, we kind of look around to everybody else for what psychologists call social proof. What's going to be okay?
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What's not going to get us kicked out of the group? And that we have sort of these natural tendencies towards
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mimicking one another's behavior and also responding to authority and what people think is appropriate.
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So
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those norms and what happens in those first meetings, you know, who talks the most, who sits where,
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all that stuff's really sticky
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and it gets harder and harder to change as a group interacts over time. Yeah. We all pick the chair and then we go back to that same chair every time. It's, it's a strange phenomenon. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, it's not just the chair. It's also
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whether we're going to kind of mentally check out because
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we don't need to be there. And that those sorts of things, whether we feel valued, whether we feel that our voice is needed in that meeting,
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those kind of mental norms are also set in that first meeting.
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And so that that's a really important time to kind of put this structure into action.
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But the kind of, you know, moment to moment coaching of groups, well, it's really important in that that's the 10 in that sixty thirty ten rule.
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You know, if you can improve your performance 10%, that's a lot. Right? Like, we'd all we'd all, you know, kill to
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improve everything 10%.
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But that's
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where most managers'
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time and energy goes is only into that 10%.
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And they actually don't put nearly as much energy and attention
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into the 90%.
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And so really what I'm trying to do is encourage people to
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put much more of their energy into
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what they're doing before the group exists, what they do in the launch, and then their work on doing that coaching, that last 10% is going to be so much easier and so much more productive.
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What
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about the
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like some people are able to improvise in a business
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a lot of people are not. That's definitely a skill
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that's paramount to jazz performance. What a lot of people don't understand though, probably non musicians, I mean, is that when jazz musicians get up on stage together,
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they probably don't understand, like, how much work has gone into that beforehand. Because, yes, you may not have played those songs ever together or played together as a group like that, but you yourself and individually,
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you've probably each played those songs dozens or even hundreds of times as well as, like, all of the scales and the math behind the music such that you can kind of rise above
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the structure of the song and then just be free.
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Right? So maybe you can explain how that, that functions in music and also how we might be able to bring that level of thinking or the ability to adapt to the situation,
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improvise and really be connected to the other people outside of the musical situations.
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Yeah. I mean, I think you put that really well that the
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hidden part of people wanting to improvise in in business
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is when we're trying to learn from jazz or we're trying to learn from,
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you know, theater improv or comedy,
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that we're
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trying to learn from people who have put in their 10,000
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into developing this expertise
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and that they're
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using really a common language
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that they've developed. And it's got, you know, the the grammar and the structure
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of language
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just like you and I are talking.
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And so
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when we're when we're playing jazz,
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yeah, we're improvising,
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but we're improvising
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in a coherent grammar and language and structure
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that allows us to communicate about the music and that it allows us to adapt to a lot of different kinds of music. And I think that's why, you know, you see jazz, you know, influences in a lot of different genres of music because the kind of grammar of how we make up stuff in jazz is really versatile, and it can transfer to a lot of different domains.
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But that I think, you know, there's kind of two ways to think about
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how we can bring that into organizations.
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One is that you're not going to,
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you know,
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have the kind of
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freedom in improvisation
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in your organization, unless you are
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investing a lot in expertise.
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And if you're putting teams together spontaneously,
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we really do have to have those roles
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That the the fact that I I'm a trumpet player and I know what my job is in the ensemble. And that's, you know, the drummer knows what what their job is and the bass player knows what their job is and that, you know, we come to any situation with that understanding.
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And you can see that in situations like emergency rooms, in sports teams,
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often in the military that they'll have these kind of well developed roles for people so you can substitute
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one person for another person and that the next person up is going to know what to do.
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Our sense of that in organizations is often much looser.
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And so that's why when I was talking at the beginning saying
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a lot of the work, if you want this kind of spontaneous
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interaction or you're, you know, in a really fast paced environment, you have to invest in helping people to understand what those roles might be or to have explicit discussions about how we're going to construct them.
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But on the other hand, that's the kind of improvisation
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is really hard.
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You might not be able to do it kind of perspective.
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But on the flip side, we're always improvising.
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Right? Like the conversation we're having right now is, is improvised that most of your workday
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is improvised
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and we just don't
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see it that way. And that the moments that often do feel the best are the ones where we're really listening to someone else,
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where we're responding,
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where we're taking what they're putting out and we're building on it and we're integrating them and we're coming up with something that we otherwise wouldn't.
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And in that sense,
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we're all improvising all the time.
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And that the thing that we're
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good at though,
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is
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language.
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That that took us years
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to
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perfect using,
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nobody
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starts speaking this language and understands it right away.
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So we can build on those kinds of moments of communication
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and improvising groups in the sense of
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generating new ideas, of learning other people's perspectives,
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of really trying to
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come up with stuff that isn't just
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me trying to sound good and impress people
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and, you know, what I had thought of in the shower and kind of had been rehearsing,
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that that stuff's not all that valuable,
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but the stuff that we can really get in conversation, in interaction is much more valuable.
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Now, what about groupthink when you get a lot of smart people together and then the results are trash?
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Yeah. I mean, groupthink
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is something that's got
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a lot of misconceptions
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about it. So
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the the basic phenomenon
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that
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groups are kind of conformity machines
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that we when we identify with another group of people
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and we like them, we're going to want to agree with them. That's just kind of human nature where
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it feels
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a little bit socially risky
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to
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express almost any kind of disagreement
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and that we need a lot of kind of reassurance that that's okay. And that's reassurance we often don't get at work, we don't get in a lot of groups.
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So this kind of conformity pressure is what I think of as kind of the core of groupthink.
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That all groups have some degree of that and that all groups
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need to be fighting that if they want to be
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making better decisions. And that's one of the core functions of
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establishing norms where people speak up, people express disagreement, but they do it respectfully.
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When they have questions, they ask them.
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All those kinds of things help us fight groupthink.
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Now, the psychologist who
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coined the term groupthinker, at least popularized it, was this Yale psychologist named Irving Janus.
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And he did it to describe
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the John F. Kennedy's administration's
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invasion
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of the Bay of Pigs.
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And to see, you know, we had all these like Harvard educated,
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super smart people,
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you know,
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what was supposed to be the smartest presidential administration ever
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making this obviously
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dumb, misguided decision to
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invade a country to overturn Castro
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when just a little while before that, the country had rose up to put Castro into power.
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So it was a pretty misguided idea.
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And that Janus thought that part of the problem was
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how smart and how overconfident those people were.
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And but subsequent research has
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kind of cast out on whether those elements
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are all that important in groupthink.
