Mark: 0:00

Roman times, we just killed one in 10 people, and that was motivation enough. It's like, we're gonna take your salt away.

Andrew: 0:06

There's not enough of that these days. Not, there's not enough of just,

Mark: 0:09

taking your salt away or, or

Andrew: 0:11

yeah.

Mark: 0:11

in 10 people.

Andrew: 0:13

Murdering, murdering one in

Mark: 0:14

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that HR would have a problem outright murderer of, of one in 10 people

Andrew: 0:29

I'm Andrew McLaren. I'm an academic who researches teamwork.

Mark: 0:32

And I'm Mark Ridley. I'm a technology professional who leads product and tech teams

Andrew: 0:36

Welcome to Team Craft, where we talk about the trade craft.

Mark: 0:39

and sometimes the witchcraft of what it means to work together in teams. In today's episode, we talk about the history of teamwork. So, Andrew, if you are sitting comfortably, uh, I'm gonna tell you a story. Are you, are you ready for this?

Andrew: 0:54

I'm intrigued to know how far back you're gonna start

Mark: 0:57

once upon a time, a long time ago, about about 55 million years ago, uh, our first, primate ancestors crawled into the fossil records. So

Mark Ridley: 1:06

these were lemur like creatures.

Mark: 1:09

They were definitely not, um, primates as we would think about them today. And it actually took about another 50 million years to go from these very, very early primates to get to anything that even resembled the, the types of primates that we would think of. So about 5 million years, years ago, there was a primate that

Andrew: 1:26

So, we're fast, we're fast forwarding 50 million years in one in one step.

Mark: 1:30

zoom forward literally 50, 50 million years. And it took 50 million years to get to the point where we had primates that were a little bit more recognizable as more like the monkeys that we had today, and probably our first bipedal

Mark Ridley: 1:43

ancestor, a ororin tugenensis. And

Mark: 1:45

I'm not an evolutionary anthropologist, so I'm probably murdering, murdering. That name was recorded in the fossil record. So it took a yawning long time for evolution to take us from these very early primates to something that was potentially bipedal. We don't know that that was our, our first, uh, our first ancestor. It's just the first one that we can find any evidence of. From that point, from five million, years ago, it took about another two and a half million years to get to Homo Habilis, which is one of our first ancestors that, that apparently was using tools. What happened really interestingly though, was that it took us from about two and a half million years ago to about 500,000 years ago when we saw this sudden explosion of, of different types of hominems. So the types of creatures that we are as, as humans, not even homo sapiens, but the, the, the predecessors, the Australopithecus type ancestors that, that we had before homo was, uh, was even a tribe to get to something that was recognizably human from that point. we had this explosion of different types of hominids, it took, took us from about 500,000 years ago to about 250,000 years ago to get to homo sapiens. So Sapiens appeared. Only 250,000 years ago. So we're just babies. You know, if you, if you run through that again, 55 million years

Mark Ridley: 3:07

ago, we had lemurs Lemur looking things,

Mark: 3:10

and then it went from 55 to five to get us to the point where we actually had maybe ancestors that walked on on two legs then maybe to two and a half million years ago when we were potentially using tools and then suddenly like to, to get to 500,000, 250,000 years ago when we had something recognizably more human.

Andrew: 3:32

and somewhere, somewhere in amongst this. We find the origins of the story of, of how we have learned to work together as interdependent beings.

Mark: 3:46

Yeah. And, and this is really the, the reason that we're calling this out is because humans. So homo sapiens, the, the creatures that we are today are really uniquely capable of working together in ways that we don't see anywhere else in the animal kingdom. And, and we don't see this in other, other mammals, even in the great apes. So even, even if we conduct research and look at how chimps and bonobos collaborate together, it's markedly different to how humans work together. And I think the, the reason that it's important to look at this this ancestry is because it lays down some of the fundamental components that make up teamwork today. So you may remember I said about half a million years ago, 500,000 years ago, there was this sort of explosion of, of these different types of homonyms, of close relations to us where there were lots of firsts and lasts of different types of species. Not just sapiens, but all of these other experiments in, in the big human, uh, the big human experiment. So what seems to have happened is about 900,000 years ago, something happened, something catastrophic happened with the planet, and at that point, the human population, which is about a hundred thousand individuals, reduced to just over 1200 individuals.

