Our guest today is Andrew MacLaren. For those of you who have been following the series, you’ll know that Andrew is the co-host of the Teamcraft podcast. We received some feedback that people would like to hear a bit about us, how we got to be so interested in teamwork and what our own current thinking is on some of the themes we cover in our conversations with guests.

Dr Andrew MacLaren is a lecturer based at the CREWS research centre at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. His research is principally concerned with the sociolinguistics of teamwork: how teams communicate. Some of the teamwork projects he is involved in include astronaut communication in deep space exploration and the communication processes of healthcare teams in trauma scenarios. He has researched and authored textbooks, book chapters, peer-reviewed articles and international conference papers on subjects from the British Army in Afghanistan, professional kitchen teams and startup investing.

Before entering academia, Andrew spent 10 years working as a tennis coach and as you’ll hear in today’s episode, he still sees a tennis court as his spiritual home. 

Expect to hear about...

• The dysfunction of teams in academia,
• The “expert paradox” and how it impacts team decision making,
• The importance of language as a non-technical team skill, and...
• The risks caused by the ‘newness’ of teams

Something to Share
Talk: The science of conversation by Elizabeth Stokoe

Links
Andrew on Linkedin

Read some recent teamwork articles written by Andrew:
There's no 'I' in team, but there is a 'meta'
The liability of newness of teams
Human Autonomous Teaming: The holy grail of AI

Thanks for listening!

Music by Tom Farrington