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And that it's really
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the elements that are more important than people being smart or how confident they were is actually how insular they were,
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that they weren't seeking a lot of outside opinions
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besides that,
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and that
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conformity was getting enforced.
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That, you know, one time there's a story about the historian Arthur
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Schlesinger,
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who was
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in
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in these meetings.
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And he, you know, knew that Kennedy's plan was a bad one, that the the Bay of Pigs invasion was not a great idea. And he spoke up. But after that meeting,
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Robert Kennedy senior, we have to say now, I guess, took him outside and said, you know, hey.
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We can't be saying things like that in these meetings. We've all got to get behind the president.
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And basically saying, you know, you cannot be expressing that disagreement.
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Now that's a really important element in
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groupthink and making sure that this group's gonna make bad decisions.
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So the the really important parts aren't, you know, don't the the lesson isn't don't get a group of smart people together. You probably should get groups of smart people together sometimes to to make important decisions.
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But it's really more about what do you do in those meetings? How insular does it become and how much are we actually enforcing conformity?
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And that's always dangerous, that that's always where we're we're gonna risk making some bad decisions.
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And
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the social loafing effect also comes into play for smart people too. I know that I,
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if I'm in a group where like someone who's not saying something useful starts talking, I'm out. You know, I'll just, I may be sitting on the sidelines or whatever, but it's like, is not my conversation anymore. I don't really wanna be in it. And I think that that's a that's a very delicate thing. Right? Especially when you get these meetings together of a bunch of people who are kind of doing their own things separately. You get them in the same room. You think magic's just about to happen, but that can be extraordinarily
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problematic if you don't know why you're there. You don't really know what you're going to accomplish, and then someone just starts talking. So I think your your point is really well taken that especially at the beginning of these
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these meetings, you want to set the right sort of precedent. And also,
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I'm curious about your your take on how to accept some of this
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criticism so that it becomes constructive. Like, last
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night, for example, I went to a talk in Austin. It was like the first one that they had put on and I thought it went quite well, but it was kind of general and there wasn't like
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few
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people were milling about afterwards and they were just talking about it to themselves. They're like, well, I thought it could have been better because they didn't talk about this thing and they could have talked about that. And I was curious if they were going to bring that up to the speaker, you know, because there were only like 40 or 50 people there, and I don't think they did. I think they all just kind of had their little conversations about like, that was good, but it could have been better, but I don't know if I'll come next time. So what could the speaker or the group have done
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at an event like that to make sure that those little side conversations become constructive feedback to make the next event or meeting better?
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Yeah. I mean, it's,
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it's such a great question. And it's really hard, right? Like a social situation,
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like we're going to an event with a speaker.
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We all have these scripts, you know, that that's what you do. Afterwards, you go out and you debrief, but it's like a performance. There's a bunch of people up on stage and it's not our job as the audience
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to,
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you know, give them feedback.
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So I think
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the most important ingredient,
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if you want to get this kind of constructive feedback,
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is to ask for it
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and to ask for it convincingly.
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And so that, I mean, that's really the first thing is like, you know, everyone says, oh, you know, I want feedback, please, you know, take this survey from this marketing agency that I paid that I'm not going to look at. And that,
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you know, that's not very convincing to people that you have to really go out of your way and say, hey, I really
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want to make this better.
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And that your feedback and what your reactions were, that's really important.
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And then it depends on, you know, how comfortable everyone is speaking up across
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what's kind of a perceived status or authority dynamic that's inherent when one person's got the microphone and and other people don't.
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So,
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you know, how are you gonna kind of flatten that?
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Are you going to create an avenue that's less personal? Are you gonna have maybe smaller conversations
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with people where they don't have to stand up in front of the whole group and say it? But that look, when you're really committed to it, you've got to take those steps. You've got to, you know, put your money where your mouth is and show how important it is to you to get that feedback because the social situation
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is kind of acting against you getting it.
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Right.
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And that's when the group size can come into play or breaking it up into smaller groups, like you said. Right? So there are, there are kind of ideal sizes for different uses of these groups. Maybe you could talk about that next, like task orientation versus larger groups. Yeah, no, I think I want to go back to your story about flying
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fifteen, twenty people across the country to have a meeting because that's already a bad idea.
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That
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even without telling me that we didn't even know why the meeting was called, it was a bad idea even before that. And that because 15 to 20
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is big for a meeting.
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And and it just like, you know, if you had a dinner party or you're, you know, inviting friends out to dinner and you're going to a restaurant,
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You're like, oh yeah, I'm going to invite 15 to 20 people.
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But then imagine you're in this restaurant with, you know, 15 people around this big table
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and you say to everyone, we've got to have one conversation.
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Like you can't talk to each other at different ends of the table. We're all of us are going to focus on one conversation.
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Yeah. How well is that going to go?
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How confident are you that everybody's going to get to contribute and tell you how they are and that you're going actually have a meaningful interaction with them.
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Now,
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it's not impossible with 15 people like that. We could do that. Right. It's not, but it's not terribly likely either.
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And that, but yet that's what we do at work all the time. That we're like, let's get fifteen, twenty people in a room.
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We're gonna have just one conversation,
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and we're gonna try and, like, get meaningful contributions
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from all those people. You're just you're already set up for failure and, you know, especially in an hour long meeting with that many people.
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So that my my mentor, Richard Hackman, who's kind of the guru of teams research,
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did a study pretty early in his career about
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when people feel like they're in groups that are too big or too small.
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And so, you know, tracked across different group sizes when people said the group was too big or too small.
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And when you kind of plot these lines against group size,
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they cross at 4.5
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people.
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And that's where
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humans
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feel like we're in a group that's the right size. It's not too big. It's not too small. We can all kind of interact and meaningfully contribute.
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And that's the size of today's family, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, exactly. That, I mean, they're like, I think when you think about it, like being in that group of four or five,
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that's where it feels like it feels like you're part of, you're part of something. Right? It's a real group. It could be a real team. That's the size of bands are. That's the size of basketball teams and
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and hockey teams often are. But
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and that there's a lot of,
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you know, kind of face validity to what I want everyone to call Hackman's number. I'm trying to get everyone to call call the appropriate group size Hackman's number of 4.5.
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But then anything
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from about three to seven members when we're at work, depending on what you're doing, we can have meaningful conversations of groups of that size.
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But when you have these bigger groups and you want us to come together,
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make decisions,
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generate ideas, any of those things, if you've got 20 people, you're going to have to break it up into these smaller groups if you want to give yourself a fighting chance of success.