Andrew: 5:04

600 breeding piers

Mark: 5:06

600 breeding pairs. So exactly that in, in the terms of Endangered species, we would've had 600 breeding pairs of humans left, And we, in that, in that period, all of those experiments were happening. So what we saw is in this period of for a hundred thousand years, we had a tiny population. So it was obviously something, some deeply stressful event could have been a, an ice age or a meteor strike. We dunno exactly what it was. But we can see in the DNA evidence that the, the, there was this massive bottleneck in our DNA. What was particularly interesting though, is the, the homo group, so us as opposed to our, some of our more distant cu cousins like the Australopithecines, um, they had much larger brains. So in this period, leading up to Homo sapiens 250,000 years ago, suddenly our brains exploded in size, and the brain is this enormously hungry organ. It takes about 25% of all of the energy that we consume, even though it's about 2% of our, of our body weight. So the brain develops at a massive rate. There are also other things that happened at the same time. So we became much taller. Our legs became much longer. Our teeth adapted for grinding. So all of these changes happened. But from the evidence that we have, it seems that none of these evolutionary traits. Developed anywhere else. They weren't, this wasn't the continuation of things that were seen elsewhere. These all suddenly happened to create homo sapiens at a, an evolutionary rate that was effectively unheard of. Our brains from Austria Australopithecus Africanists about 3 million years ago to Homo sapiens, 250,000 years ago, almost doubled in size. So in a Australopithecus, it's about the si size of a can of Guinness in humans. It's a bit bigger than a bottle of wine. So just to give you an, an idea of how much the growth was. So it's an enormously fast growth of our brain sizes and what researchers and experts in the field seem to believe. And this is really, really important for us is it wasn't just a genetic evolution, but it was sort of a cultural and genetic co-evolution. So when you look into why did our brains get so big, some people have said it's because we use tools. Some people have even said it's because we started cooking food, which meant that we had much more availability of calories. That some people, the ones that are interesting for us, have said that the reason that our brains developed so fast is because we started collaborating. And we started collaborating in ways that were extremely processor intensive. So they required lots and lots of mental capacity to, to actually work together in, in the way that humans can demonstrate that we do. One of the, the ways that they Talk about the, the ways that humans collaborate is talking about a difference between mutualistic and altruistic collaboration. So mutualistic collaboration would be, and you could see this in primates, you might see primates actually collaborate on, on some outcomes. So there is a shared outcome, which could be food or fruit gathering, or it could even be in, in the case of some of our, uh, close and current relatives, it could be with chimpanzees, chasing monkeys to, to herd them, to capture and kill them. Unfortunately,

Andrew: 8:23

this is the what we determined forming coalitions.

Mark: 8:27

yeah. And what, when you look at that behavior, it looks like there is shared intentionality. So, so the the chimps feel like there is some food to, um, to reward this behavior, but generally they are acting for themselves. There is, if they are successful in that hunt, they can partake in it. So they have, they have shared intentionality, but it's largely driven by their own interest. Whereas humans demonstrate altruistic behavior. And this is really interesting. It's where, where the outcome might not be perfectly aligned. So if you and I collaborate, it's, it's relatively easy for us to decide to, to collaborate. If we say there will naturally be a 50:50 share of whatever outcome there is. So you benefit, I benefit and we're happy. So our, our intentions are perfectly aligned, but humans collaborate even in ways where our outcomes aren't perfectly aligned. So it is in the service of some greater good that is bigger than that mutualistic outcome where we're actually saying, um, you know, not only do you benefit and I benefit, but maybe I can actually delay my gratification in the service of something larger, which could be a society or a tribe or a family unit. And. There's some really interesting research by, uh, a researcher called Michael Tomasello. Tomasello is a comparative, uh, psychologist, so he's a, he's a development, uh, developmental psychologist, looks at studying children and great apes. Uh, and when I say children, generally, he's research is between the years about one and three. And what Tomasello's research really cleverly demonstrates is that humans are, are either born or acquire within their first year of life behaviors that look like altruism, like rule following, uh, and, and they are able to understand when somebody needs help. So, in in what, in the research that Tomasello carried out, he was able to demonstrate that these very young children between one and three years of age, if somebody is. Pointing to something, they can follow the gaze, they can understand the intentionality of the, the person, say the researcher that is pointing at something, that they need assistance. They can also understand these shared norms, so they can understand rules of games. And they'll be able to point out if the game isn't being played. So they will understand that it's either fair or not fair. So these very young human children are able to demonstrate a few things which are absolutely necessary for teamwork. So there is first developing shared intentionality, as in we will both benefit. Then there is this altruism of being able to participate, even if. The, the outcomes aren't perfectly matched. So if everybody doesn't benefit at exactly the same, the same rate. And there is also these very complex structures, things like trust, as in, if we're gonna collaborate, I trust you to deliver your side of the outcome, and you have to trust me. And it's not just reciprocal trust, it's, it's broader than that. So there's trust and also communication. And if you think about the complexity, and this is obviously speaking to, to your specialism, there's a lot of complexity in understanding exactly how I communicate to you what a set of tasks or what, what an outcome is. You have to agree to commit to delivering that task. And then we have to separate those tasks out between us. So if we're collaborating, I will do things and you'll do things. And then at the end we have to share. The, the spoils of whatever outcome we've agreed on. And so there's this incredibly complex communication that we have, and a lot of the evidence is pointing to the fact that although it wasn't one event, it wasn't that we evolutionarily developed that genes developed or, or society developed. One thing led to another. The causality is unclear. But there was this evolution of the behavior of humans and our capacity to demonstrate that behavior at the same time. So bigger brains, social groups, um, the development of language, the, the physical changes that allowed us to communicate with spoken language and not just, uh, not just gestures, not just pointing. So all of those things had to come together. So we've got this very, very rich, very long history going from 55 million years ago up to current homo sapiens that demonstrates that we're uniquely. Capable of teamwork in ways that that other creatures aren't. And that's not to diminish where we see cooperation in things like, um, ant colonies and beehives. And, you know, there's obviously a very rich cooperative social groups elsewhere in nature. But there are things that we demonstrate that lead to this very, very complex type of, um, interaction, uh, and capability for, for collaboration that humans have.