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And I would imagine different personality
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traits independent of intellectual capability, just personality traits would would really dictate who speaks up in front of that larger group versus not. Right. And that could be a huge loss for some of these groups because a lot of the smartest people I know are not likely to raise their hand in front of 50 people and just say something, but they are very likely to
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to to speak up and be very disagreeable
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actually in these smaller groups if they know that they're coming from a place of intellectual truth. Right? Like, they have no problem disagreeing. Whereas if you raise your hand in front of a speaker, like, front of 50 people, you say, well, I don't think that was that good. It's gonna have
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dramatic social implications. So how can teams
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account for these different kinds of personality and individual issues when they're getting all of these cats together?
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Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great example because, you know, there's, there's lots of people whose, you know, personality is such, they probably never put their hand up in a room full of 50 people.
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But that when we talk about these groups of four or five,
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our behavior can be wildly different in different groups of four or five. And that's because groups are actually really good at developing their own norms and their own culture.
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And that the way even the most introverted person you know
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will behave,
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you know, at home in a group of four or five or,
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you know, among their friends can be wildly different than the way maybe you would see them in other
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situations.
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And the funny thing is
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you would think personality
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and the mix of personalities that you have in groups
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is this
411
00:36:20.234 --> 00:36:23.833
really powerful determinant of how well the group gels.
412
00:36:24.874 --> 00:36:28.074
But the research on this is really, really murky
413
00:36:28.649 --> 00:36:31.769
and that there really isn't some ideal,
414
00:36:31.769 --> 00:36:34.409
like mix of introverts and extroverts
415
00:36:34.569 --> 00:36:36.728
that we can reliably
416
00:36:37.129 --> 00:36:39.769
say, oh, that's the best way to compose a group.
417
00:36:40.649 --> 00:36:45.294
And that there, there was a great study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University
418
00:36:46.014 --> 00:36:46.734
where
419
00:36:47.134 --> 00:36:47.774
they
420
00:36:48.094 --> 00:36:54.814
looked at as many traits as that they could measure. So they were trying to measure every single personality trait they could find,
421
00:36:55.374 --> 00:36:57.294
and they even measured intelligence
422
00:36:57.374 --> 00:37:00.839
and said, well, when does the average or the mix
423
00:37:01.319 --> 00:37:08.519
of these traits predict group performance, not just in one task, but across a variety of different kinds of tasks,
424
00:37:08.759 --> 00:37:10.759
which is what they call collective intelligence.
425
00:37:12.114 --> 00:37:15.074
And it turned out that there was only one trait
426
00:37:15.474 --> 00:37:17.714
that predicted collective intelligence.
427
00:37:18.514 --> 00:37:22.034
And that was something that is called social sensitivity.
428
00:37:22.674 --> 00:37:24.834
And that is our ability to
429
00:37:25.989 --> 00:37:26.789
understand
430
00:37:26.789 --> 00:37:29.829
the emotions of others without being told.
431
00:37:30.229 --> 00:37:36.709
And it's actually, it's measured by a really fun test. If you ever, if you look, if you Google the reading the mind and the eyes test,
432
00:37:37.029 --> 00:37:38.469
you can take this test yourself.
433
00:37:38.994 --> 00:37:41.394
And it's basically you get these eyes,
434
00:37:41.554 --> 00:37:47.874
pictures of people's eyes, and the researchers had asked the person who is in the picture how they were feeling at the time.
435
00:37:48.354 --> 00:37:53.314
And then there's four options and you pick, you know, was this person feeling angry or jealous
436
00:37:53.829 --> 00:37:59.589
or what they were feeling. And the average score of people on that task does predict
437
00:37:59.909 --> 00:38:01.109
group performance
438
00:38:01.429 --> 00:38:03.189
across a variety of tasks.
439
00:38:03.589 --> 00:38:08.389
But that was the only thing, not even the average or maximum level of intelligence
440
00:38:08.894 --> 00:38:12.414
was as predictive as social sensitivity.
441
00:38:12.813 --> 00:38:15.614
Do we know what leads to social
442
00:38:16.094 --> 00:38:19.374
sensitivity or what might cultivate it in someone's life?
443
00:38:19.934 --> 00:38:26.619
You know, that's a great question. I, I don't totally know the answer. I know it is correlated
444
00:38:26.619 --> 00:38:29.339
with another common trait, which is,
445
00:38:29.579 --> 00:38:30.619
being a woman.
446
00:38:31.418 --> 00:38:36.554
Sure. Yeah. I was gonna ask it because that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. That on average,
447
00:38:36.714 --> 00:38:47.994
and, and, you know, I don't know if we know the answer to whether this is cultural or whether there's a genetic component to it, but that on average women are more socially sensitive than men are.
448
00:38:49.599 --> 00:38:50.319
You know,
449
00:38:51.039 --> 00:38:58.079
teams with more women on them on average also are more collectively intelligent than our teams with more men.
450
00:38:59.199 --> 00:39:04.474
I think, though, I don't want people to get too hung up on if I'm not socially sensitive,
451
00:39:04.474 --> 00:39:06.154
I can't be a good team member,
452
00:39:06.794 --> 00:39:08.954
because there's actually, there's a great substitute
453
00:39:08.954 --> 00:39:11.034
for social sensitivity.
454
00:39:11.114 --> 00:39:13.594
So if you remember, I said social sensitivity is
455
00:39:13.929 --> 00:39:16.329
knowing what other people are
456
00:39:16.489 --> 00:39:18.089
feeling without being told.
457
00:39:18.569 --> 00:39:21.849
But if you're looking at someone and you don't know how they're feeling,
458
00:39:22.169 --> 00:39:27.129
you've got an alternative tool in your tool belt, is just as, if not more powerful,
459
00:39:27.529 --> 00:39:28.569
which is questions.
460
00:39:29.424 --> 00:39:31.904
You can ask them, How are you feeling?
461
00:39:32.704 --> 00:39:36.944
And then not only do you know how they're feeling, but if you're doing this in a group setting,
462
00:39:37.184 --> 00:39:38.464
then everybody knows.
463
00:39:38.704 --> 00:39:40.784
And now we all have that much more information.
464
00:39:41.678 --> 00:39:44.959
So if if you don't feel like you're socially sensitive,
465
00:39:45.039 --> 00:39:48.158
don't lose faith that you're doomed to a life as a bad team member.
466
00:39:48.959 --> 00:39:53.119
Use the the power of questions and curiosity
467
00:39:53.519 --> 00:39:54.319
to
468
00:39:55.124 --> 00:40:01.684
substitute for that. And that I think for groups can be, you know, just as if not more impactful
469
00:40:01.844 --> 00:40:04.884
than just having a bunch of people who know without asking.