Andrew: 13:22

It's part of, it's about abstraction, isn't it? It seems that, that that ability to abstract. A concept, a set of rules or, or indeed the shared intention around something. You have to be able to abstract it kind of at a conceptual level to then have, I think you would call it maybe theory of mind, like be able to position yourself within it and then engage with the, with the process, which is really interesting. Um, and you can see how language is kind of interposed within all of that as another form of codification that you can, that you can abstract and then make sense of and apply back. Um, I find the thing about altruistic rewards really interesting as well, because. that is also about abstraction, isn't it? It's about being able to position outcomes within a, a broader understanding of, of, of context mutualistic rewards process is very, it's still very aligned to the kind of visceral needs or basic needs of, of the, of the animal, like foods and security.

Marks: 14:34

we demonstrate this altruism very, very early. So in infants, we, we demonstrate this, this capacity for, for altruism to take part in something, to assist someone with an, with an outcome.

Mark: 14:44

But there's something a little bit nefarious under this, which is in, in a lot of this research, what you also see is that it's not altruism for everyone. That what you also see is this ingroup and outgroup bias, where we don't just help anyone, we help those that are like us. And so obviously there's, that unfortunately leads to a lot of the, the most negative parts of, uh, of, um, human culture. and Tomasello talks about some of this, these infants start identifying themselves as part of one group and not part of another. And so their altruism extends to one group and not another. So when we talk about teamwork, you can see that, you know, we know that teams work together. Teams quite enjoy being in tension with other teams, like competing with, with other teams. And that is almost entirely innate in, in humanity as well. We understand that we are part of groups. And the, one of the other things that happens in this, in this big sort of evolution of collaboration is as we grow up, we also start demonstrating behaviors that aren't so altruistic. So after about three as as children age, they start potentially learning behaviors that aren't those beautiful, pure, simple sharing, altruistic, helping behaviors that we see when they're young. They, they start developing other tendencies. And, and obviously we know in groups you will see things like social loafing, so people not playing their part, cheating. So people agreeing to to, to take part in an outcome and then taking more than their fair share. And what's really interesting is we then developed this other, this whole other additional set of behaviors, which are these cult socio-cultural norms. The things that say you haven't taken part in this in the way that you should. So some humans will display these Machiavellian tendencies to look after themselves. Often it'll be in their own interest to work for themselves, but we've had to police that. We see things like rules being imposed on people, which are the first word, just these cultural norms, which somewhat define the groups, but then became codified rules in working units, political structures, hierarchies that existed in human society.

Andrew: 16:57

This, this relates, or a lot of what you're describing is what would be described in evolutionary anthropology as the social brain hypothesis. Right. So Robin Dunbar's work, which is amazing. Have you, you know, have you read that book or heard the book, the Chimp paradox that this idea that you've got an inner chimp and, uh, I, I wonder if actually what we see is, you know, the, the sort of behavior describing once children get past three is things start to experiment with the more, selfish, primitive, uh, parts of our adaptive behavior. And then there's, you know, the social brain hypothesis is all about how the, the, the outer parts, the cortices of our brain. Are these more recent evolutionary phenomena that are there to support all of that complex social interaction, all of the, the dynamism of interdependence and collaboration and so on. And probably in our behavior we see exhibits of more ancestral tendencies and then also the, this stuff about, uh, that altruistic more, uh, advanced kind of human behavior. I think what you're describing in the kind of developmental stuff is also about how we learn to police it,

Mark: 18:18

What, what struck me es especially if you read Tomasello's work and he talks about the types of experiments that he's running with chimps and Bonobos and human children to try and understand this innate plumbing that they have to, to collaborate. And he's describing th this unique capability that we have as humans to, to work together. You can kind of understand that in a hunter-gatherer society, you do see what we might think about as teamwork. As in there, there are a group of peers who have roles inside their society. And there it's not a command and control environment. There is no management by objectives in a hunter gatherer society. There, there are definitely social norms as there are in teams today, but it was only then, as you start seeing the development agriculture. Um, so if you go back, what, maybe 8,000 years, so 8,000 years to 5,000 years, when we were starting to see the development of the pyramids, some of the megalithic structures, we started to see large groups of, uh, of individuals, large groups of humans working together on outcomes that were beyond teamwork. And then what we've seen in, through the development of Europe, where it really was much more the development of organized religion, which is a form of social control, the development of different hierarchical structures law. what we would call civilization almost for 2000 years, feels like it has been there to drive out teamwork in the service of some hierarchical management, which I know is pretty cynical of me. But it does feel like there's this sort of 2000, maybe 5,000 year gap where we were trying to get rid of natural teamwork, the type of teamwork that Tomasello talks us about us being programmed for.

Andrew: 20:01

Taking this off in a slightly different direction. Only, it's only a minor detour, but it, you have made me think about, you know how, I mean I love to do it and I think it is really useful, but you know, you use analogies of the animal kingdom. You say teamwork's amazing. Look at, look at ants or look, I like to talk about, um, uh, sperm whales. I think it is. They do bubble net fishing. It's this really amazing coordinated thing they do to round to round up fish it's an alluring. Metaphor for, look, the animal kingdom does it. We do it. And actually the the, you have to tread carefully with all of that because, um, a bit like what you're talking about with the way that, um, kind of early modern civilization developed, it was command and control and almost cleansed us of some of that, um, innate, uh, ability to, to, to work together. Um, because it was, I guess power became a thing. which power is not, the power isn't a thing in, in the animal kingdom for sure, but it's, uh, uh, socially constructed power is definitely a human thing. Um, but the, the the abilities we have in the way that we've evolved. just entirely transcend what you see in the animal kingdom because of things like language.

Mark: 21:28

And also the development of language means that, that, the passing on of that signal, the social norms, the education, all of those things has developed as we can. We no longer need genetics to pass on our learnings from generations to generation. We can work far faster than that through things like religion and education. For the next generation. We leave behind a signal that teaches us how to behave. But I think what's really interesting is I can't believe that our capacity for teamwork was diminished in the 5,000 years as 8,000 years between when we moved from hunter gatherers to now. But the focus on, on talking about it absolutely has, we sort of then have only focused on, uh, what was the feudal structure look like? What did the man manorial structure look like? How, how, how did fiefdoms work? All of these, these things, which were very much these hierarchical structures, command and control. And then it's only then when we get to maybe the Indus Industrial Revolution when we start thinking about different types of working together. And I think the Industrial Revolution has probably quite a big part to play in at first really stripping out any teamwork. And when you look at Taylorism and then you start moving back into the 20th century, late 20th century, focus on, oh, actually there were these things called teams and they were good. And we replace groups of individuals and management hierarchies with teams. Again, I.

Andrew: 22:54

It's funny because there's this research by Mathias Weis and Martin Hoegl, and they looked at the diffusion of teamwork. They looked at it in the, in the 20th century, but essentially looked at the, the, um, the prominence of teamwork in the literature and in in culture. And what they saw was there's quite a close, uh, relationship between how prominent teamwork is and, you know, significant, you might call it traumatic events. So in the 20th century, interest in teamwork. Spiked around the two world wars and that, that has echoes of looking at that evolutionary history. And the 900,000 year ago bottleneck, you think, well, human, the, the, the early humans were, uh, the ancestors of humans were under a great deal of stress. And, and, and an evolutionary step change happened that, uh, involved that capacity for, for working together. Um, so I don't know. I, I, I thought it was worth, worth making joining the dots, whether those, whether, whether there is a join or not is maybe up for debate. But, uh, that research was quite interesting to me, that the, when the chips are down for us as humans, we tend to almost revert to those capacities. We've, we've evolved to have around about working together, collaborating, and I, I would. Venture to say that during the Covid Pandemic there was probably a, a, a, a renewed sense of urgency and concentration around working together, uh, and collaborating across boundaries. Um, you know, the way in which different institutions had to work together and people had to find ways of, uh, of operating, uh, you know, towards very specific objectives, um, in a highly interdependent, complex way. I, I would say a venture to say that happened, but the trend of engineering, teamwork out of culture in general, I would say still prevailed through the 20th century because, um, certainly the wake of, uh, the World Wars, what you had was global corporations emerging. So a degree, uh, degree of stability. Um. Rapid growth and what, you know, what the, the combination of, you know, what's called the second industrial revolution, uh, and the technological advances and the geopolitical stability in the wake of the Second World War, sort of all precipitated this, uh, boom in global corporations. And the structure that global corporations followed was, uh, systematic, um, this diffusion of managerialism. So, uh, what historian Alfred Chandler, Jr. Called the Visible Hand of Managerialism. Considering itself a, companion to the invisible hand, um, of, uh, of markets that Adam Smith came up with in 1776, but the, the manager was probably the mid 20th century poster child for, um, for you, you could see Western culture more generally. You know, the managerial class that you had emerging, certainly in America and uh, in Northern Europe. And why I associate that with teamwork is because it again, was a way of operating organizationally that didn't, in principle, didn't require effective teamwork. It required effective administering of process and allocating people things to do, um, and. The manager was that that, uh, role that all of this administration flowed through.