470
00:40:06.244 --> 00:40:07.124
Yeah.
471
00:40:07.124 --> 00:40:15.699
It reminds me of some research I did a long time ago for my first book about music in the brain, which looked at what musical training does
472
00:40:15.938 --> 00:40:17.699
in terms of your capabilities.
473
00:40:17.699 --> 00:40:26.394
And it's not like it gives you superpowers in math or something like that, like many people used to think. But the most interesting part to me was that for speech prosody,
474
00:40:26.394 --> 00:40:26.874
the
475
00:40:27.914 --> 00:40:34.554
interpretation of the inflection in people's words and the interpretation of the rhythm and all of that, musicians have a heightened awareness
476
00:40:34.569 --> 00:40:38.889
and a heightened ability, kind of like that social sensitivity and attunement to
477
00:40:39.129 --> 00:40:40.329
the emotional
478
00:40:40.329 --> 00:40:55.344
state of whoever's speaking. And I found that that was really interesting because a lot of the musicians who went on to pursue other careers when they actually had to pay larger bills and had responsibilities and that sort of thing seemed to really thrive in these crews, these groups,
479
00:40:55.504 --> 00:40:58.144
not necessarily as group leaders, but as
480
00:40:58.704 --> 00:41:18.814
really fundamental members of these groups. And I saw this happen over and over again. And I know it's not just because they were in bands and like hung out with four or five people. There's like something more to it. So I think it's also important to recognize that some of your hobbies or your life passions can also pay off and have somewhat transferable skills to social situations like this, especially in groups.
481
00:41:19.293 --> 00:41:20.334
Yeah. I mean,
482
00:41:21.694 --> 00:41:25.374
everything that you do that gives you a unique perspective,
483
00:41:25.773 --> 00:41:32.369
that gives you something that like the other, other people that you're hanging out with or that you're talking with or collaborating with
484
00:41:32.769 --> 00:41:34.049
don't bring to it
485
00:41:34.449 --> 00:41:36.209
is so, so valuable that
486
00:41:37.168 --> 00:41:40.289
we can only have groups that are more than the sum of their parts
487
00:41:40.743 --> 00:41:41.464
when
488
00:41:41.783 --> 00:41:43.624
we're bringing diverse
489
00:41:43.624 --> 00:41:44.664
expertise,
490
00:41:44.743 --> 00:41:46.344
skills, perspectives
491
00:41:46.664 --> 00:41:51.384
to the task. It's just like we don't, you know, it's like a band where everyone,
492
00:41:51.384 --> 00:41:57.259
you know, we've got five guitar players or five drummers. That can be fine in small doses, but on average,
493
00:41:57.339 --> 00:42:02.379
that's not what most people like to listen to. We like to listen to kind of one of every different instrument.
494
00:42:03.019 --> 00:42:05.099
And yet that's not what we do at work.
495
00:42:05.499 --> 00:42:08.219
Right? That we get everybody from the same function,
496
00:42:08.539 --> 00:42:11.819
from the same background, everybody with similar expertise
497
00:42:12.054 --> 00:42:22.134
in the room all the time because it's more comfortable. It feels like, oh, yeah, we can all relate to one another. We're all going to agree. It's going to be a more harmonious group
498
00:42:22.694 --> 00:42:23.414
process.
499
00:42:23.494 --> 00:42:27.309
But you're taking this potential to be more than,
500
00:42:27.389 --> 00:42:28.029
you know,
501
00:42:28.589 --> 00:42:35.389
to learn to be more than we knew when we came in off the table. And so bringing your background
502
00:42:35.389 --> 00:42:36.509
as a musician,
503
00:42:36.749 --> 00:42:37.549
bringing your background,
504
00:42:38.523 --> 00:42:43.484
whatever it is, and that the skills and the perspectives that that's given you
505
00:42:44.043 --> 00:42:48.204
is really, really important and something that we don't do that well at work.
506
00:42:49.084 --> 00:42:50.763
Have you seen research
507
00:42:51.099 --> 00:43:00.619
that says if we're listening better or worse in modern times versus a few decades ago, I'm curious if smartphones and kind of the endless distractions have, have started to
508
00:43:00.859 --> 00:43:03.339
kind of erode away some of our natural capabilities.
509
00:43:04.104 --> 00:43:08.344
Let me say, I haven't seen research I'm super convinced by that is,
510
00:43:09.063 --> 00:43:12.424
declarative in that. I think what I'm definitely convinced by is
511
00:43:12.584 --> 00:43:17.224
when you are holding your phone or when, even when it is nearby,
512
00:43:17.384 --> 00:43:21.539
you do a worse job That, that like the influence
513
00:43:21.539 --> 00:43:22.259
of
514
00:43:23.299 --> 00:43:25.459
these phones on a, on our
515
00:43:26.019 --> 00:43:29.699
attention and our cognition is very, very powerful.
516
00:43:29.939 --> 00:43:30.739
And it definitely
517
00:43:31.664 --> 00:43:34.144
erodes our ability to
518
00:43:34.543 --> 00:43:38.944
think and connect and listen to other people when we're in its presence.
519
00:43:39.503 --> 00:43:41.264
When we're not in its presence,
520
00:43:41.743 --> 00:43:44.144
I think the jury is still out on whether
521
00:43:45.589 --> 00:43:50.629
this has eroded kind of our fundamental ability to do this. So it,
522
00:43:50.709 --> 00:43:56.869
at least from what I've seen, it still does seem like when we are confronted with other humans who are not distracted,
523
00:43:57.284 --> 00:43:58.244
who are
524
00:43:58.644 --> 00:43:59.684
really
525
00:43:59.684 --> 00:44:04.164
motivated around a common goal to listen to one another and cooperate,
526
00:44:04.724 --> 00:44:12.989
they can still do it. It's just harder to get them in that situation in the first place because we're carrying around these distractions with us in our pocket.
527
00:44:13.789 --> 00:44:14.429
How
528
00:44:15.709 --> 00:44:16.349
about the,
529
00:44:17.229 --> 00:44:20.749
the legend or the myth of the lone genius versus how
530
00:44:21.069 --> 00:44:27.494
groups actually improve or how you get better outcomes, the trial and error approach versus just someone showing themselves away for years.