Mark: 27:12

You've, you've hit on per perhaps one of my biggest bugbears, and, and I, I think there is, there is a huge amount of Western bias in, um, in all of the, the management writing on, on teams, especially through the 20th century, because that's where the success was, at least the capitalist success. And for, for me, I trace a lot of demons back to Frederick Winslow Taylor. There was a, there was a quote from, from Taylor, in the principles of scientific management, which is a terrible title for anybody that feels like they care about their team members today. But in, in that book. Winslow Taylor wrote in the past, the Man was First in the Future. The system must be first. And this, you know, this absolutely inspired the, the works of Ford and Sloan at GM. So the, you know, these poster children for, um, the, not just the industrial Revolution, but the, the growth of mass production. And so people, what, what Taylorism did is it absolutely split people into two classes. There were managers and then there were workers. And there was, you know, there, there was no good way of deciding it. But this was, this was really binary as to which group you belong to. If you were a worker, your job was just to do what you were told. If you are a manager, you designed the work and it completely separated, completely separated out. Um, the responsibility for creative thinking from this group of, of people classed as workers and, and when I say there's a lot of Western bias, what I find is really, really interesting. And you have to sort of fast forward to the mid eighties to, to see where these two worlds start colliding. But while Taylorism, uh, and Fordism and Sloanism was, was rife in The 19 teens, the 1920s, uh, in Japan, you had the growth of Toyota, which was originally a company that produced looms, mechanized looms, and then later became, became a tar a car company, and then later became famous for really driving what would now be called lean or agile inside western organizations. But it took like this yawning, yawning chasm of nearly a hundred years between the, the founders of the Toyota Dynasty and the way that they thought, and a very, very different mindset, which treated workers as the source of creativity and improvement and, and systems design and taylorism, which said system comes first. There are two classes, there are managers and workers, and if anything, that's the antithesis of teamwork. Whereas at the same time, and this is why it's important to have the two lenses, you saw something very different coming out of Japan.

Andrew: 29:52

I always feel, know, I'm fast forwarding to the, the, the modern day with, you know, what, what you and I would call the team zeitgeist of how, you know, how, uh, ubiquitous teams and teamwork are and contemporary organizations, and I always feel like saying, I. You know, like you've not found, you've not discovered something new. We've just willfully ignored it for half a century. we, we, we beat, we beat teamwork out of work and culture almost, uh, for 50 years. And now we've decided, we've discovered it as this shiny new thing that's going to solve all our problems. Um, you know, if we've been practicing it for the last 50 years, we might, we might be a little bit further down the road, but yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Uh, and, and, that's not to say that actually that in all walks of, uh, kind of on all corners of, of research activity that were going on, there wasn't, uh, an appreciation of the human side.'cause, so you've got, um, I think kind of good early examples. Mary Parker Follett, who's. she's termed the, the mother of modern management theory. Some, some people would call her. But, um, she, she wrote this work creative experience. I, I've got a quote here that I thought was apt and it, the, this is considered to be one of the early antecedents of the Human relations School of Management, which is a sort of, you know, kind of countervailing idea against Taylorism. Um, uh, but she said the enrichment and advancement of every human soul, that's what, the objective should be in, in business. So that, so she's talked about the cove power of, of, uh, of working together, of, of, of, of teamwork, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul. So it really. I had this focus of putting the human experience and the, the flaws and the three dimensional features of what it is to be human at the center of, of organization, and you, and you can't have one without the other. So you can have the productivity and the capacity to operate within a system and the capacity to, you know, do delegated tasks. But it comes with comes with human baggage as well. And some of that human baggage is in fact a feature of that evolutionary stuff that we've already discussed. Uh, you know, we've, we've talked about, uh, in preparation for this discussion, talked about the hot, the Hawthorne experiments. You know,

Mark: 32:38

yeah, I was, I was just about to, I was just about to say it. It's, it's one of those things that I love raising with you just to re-explain it to me every time, but it's, I I was going to just interject and say, you know, in the, in the 20th century, we seem to have found this absolute interest in trying to design things that will make people perform better. And Roman times, we just killed one in 10 people, and that was motivation enough. It's like, we're gonna take your salt away.

Andrew: 33:04

There's not enough of that these days. Not, there's not enough of just,

Mark: 33:07

taking your salt away or, or

Andrew: 33:09

yeah.

Mark: 33:09

in 10 people.

Andrew: 33:11

Murdering, murdering one in

Mark: 33:12

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that HR would have a problem outright murderer of, of one in 10 people. But, um, but we found, you know, there, there was taylorism and there were, but there were these theories about management and then it moved into actual research, into what can we do to make, make the workers perform better? And I, you know, I find the Hawthorne experiment really interesting. So can you just explain what that was?

Andrew: 33:39

Yes. I mean, the, the Hawthorne experiments were an early example of. Paying some attention to how the humans behave. So you've got them right. So it was, um, Western Electric, I think it was factory of Western Electric in, uh, near Chicago, in America. And basically they wanted to look at, well, and you know, this is an interesting thing as they talk about the Hawthorne experience being an early example of the human relations school of thinking, they, they were interested in productivity. So, uh, it's not like we're saying. Well, it's just productivity and performance doesn't matter. We should think about the humans. But it's, it's about considering the human factor in the process. Um, and, you know, organizations ultimately are looking for productivity. Uh, but it was, uh, these were experiments where there were adjustments made to different things. Um, and I mean, the famous one is about lighting levels. So they they mucked about with what levels of lighting there were and looked at what difference that made in performance and. The, that particular experiment is often attributed to the, this concept of the Hawthorne effect, which is where, um, it's essentially a metaphor for the, the, uh, the contamination or the influence of the research process in the subject matter. So the thing that you're observing, the things that you do to understand what's happening influences the behavior of the unit of observation. So, uh, if you're looking at workers, the fact that you're changing the lighting. Makes them behave. The fact that they know you're changing the lighting because you're doing an experiment changes their behavior. Um, so it's called the Hawthorne Effect, where, um, the, the influence of the research itself has, uh, an influence on the behavior. Um, but there were other things that they did. They looked at, um, things like, uh, rest, you know, so how much rest were people given? And then looked at how that correlated to performance. it boils back down to paying attention to. The human experience of the work. Uh, and that probably laid the foundations for appreciating that we are social animals. And when we are working together in organizations, the social dimensions of our lived experience in our work has a direct impact on the work itself. And actually, you could take it one step further and say, no, it doesn't just have an impact on it. It is, it it's part and parcel of the work. So you can't sort of say, oh, the work is the bit where you, you know, you, if you're in a, a production line where you hammer a hole in the thing, or you'd place a widget in the, in the, in the machine, um, the. The relationship you have with the other people on the production line and, and the, the, the broader environment. That's all part of the work as well.

Mark: 36:55

And that, that was, as you were talking there, I think the, there is definitely a, or for me, it feels like there is a change around the fifties because we, you sort of move from the Taylorism, which is. There is this segregation between workers and managers, and then more focus on what can we do for this resource that we have to make them perform better. But some sensitivity to the fact these, these are people and so we need to take care of them. But it's still a little bit like treating people like livestock. And if I leave, be behind some of the advances that were made in in Japan on the Toyota production system for now. But then look at the, in the Western world, I think it's probably around the fifties, I think it was 1954, we had Peter Drucker introduce the uh, management by objectives, MBO and that. As far as I understand, it was really driven by, uh, a, a belief that if employees, so employees and managers in MBO, what it's suggesting is we should have objectives. Those objectives are set for the employees, but the employees are part of that objective setting at the same time. And the reason for that is because employees will, so team members will perform better if they understand the reasons that for delivering the objectives. So the co-authoring and the, the, the co-creation of, of these objectives and understanding the why, as you'd seen from Simon Sinek 50 years later and understanding the why was really powerful. And suddenly we started seeing a more humanistic approach that started breaking down, especially from that, that Ford and Taylorism.

Andrew: 38:28

Yeah, I, I reckon we're gonna. We're gonna crash into how, just how important and how, uh, influential that kind of Japanese philosophy was. Once we get into the, I guess you call it the digital age, um, certainly into the, the eighties and nineties. Um, for me, the big moment in the mid 20th century that had its legacy is still very much felt, I would say in teams research. It was the dawn of digital and it, you know, guess what? You recapped it really nicely there. So we, we've got our, we've got our early, early 55 million years, the development of the social brain and our, uh, unique capacities for interdependence, collaboration, uh, and, and, and associated, uh, characteristics first industrial revolution. Engineering all of that almost out of the process. Second industrial revolution, uh, in, you know, that explosion of uh, chemical petrochemical, oil and gas, steel, iron, automotive industry and all that. this interesting transition of, well, we're still taylorism, we're still very much seeing humans as cogs in the machine, but there's a bit of attention starting being paid to the human experience within that. So a little bit of a remember teamwork. Maybe we should keep that going. And then I think what we then see in the sixties, seventies, what you might call the third industrial revolution into the digital age. That's when something really interesting starts to happen in my opinion. And I would I hang it off the space race, you know, the space race, uh, especially the, uh, Apollo missions, the moon landings, the, that was where you saw digital technology being, uh, it was a step change because basically the problem of putting people on the moon, they quickly realized we, we have to take a risk on this newfangled thing. That's, that really only exists in laboratories in some of the elite universities in America. We have to take some risks on this new thing called digital because the only way we can put the kit that we need in the space that we have, um, to, to achieve something as, uh, you know, on, that's on several orders of magnitude beyond our current capabilities, which is putting someone on the moon. So. I, the reason I kind of focus on that is because you had this extreme bleeding edge engineering, uh, challenge going on, but Kennedy had laid down the gauntlet we're going to, you know, the, the phrase was, we are gonna put a man on the moon before the decade is out in, in, uh, in the 1960s. And so what really came from that was, uh, the confluence of working in the, the relationship between humans and systems, humans and technology systems. And I would say it was the, the most advanced expression of the. Complex inter interactions of the technological systems and the, and, and the humans. And it led to this idea of, well, what they would call human in the loop systems, but sociotechnical systems. So your astronauts were going up into, into orbit and then off, uh, off to the moon, landing on the moon. Those astronauts were an integral part of the technology system. They, they, they had to understand how they used it and the systems needed to be designed around them so that they could use it. So you had that going on around this bleeding edge tech, edge technology, digital, um, and at the same time. They were also sending humans off into this environment that was, you know, uncharted and, um, under e extreme, uh, conditions of isolation, confinement, and so on that hadn't been done before. And you, by necessity, you had send more than one. So you had a, a, the, the lunar landings, the poly missions were three, uh, astronauts. So you had this team of three plus the team on the ground. They were connected to, uh, who needed to have, uh, really well, uh, developed capacity for working together as humans in a team who were also the three of them, part of a sociotechnical system. Um, and so you had this co-evolution, uh, again, the idea of co-evolution, but the co-evolution of systems engineering around about humans. Um, and Was all happening in the 1960s. And interestingly enough, around about the exact same time, so in 1969, you had Lunar la, the first lunar landing, apol 11, around about the exact same time, uh, world War ii, war hero, RAF pilot he's called David Beatie and he, 1969, he wrote a book about the human factor in aircraft accidents. So it was called The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents. And I just find that fascinating that that happened in the same year, but this was, um, the same. Attention being paid to the same thing. So instead of it being paid to, how do we overcome this really massive challenge of putting people on the moon? It was looking at what had gone wrong and considering that human loop element, that the human factor in that socio-technical system and why, uh, the human factor had influenced or, or since sometimes been the direct cause of aviation accidents. And that was the dawn, if you like, of this concept of human factors research. Uh, and it came from the world of, it came to the world of aviation. If you, you've considered space flight part of broader aviation. Uh, you've got these, the technological advances of socio-technical systems in space flight and you have someone paying attention to. Well, you know, human factors are really important and how we manage them in uh, aviation can reduce the risks of, uh, of accidents.