531
00:44:27.973 --> 00:44:29.493
Yeah. One
532
00:44:29.493 --> 00:44:38.533
of the things that I found most striking in doing the, some of the background research for this book. So this wasn't all stuff that I knew before I started writing it
533
00:44:39.539 --> 00:44:40.178
was
534
00:44:40.499 --> 00:44:42.259
how pervasive
535
00:44:42.658 --> 00:44:44.659
the myth of the lone genius is
536
00:44:44.819 --> 00:44:46.339
and how powerful
537
00:44:46.739 --> 00:44:53.699
trying to think in terms of heroic individuals and villains is in our psychology,
538
00:44:53.699 --> 00:44:56.104
that we just understand stories,
539
00:44:56.104 --> 00:45:00.504
we remember stuff better when we have these individual protagonists.
540
00:45:00.744 --> 00:45:05.144
And it's one of the reasons why, you know, it's tough to have these, you know, ensemble
541
00:45:05.144 --> 00:45:07.224
stories and ensemble casts
542
00:45:07.729 --> 00:45:11.649
where we're trying to follow a group and their progress
543
00:45:11.969 --> 00:45:12.929
through things.
544
00:45:13.409 --> 00:45:23.824
So when you go back to these stories like of the invention of the light bulb, most people would say, oh, you know, you're looking at Thomas Edison when you're trying to understand the invention of the light bulb.
545
00:45:24.144 --> 00:45:27.424
But when you really go back and look at how that evolved,
546
00:45:27.984 --> 00:45:33.824
first of all, Edison didn't invent the light bulb at all, that the light bulb was invented before he was born.
547
00:45:34.384 --> 00:45:44.659
And the second, even the version that he gets credited for, which is kind of this mass market bulb that everybody could use and it could be manufactured cheaply enough that
548
00:45:45.299 --> 00:45:46.819
it was actually gonna change
549
00:45:46.979 --> 00:45:48.659
change a lot of people's lives.
550
00:45:49.699 --> 00:45:53.459
He had this whole team of what he called muckers.
551
00:45:54.204 --> 00:46:04.364
And so he would often refer to his muckers, and there's these pictures of all the fabulous engineers and scientists who were working with Edison on this project.
552
00:46:05.244 --> 00:46:09.259
And it really was not just him toiling alone in the basement.
553
00:46:09.658 --> 00:46:17.099
And that almost every famous discovery, when we actually have data on what really happened and you peel back the onion from
554
00:46:17.339 --> 00:46:20.539
the person who's getting all the credit for it to what really happened,
555
00:46:21.364 --> 00:46:22.804
you find a great group
556
00:46:23.204 --> 00:46:25.604
that the hard problems in the world
557
00:46:26.324 --> 00:46:27.044
are
558
00:46:27.364 --> 00:46:29.524
almost always group problems.
559
00:46:29.844 --> 00:46:34.164
And that I think even if there was a time where
560
00:46:33.539 --> 00:46:34.418
individual
561
00:46:34.418 --> 00:46:37.699
heroes and geniuses could change the world on their own,
562
00:46:38.338 --> 00:46:40.899
I think that those kind of easy problems
563
00:46:41.219 --> 00:46:45.059
have now come and gone. And the world is just too complicated
564
00:46:45.299 --> 00:46:52.494
for us to try to tackle these important challenges on our own and that great groups are
565
00:46:52.894 --> 00:46:57.374
really what moves the world and that the lone genius is mostly a myth.
566
00:46:58.174 --> 00:46:58.734
And
567
00:46:59.214 --> 00:47:07.719
now if you try to be a lone genius and you're using any amount of AI, can't you really say that you're doing it alone since it's gobbled up all of the Internet and,
568
00:47:07.959 --> 00:47:16.519
you know, whatever else. If you come up with anything somebody thinks is genius by using AI, you know, you're probably using it better than anybody I know that Right.
569
00:47:18.224 --> 00:47:28.864
Now I found this fascinating because you can see it play out in pro sports and and other situations. But teams that win together tend to get stronger, at least when they're on that streak, and teams that lose together,
570
00:47:29.184 --> 00:47:35.609
tend to get weaker. And and so let's talk about the losers first because I think the kind of talking about JFK
571
00:47:35.689 --> 00:47:38.249
and how that can go when you get overconfident
572
00:47:38.489 --> 00:47:43.289
makes sense that there are pros and cons, but what happens when you're on a losing team that keeps losing?
573
00:47:43.449 --> 00:47:49.034
How do you get out of that dynamic back on a good streak again? It's it's really tough because
574
00:47:50.474 --> 00:47:56.074
the one of the interesting things about our perceptions of group dynamics
575
00:47:56.394 --> 00:47:58.634
is that we reason backwards
576
00:47:59.159 --> 00:47:59.959
about
577
00:48:00.039 --> 00:48:03.719
the dynamics of our group so that when we lose,
578
00:48:04.279 --> 00:48:07.319
we downgrade our perception of group dynamics
579
00:48:07.879 --> 00:48:17.064
so that we're like, oh, you know, all these little slights and problems that we had, all these conflicts, they seem much more more salient, much more important.
580
00:48:17.544 --> 00:48:19.704
And so people who are told
581
00:48:19.784 --> 00:48:21.944
that their group performed badly,
582
00:48:22.504 --> 00:48:25.544
they rate the level of communication
583
00:48:25.784 --> 00:48:28.824
as being worse. They rate their cohesion as being worse
584
00:48:29.349 --> 00:48:31.829
even when that feedback is randomly given.
585
00:48:32.469 --> 00:48:33.589
So in other words,
586
00:48:34.069 --> 00:48:36.389
we don't, you know, we're really using
587
00:48:36.949 --> 00:48:39.429
whether we won or lost to
588
00:48:39.509 --> 00:48:41.349
decide how we feel about each other.
589
00:48:42.254 --> 00:48:44.414
And so these groups that are losing,
590
00:48:44.814 --> 00:48:45.774
they're naturally
591
00:48:46.254 --> 00:48:54.574
going to start to think that they're a less cohesive group. They're naturally going to make a bigger deal about any disagreements as being these intractable conflicts.
592
00:48:54.929 --> 00:48:57.729
And they're naturally going to try and blame one another
593
00:48:57.889 --> 00:48:59.729
for things that are going wrong.
594
00:49:00.289 --> 00:49:04.609
And if you want to get out of that, everybody has to be committed
595
00:49:04.929 --> 00:49:05.649
to
596
00:49:06.449 --> 00:49:09.569
knowing that that's what's going on and fighting it.