Mark: 45:23

The, the thing that popped into my head, especially when you mentioned the post-war era was, obviously Japan was defeated in the Second World War by the US, but as part of the reconstruction, there was an American statistician W. E. Deming that was effectively sent over to Japan or requested to go to Japan. And his, his training became very widely used throughout Toyota, through the, the fifties and the sixties and, and actually all the way up to, to the current day. So Deming, an American statistician, became a really strong influence on the development of this, this, this production me method that Toyota was using for the creation of the cars on their production lines. What was really interesting was we now talk about agile and lean a lot, and there are a lot of misconceptions about what that actually mean, but The root of that was actually a, a research study that was carried out by MIT and was published in a paper in 1991 and it's an incredible, incredible piece of research because what effectively happened was MIT were paid by leading car manufacturers to go and research other production facilities, other factories. The reason that this study was commissioned was because American factories didn't believe it was possible for Japanese factories to be producing cars at the speed and at the quality that that, that they were. And so it was, we need to understand what the difference was. And at this point, through the sixties and the seventies and into the eighties, American firms were still largely following the Taylorism, Fordism, GM Sloan factories with, with workers that are on, on a production line. So the, making the system more important than, than the individual. But there had been this, this, this alternative timeline in Japan that was driven by the Toyoda family, then by the influence of Deming on these engineers that worked in inside Toyota creating what became the Toyota production system, and was then talked about in this book and this book effectively. Coined the term lean. So when in the West we talk about lean, it specifically was used in that book to differentiate mass production from artisanal production. They need another word for it. So we, we used to have, in the 19th century artisanal production, you have craftsmen that would create things and pass that knowledge down from generation to generation through apprentice, uh, apprenticeships. Then we had mass production, which largely took away that artisanal nature. The, the, the, the artistry of creation and separated out into managers and, and workers. And so we needed a new word that wasn't mass production, wasn't artisanal creation, but was something else. And so this research paper coined the term lean. And Lean is the direct predecessor when we talk about agile today and really what It's probably the, the strongest thing that we can talk about when we look at lean, and there's lots of things in it. There's a focus on quality and, um, and a massive focus on the reduction of waste, which is often what people believe when they hear, if they hear the word lean, they think we, we need to reduce waste. But actually, if you really break down everything the Toyota principles were trying to do was create a learning organization over and above everything else. And what, what we really look at is we give the people doing the work, the power to improve the system. We don't have two classes of managers and so we, we really change the nature of the relationship between the organization and the workers. And we give them authority and autonomy to solve their own problems because we believe that they are the best people to solve a problem. There was such a strong Um, push that came out of Lean and Agile and Toyota production system. That really changed the way that teams work in most organizations we see today. Because if I come across a team, everybody's talking about agile ways of working. Everybody is talking about structuring teams in ways that look like tech companies, products and tech companies. there's a lot of research today that it used to come out of companies like Toyota or Motorola, that that created Six Sigma. It was industrial giants that created the management structures that that had the teams in, but now it's digital companies. So we talk about the work that Google did with Aristotle and Oxygen when, when you look at that big sea change, it became these companies producing software and services that became the, the arbiters and the researchers and the, um, broadcasters of what it meant to run teams rather than in the eighties and nineties, it being industrial organizations.