597
00:49:10.184 --> 00:49:12.264
And I think all you can do
598
00:49:12.904 --> 00:49:14.984
is invest in a better
599
00:49:16.023 --> 00:49:16.904
process
600
00:49:17.303 --> 00:49:19.144
that is assuming
601
00:49:19.704 --> 00:49:23.144
that you've got the structure right. So if we're talking about sports,
602
00:49:23.849 --> 00:49:33.129
you know, you've got good goals, you've got good tasks. I mean, you can you can tweak them, but that, like, sports are already giving you a pretty good structure.
603
00:49:34.249 --> 00:49:36.809
Now I don't know if you've got the right people on your team,
604
00:49:37.664 --> 00:49:38.544
if you're
605
00:49:38.783 --> 00:49:40.063
losing repeatedly
606
00:49:40.464 --> 00:49:43.104
and that that is something that you might need to change.
607
00:49:43.503 --> 00:49:48.944
But then if, if you're fairly confident or you can't change that, all you can do is try to,
608
00:49:49.949 --> 00:49:51.389
rather than using
609
00:49:52.269 --> 00:49:56.109
your competition against other teams and whether you won or lost,
610
00:49:56.669 --> 00:50:00.989
is to compete against yourself and say, let's get better at something
611
00:50:01.229 --> 00:50:05.494
from yesterday to today, and let's start to stack up these small wins.
612
00:50:05.813 --> 00:50:07.734
And those wins have the same effect
613
00:50:07.894 --> 00:50:10.294
as the losses, but in the opposite direction,
614
00:50:10.774 --> 00:50:15.574
that when we see our collective success, we start to think better of each other.
615
00:50:16.368 --> 00:50:19.009
And, you know, I think the coaches
616
00:50:19.009 --> 00:50:21.889
who have turned around teams successfully
617
00:50:22.529 --> 00:50:27.009
really take seriously this idea of continuous improvement,
618
00:50:27.168 --> 00:50:29.249
of being better than yourself yesterday,
619
00:50:29.774 --> 00:50:32.254
but that they are highlighting
620
00:50:32.654 --> 00:50:36.734
these small wins and making sure that everybody is seeing them
621
00:50:36.974 --> 00:50:39.214
and that they're creating situations
622
00:50:39.454 --> 00:50:40.174
where
623
00:50:41.374 --> 00:50:46.589
we are, you know, relying on each other and building trust based on us,
624
00:50:46.668 --> 00:50:48.589
you know, having these successes.
625
00:50:49.148 --> 00:50:53.709
And because but if you don't really go out of your way again to to do this,
626
00:50:54.454 --> 00:51:03.014
it's likely that your group dynamics are gonna get worse as you perceive that you're performing poorly because that's just, again, kind of wired into our psychology.
627
00:51:04.614 --> 00:51:08.454
Okay. Now we have to talk about cults a little bit because
628
00:51:08.639 --> 00:51:15.759
in your in your book, you actually talk about one that I lived just a few miles from a few years ago in in the mountains of Colorado.
629
00:51:15.999 --> 00:51:19.839
But, the Love Has One cult was on a bunch of different documentaries
630
00:51:19.839 --> 00:51:25.924
and I think Doctor. Phil and get some major media coverage. But why don't you just tell the quick story of how
631
00:51:26.484 --> 00:51:29.764
that can happen and and the group dynamics that allow,
632
00:51:30.324 --> 00:51:40.109
a leader to not be listened to anymore as well? Because that's that's a really interesting thing that kinda happened along the way. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that I I love that you
633
00:51:40.269 --> 00:51:46.269
pulled out that detail from from Love Has Won. So the the name of the cult was Love Has Won
634
00:51:46.829 --> 00:51:47.549
and
635
00:51:48.589 --> 00:51:51.149
that it was a a small group of people
636
00:51:51.864 --> 00:51:54.184
that, you know, had kinda gotten
637
00:51:54.424 --> 00:51:55.704
organized around
638
00:51:56.824 --> 00:51:59.543
these two people who were making spirituality
639
00:51:59.543 --> 00:52:00.744
videos online
640
00:52:00.984 --> 00:52:02.024
and eventually
641
00:52:02.584 --> 00:52:13.289
started selling, you know, these tinctures of colloidal silver and a bunch of a bunch of other things that they were saying were gonna help people, you know, be healthier and more well.
642
00:52:13.689 --> 00:52:14.809
But then they also
643
00:52:15.369 --> 00:52:16.889
had an ideology
644
00:52:18.024 --> 00:52:18.904
that was
645
00:52:19.464 --> 00:52:22.984
based on, you know, what they called the the
646
00:52:23.304 --> 00:52:26.744
five d world, that there were five dimensions and that we were only
647
00:52:26.984 --> 00:52:28.344
aware of these three.
648
00:52:28.824 --> 00:52:40.509
And in that other dimension, there were all these celebrities who were galactics, who, like Michael Jackson, Robin Williams, I think actually Donald Trump was part of their religion and Saw that on the list. Yeah.
649
00:52:41.629 --> 00:52:44.829
Of one of the galactics according to their ideology.
650
00:52:45.309 --> 00:52:45.949
And
651
00:52:47.424 --> 00:52:55.424
it was pretty hard to see how they got there because, you know, these were pretty average people when they started out. Know, the
652
00:52:55.424 --> 00:52:58.704
leader Amy Carlson was a manager of McDonald's.
653
00:52:59.104 --> 00:52:59.344
And
654
00:53:01.608 --> 00:53:09.688
the guy who I think ended up bankrolling it, whose name escapes me right now, but, you know, he had been in finance and, you know, was,
655
00:53:09.928 --> 00:53:13.129
you know, had a pretty normal job doing normal stuff.
656
00:53:13.529 --> 00:53:15.364
But the process
657
00:53:16.884 --> 00:53:19.284
of this is actually what we call
658
00:53:20.164 --> 00:53:21.044
polarization,
659
00:53:21.044 --> 00:53:28.244
but not polarization of society where everybody's going kind of further away from one another, which is how we talk about political polarization.
660
00:53:28.839 --> 00:53:29.959
But polarization
661
00:53:29.959 --> 00:53:31.239
within a group
662
00:53:31.559 --> 00:53:34.439
just means that we start moving
663
00:53:35.239 --> 00:53:36.039
gradually
664
00:53:36.039 --> 00:53:37.479
towards an extreme.