Andrew: 50:06

What you're describing is how we got to where we are today, which is an appreciation from a lot of different quarters. I. A lot of different industries, a lot of different, uh, organizational contexts where there's a recognition of the importance of everyone being able to feed in. And it, it almost, when you start to deconstruct it into its constituent parts, you find that, oh, what everyone is doing now is sort of what we understand teamwork to be. it's interesting how that, what was happening in Japan mirrored what emerged from safety and aviation. And then NASA actually did a study in, in the seventies, NASA did a study an a NASA psychologist called John Leber, and he kind of took up the mantle from Beattie and by looking at loads of evidence from aviation accidents, he, came up with this concept called Crew Resource Management. Um, for aviation crew resource management is just all about how the pilots and the wider constellation of, uh, people working around pilots. So air traffic control, uh, if it's a commercial flight ca, uh, cabin crew. But, um, all about managing the human factors and appreciating how things like, uh. Hierarchy can get in the way of information, uh, necessary information being passed. How the way in which you say things, the interesting thing is that Leber's focus was on communication. Principally. It was on what pilots said. Uh, so again, there's, there are these echoes of our ancestry in how we developed and, and evolved to get on as a species. focused on what they said to each other. And that's come through in, in modern interest in, in teamwork research. So I'd say, you know, arriving with your 1990 paper on Agile and Lean, you had researchers taking up the, uh, the baton of. Right. We've got this sociotechnical system stuff, humans in the loop and crew Resource management and the importance of things or what we say. Um, and what you had was through the eighties and into the nineties with teams. Research was, uh, a kind of systems engineering organization, industrial organizational psychology, interest on this concept of teamwork and, uh, how it, how it manifested itself in contemporary organizations and institutions, particularly the military. Um, but uh, beyond as well. Uh, certainly in high reliability context, so where safety was of a prime primary concern. And they've managed all to arrive around this contemporary idea that's driven very much by, um, in, in teamwork research, uh, in industrial organizational psychology, uh, on understanding teams as complex systems that sit within systems. Um, appreciating the role of things like language. And I'd say that's coming even more to the fore, uh, again, in almost a full loop back around is to say, well, Lauber's research on crew resource management was all about language. And we are now seeing it in things like healthcare. So not just the what do healthcare teams do to help with patients, but really dialing in back into the detail on, uh, what exactly do they say? What exact language do they use? How is it, how is it produced, how is it interpreted? Um, and how does that flow around a team? Uh, so that's where we've kind of arrived at in, in to the, to the present day almost, um, about What importance we place on teamwork. And, it sits on the top of, evolutionary history that, that actually we, we've, we've relied on all along And we rediscovered it.

Mark: 54:26

How do we communicate, how do we build trust? How do we build psychological safety? It's probably no surprise that it's those things that are coming to the fore, uh, if we were to, to look at where we are today. So I think that's probably it for today's episode. A short whistle stop through the entire the entire history of human evolution. Um, but obviously it'd be remissive us not to have some leave behinds and takeaways for, for our listeners and viewers, for the, uh, that, that they can go and look at what's your, what's your takeaway for, for people today?.

Andrew: 54:58

I have a couple of books I think that might be quite nice things to share. Um. So very different from Tomasello work. You, you've got someone working with two different kinds of animals. I've got people working with machines, So the, um, the book that I mentioned about human, the kind of dawn of human factors, uh, this is David Beatty's book. Um, so it was originally called The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents. And then I assume he got a literary agent who told him that's a really boring title. So it's, it's nowadays called The Naked Pilot. Uh, so that's all about human factors

Mark: 55:39

So somebody, Jamie Olivered his, his title? Yeah. Okay.

Andrew: 55:42

got loads of fun diagrams of cockpits in it and talking about, you know, the ergonomics of, of, uh, our interaction with the, the technical system. So that's fun and I thought I should probably share as well. Um, I talked a bit about the space race, and this is a really, I. Really good book. Um, it's called, it's by David Mendell and it's called Digital Apollo and it's what's called Digital Apollo Human and Machine in Space Flight. So it probably informed quite a lot of the way in which I think about the relationship between and understand that, that that period of the, of the development of the relationship between humans and, uh, very complex technical systems. Um, but it's just, it's a fascinating. guide through actually how, like, how digital technology was created and embedded within the, uh, the Apollo missions. It's fascinating. and you know, like this little random lab at MIT that, uh, that these young researchers who were called up, like, you're doing this digital thing, right? Could you, uh, could we put that on our spaceship? Uh, but yeah. So Digital Apollo by David Mendell is worth a look if you are interested in more detailed context on that part of the development of teamwork.

Mark: 57:07

So I think my leave behind is just how amazingly adapted we are for this very unique type of collaboration. And it, it inspires me to think about. Teamwork today and, and really leaning into the, these evolutionary advantages that we have. There are a number of books by, by Michael Tomasello. The one that, um, I, uh, referenced through this was a book called Why We Cooperate, just seeing the, the stories of the research that he does when he's working with these infants and when he is working with the, um, the great apes, these very subtle differences in ways that I, because I think it challenged my preconceptions of, well, of course we collaborate, but lots of animals collaborate and he does a great job of breaking down, um, breaking down the differences behind it. So that brings us to the end of this episode. So first, obviously I have to thank you, Andrew for, for co-hosting. Um, and obviously thanks to everybody that's listening and to those that are watching now, uh, for, for taking part. And we will hopefully see you again for the next episode of Team craft.

Andrew: 58:13

Thanks, mark. Enjoyed it. See you next time.