665
00:53:38.359 --> 00:53:39.559
And the process
666
00:53:39.639 --> 00:53:41.879
that by which this happens
667
00:53:42.124 --> 00:53:46.604
is actually really familiar. And it's the same kinds of conformity pressure
668
00:53:46.684 --> 00:53:50.444
ideas that that we were talking about with JFK and groupthink,
669
00:53:51.004 --> 00:53:51.564
where
670
00:53:52.044 --> 00:53:53.404
when you're in a group,
671
00:53:53.804 --> 00:53:55.484
the person who talks
672
00:53:56.559 --> 00:53:57.439
the most
673
00:53:57.919 --> 00:54:03.519
is, you know, one where we say, oh, that's probably the average of what everybody thinks.
674
00:54:04.319 --> 00:54:12.374
But what's actually true is the people who are most likely to speak and they speak the most, they speak the loudest. They're actually a little more extreme than average,
675
00:54:13.174 --> 00:54:18.454
but then our minds go, oh, that's, that's what the acceptable view is here in this group.
676
00:54:19.094 --> 00:54:20.533
And that we subconsciously
677
00:54:20.533 --> 00:54:25.654
or consciously update our own views to be more what we think is in the middle of the group.
678
00:54:26.589 --> 00:54:31.069
And that over time, if all we ever do is we talk to each other,
679
00:54:31.869 --> 00:54:33.389
we're going to start moving
680
00:54:33.629 --> 00:54:36.749
basically in the direction that we leaned initially.
681
00:54:36.749 --> 00:54:38.109
So if we were all saying like,
682
00:54:38.724 --> 00:54:41.444
maybe colloidal silver, which incidentally
683
00:54:41.444 --> 00:54:43.124
is extremely
684
00:54:43.124 --> 00:54:43.924
toxic,
685
00:54:44.404 --> 00:54:46.564
and that this this could
686
00:54:46.724 --> 00:54:49.044
prove that beyond a doubt,
687
00:54:49.604 --> 00:54:55.879
that if you take a lot of colloidal silver silver, you will die, and that's actually what happens at the end of this story.
688
00:54:56.279 --> 00:55:05.399
But, know, they're sort of saying, oh, that's, that's a normal thing to do. And that we're going to take more and more and more of it. And we're going to kind of normalize it.
689
00:55:05.799 --> 00:55:15.334
That comes from us only talking to each other. And that we obviously everyone joined this group because they were sympathetic to that view. So they were already leaning that way,
690
00:55:15.654 --> 00:55:19.494
but by becoming more insular, only talking to each other
691
00:55:19.814 --> 00:55:21.094
and then having
692
00:55:21.719 --> 00:55:23.239
the true believers
693
00:55:23.239 --> 00:55:26.199
of that point of view start to rise to power
694
00:55:26.999 --> 00:55:29.879
and start like Robert Kennedy senior to
695
00:55:30.519 --> 00:55:33.799
enforce that view, tell other people that disagreement's not okay,
696
00:55:34.983 --> 00:55:35.624
then
697
00:55:36.263 --> 00:55:38.824
that view gets more and more and more extreme.
698
00:55:39.624 --> 00:55:45.303
And over time, that's kind of where we get cults is these insular views where conformity,
699
00:55:45.303 --> 00:55:49.144
especially to a particular leader's point of view gets enforced,
700
00:55:50.069 --> 00:55:51.269
gets rewarded.
701
00:55:51.428 --> 00:55:53.669
Often, you know, the punishment
702
00:55:53.749 --> 00:55:57.109
of either being kicked out of the group or other forms of punishment
703
00:55:57.509 --> 00:55:59.349
even strengthen this effect
704
00:55:59.509 --> 00:56:03.429
and that the most extreme people keep rising,
705
00:56:03.749 --> 00:56:05.109
rising more and more to power.
706
00:56:05.714 --> 00:56:08.354
Now to to your point about the leader here,
707
00:56:08.674 --> 00:56:12.354
so at the you know, Amy Carlson was suffering
708
00:56:12.354 --> 00:56:12.994
from
709
00:56:13.634 --> 00:56:15.313
this silver poisoning,
710
00:56:15.313 --> 00:56:17.874
which turns your skin blue.
711
00:56:17.954 --> 00:56:19.313
So she was, like, you know,
712
00:56:20.349 --> 00:56:22.509
a fairly otherworldly color
713
00:56:22.589 --> 00:56:24.509
by this point. She couldn't walk
714
00:56:24.909 --> 00:56:27.069
and she was starting to doubt
715
00:56:27.309 --> 00:56:31.149
her own teaching. You know, she was getting to be on the verge of death.
716
00:56:31.469 --> 00:56:34.029
And one of the main tenets of Love Is One
717
00:56:34.604 --> 00:56:35.724
was that
718
00:56:35.964 --> 00:56:39.004
the healthcare and hospitals in the
719
00:56:39.404 --> 00:56:41.404
normal society are
720
00:56:41.724 --> 00:56:44.204
these horrible, horrible things to be avoided.
721
00:56:44.924 --> 00:56:49.564
And so at the end of her life, she was asking to be taken to a hospital
722
00:56:49.829 --> 00:56:55.029
and her own followers were saying, oh, no, no, this is just a delusion
723
00:56:55.029 --> 00:56:55.749
of
724
00:56:55.829 --> 00:56:56.549
her
725
00:56:56.789 --> 00:57:00.149
ascension to this higher plane of being
726
00:57:00.229 --> 00:57:03.829
and that she doesn't really want a hospital, that's not possible.
727
00:57:04.743 --> 00:57:06.584
And that the ideology,
728
00:57:06.584 --> 00:57:07.624
these norms
729
00:57:07.704 --> 00:57:12.184
had taken on a life of their own. So it wasn't the leader
730
00:57:12.424 --> 00:57:13.384
themselves.
731
00:57:13.384 --> 00:57:14.984
It wasn't her, the person
732
00:57:15.384 --> 00:57:16.824
that the
733
00:57:17.678 --> 00:57:22.799
culture and the beliefs that she had been propagating and enforcing in this group
734
00:57:23.039 --> 00:57:24.479
were more powerful
735
00:57:24.638 --> 00:57:26.079
than even she was.
736
00:57:26.719 --> 00:57:31.759
And I think it's a really interesting lesson to kind of take this deep dive into
737
00:57:32.874 --> 00:57:38.793
this this cult because the people were so normal, be and they got so outlandish
738
00:57:38.793 --> 00:57:39.434
there
739
00:57:39.674 --> 00:57:47.579
over time. And that it's actually still the remnants of it are still around. I mean, you can still find some of some of these members online
740
00:57:47.819 --> 00:57:49.419
selling some of these same,
741
00:57:50.139 --> 00:57:51.019
treatments and,
742
00:57:51.339 --> 00:57:58.059
galactic healings and so forth, and and that those beliefs were much more powerful than any one individual.
743
00:57:59.124 --> 00:58:00.484
It was really
744
00:58:00.644 --> 00:58:04.564
incredible and ugly to behold how that happened. And also I could,
745
00:58:05.204 --> 00:58:07.924
having lived there, I can also kind of understand
746
00:58:08.644 --> 00:58:12.404
what led up to it because there's nothing to do. It's extraordinarily
747
00:58:12.404 --> 00:58:13.364
isolated.
748
00:58:13.364 --> 00:58:14.964
It's this tiny little
749
00:58:15.099 --> 00:58:19.019
community of less than like three or even 2,000 people in the wintertime
750
00:58:19.179 --> 00:58:39.934
and everyone's studying different religions. Some of them are on silent retreats for decades. You know, it's just a wild, wacky place where everyone's kind of doing their own thing. So the groups that form tend to be pretty culty and have very unique dynamics. So that's definitely something to be careful of. We just have, one or two minutes left. Could you riff quickly on the future of groups and what,
751
00:58:40.254 --> 00:58:47.168
what we might be looking at as AI enters the chat in the next few years? Yeah. I mean, I think that's another
752
00:58:47.168 --> 00:58:51.889
really big question is, you know, what's AI's role gonna be in
753
00:58:52.049 --> 00:58:53.169
our collaboration?
754
00:58:53.489 --> 00:58:58.688
And that, you know, the popular stories are all, you know, oh, AI is substituting for social
755
00:58:58.584 --> 00:59:01.944
interaction. That it's people are having AI
756
00:59:02.023 --> 00:59:06.504
girlfriend and boyfriends, that they're having AI therapists and all these kinds of things.
757
00:59:07.223 --> 00:59:07.944
I'm
758
00:59:08.344 --> 00:59:09.144
skeptical
759
00:59:09.144 --> 00:59:11.789
that that's going to become pervasive,
760
00:59:12.269 --> 00:59:16.269
that our sort of drive for other human contact
761
00:59:16.989 --> 00:59:18.589
is pretty darn strong.
762
00:59:19.229 --> 00:59:21.229
And that I think for most people,
763
00:59:21.709 --> 00:59:24.589
that's not going to be an adequate substitute,
764
00:59:24.589 --> 00:59:28.024
even if it's, you know, a good facsimile.
765
00:59:28.664 --> 00:59:29.224
But
766
00:59:29.704 --> 00:59:32.024
I think in the world of work,
767
00:59:32.824 --> 00:59:40.024
one of the reasons I think we're struggling with this question of, of how, what the role of AI is going to be is because it's really stigmatized
768
00:59:40.584 --> 00:59:40.984
that,
769
00:59:41.439 --> 00:59:48.719
and that because of that people aren't being honest with each other about when they're using AI and what they're using AI for.
770
00:59:49.359 --> 00:59:54.639
And because of that, we're learning actually more slowly than we learn other technologies.
771
00:59:55.224 --> 00:59:59.704
Most technologies, you know, when we're picking it up, we say, Hey, you know,
772
01:00:00.264 --> 01:00:15.929
I've got this really cool new thing. I know how to use this software program. You don't, and that's a virtue, right? Like that's something we all talk about. We know who to go to. We talk about what it does well, what it does poorly, how we can use it as an organization or a team,
773
01:00:16.409 --> 01:00:20.169
but AI, we're not having a lot of those conversations.
774
01:00:21.049 --> 01:00:21.929
And because of that,
775
01:00:22.794 --> 01:00:24.234
we're not really learning.
776
01:00:24.474 --> 01:00:26.154
And that I think the
777
01:00:26.234 --> 01:00:29.994
key to us having a productive relationship with AI at work
778
01:00:30.314 --> 01:00:31.594
is gonna be
779
01:00:31.834 --> 01:00:43.029
that we destigmatize it to the point that we can talk about it. Because if we don't talk about it, that's where we're going to have all this dysfunction where some team members are sending AI written emails
780
01:00:43.029 --> 01:00:46.229
to other people who are reading it with AI and responding
781
01:00:46.469 --> 01:00:51.714
with AI and that we're actually not getting anywhere, right? We're not getting any work done at that point.
782
01:00:52.274 --> 01:00:56.034
We don't want that, but if we're being honest about what we're doing with it,
783
01:00:56.594 --> 01:00:57.874
that's not going to happen.
784
01:00:58.194 --> 01:00:59.794
So I think my
785
01:00:59.794 --> 01:01:01.074
biggest plea to
786
01:01:01.394 --> 01:01:30.226
managers and people in organizations
787
01:01:30.386 --> 01:01:31.106
is
788
01:01:31.851 --> 01:01:34.731
just have honest conversations about what we're doing,
789
01:01:35.291 --> 01:01:36.411
that we'll
790
01:01:36.411 --> 01:01:41.931
have to declare a little bit of amnesty if people are using it for things that you don't want them using it for.
791
01:01:42.411 --> 01:01:43.611
But without that,
792
01:01:43.851 --> 01:01:44.971
we're not gonna
793
01:01:45.131 --> 01:01:46.411
find a way to
794
01:01:47.826 --> 01:01:54.706
use it as well as we can and to, you know, essentially not fall behind other organizations
795
01:01:54.786 --> 01:01:58.946
and countries that are, that have less stigmatized attitudes towards it.
796
01:01:59.811 --> 01:02:00.770
Yeah,
797
01:02:00.770 --> 01:02:02.770
I hear that. Amazing
798
01:02:02.931 --> 01:02:03.651
conversation.
799
01:02:03.891 --> 01:02:12.291
Colin, what is the best place for people to find your book, your work, and what's coming next? You can find all that out on my website, colinmfisher.com.
800
01:02:12.291 --> 01:02:14.291
Please follow along on LinkedIn.
801
01:02:14.690 --> 01:02:16.335
And I write a newsletter
802
01:02:16.335 --> 01:02:18.976
where I'll keep you up to date on what's going on.
803
01:02:19.375 --> 01:02:23.135
Right on. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me.
804
01:02:28.151 --> 01:02:35.111
Hey. Abel here one more time. And if you believe in our mission to create a world where health is the norm, not sickness,
805
01:02:35.111 --> 01:02:44.086
here are a few things you can do to help keep this show coming your way. Click like, subscribe, and leave a quick review wherever you listen to or watch your podcasts.
806
01:02:44.246 --> 01:02:53.606
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807
01:02:53.871 --> 01:02:59.311
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808
01:02:59.391 --> 01:03:11.666
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