Andrew: 0:00

if you become so protocol driven that you don't have the elasticity in your language to cope with unexpected events, then suddenly you, you hit the limits like hitting a brick wall, or indeed flying into the ground.

Mark: 0:12

They don't have the standard processes to describe little green men or women flying past in the spaceship. Okay, good.

Speaker: 0:19

Yeah.

Andrew: 0:27

So I've been looking into the role of, you would call it communication, but I think as we'll probably end up covering even the word communication, when you get into the weeds of linguistics. There are limitations. There are qualifications that you need to add to the concept of communication when you're talking about it in relation to language. So yeah, I've been doing a bit of a travel back in time. You know, we talked about the evolutionary anthropology of the ability of the human being to collaborate and work together, distribute tasks, the rudiments, if you like, of teamwork and how it has its history. Um, it's legacy and in the way we've evolved as a species, and you can say the exact same about language and my position. And this is a position that, you know, I would ground in my, my academic interest, my research. My position is that language has. a really foundational role to the way in which we perform teamwork. And it's something that I think probably when you're talking about team science and the research into teamwork is that's represented in, uh, in a variety of ways. To the extent at one end of the extreme, which almost engineers and, um, I don't want to say blindly kind of ignores language, but I would say that there is a certain genre of teams research that, um, likes to conveniently wrap language and communication up into other constructs, as opposed to, um, framing them as fundamental, important features of team dynamics in and of themselves. I definitely set the other end of the extreme, which would be to say that language is constitutive of team performance. So you can't really, um, analyze or observe Teams in action without focusing in on on the language that they use, uh, what is often I think what the way it's often framed is language facilitates things happening in teamwork and my position would be a little bit different, which would be to say, well, language is the things happening in teamwork. It's not a means to an end. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a constitutive force.

Mark: 3:10

So you've, you've talked about language and you've talked about communication and obviously your, your specialism is around linguistics. One of the questions I remember asking you was about how much of that is spoken because obviously, and I know that you'll talk about this, this later, so you can lead us more into this. But one of the things I found really interesting is the increasing prevalence of written communication because of hybrid working. So, as we've seen teams progress to asynchronous working, as in, we are not in the same place, synchronously talking this out in a meeting face to face. Um, communication, It hasn't changed. We've had engineers drawing blueprints for other people to follow, you know, that's a, that's a type of communication. So we've always had this asynchronous communication, but it's turned on its head a lot since the pandemic and hybrid working, fully remote working. So obviously, That point that you just just made is there's communication and their language, but they're two different things. Communication may not be linguistic.

Andrew: 4:10

I'm not a linguist, you know, my, my research is, uh, the sort of interface between linguistics and sociology. So, you know, I'm not an out and out linguist. Um, and I would be highly being highly offensive to the colleagues that I work with who are linguists and applied linguists, if I were to claim to be that. But, um, you know, that's, that's my area of interest. Well, probably one of the people that you have to talk about when you get into the discussion about the, the evolutionary dimension to language is a name that most people are familiar with is Noam Chomsky. And you mentioned that. The two words, language and communication, uh, uh, so one of the things that Chomsky says is it's a kind of arguably a fallacy that our capacity for language issues from our more primitive capacities for communication. Um, so there are. There are lots of debates in the linguistics field around this stuff, some of which I think it's worthwhile covering. That in itself is an interesting observation to respond to your idea that, well, you know, loads of loads of the ways in which we communicate now are facilitated through information technology, you know, so technology mediated communication. in fact, there's definitely an argument to say that just in the same way that, you know, use of certain words, changes, languages, um, emojis have changed the way in which we, uh, communicate, uh, some of the communication technology that have become commonplace for organizational functioning have influenced the way in which language exists, that's true, but I think the interesting thing is actually, um, Uh, from the point of view of teamwork, which we're always that's our that's our denominator here so there's things there's things in Chomsky's research. Personally, I'm more wedded to some of the other views that are in the debate, but I like the observation that, It's, I suppose you could translate what he's saying there is somewhat reductive to suggest that language is just a sophisticated adaptive response to a capacity to communicate. Um, it's far more than that. and I like that because I also think there's a real parallel in the way in which we refer to language and communication in teamwork, which is to say, and you can see why. Because. Ultimately, language exists because of our interpersonal dynamics, it's, it's a necessity, uh, to, to, to function interpersonally. That's what teamwork is. And as, uh, I'm fond of saying, I kind of view language as the, like the cognitive synapses that we have in our brains for thinking language are our synapses in a team. That's what allows us to think as a team is language. Um, but to reduce it down just to communication, just, you know, some people would refer to communication as a transfer of information. Um, that is reductive. It's more than that. It's way more than that. It's not just a transfer of information. It's meaning making. It's a facility for identity. Um, it's a form of memory, uh, and, and, and much more beyond that. So the, the importance actually of that observation by Chomsky and that it doesn't just issue from primitive capacities for communication, I think is really important.

Mark: 8:14

I think It is easy to be, as you say, reductivist about the importance of communication in a team to think that it is, it's the issuance of objectives. It's the setting of goals, the collaboration, the distribution of tasks, and that's it. But quite rightly, as you say, it's way bigger than that.

Andrew: 8:31

Some of the things that I notice in conversations, both, you know, in the kind of literature. And then when you get into the real world and you're speaking to people that high performing teams working in and really high demanding environments, um, you've got the sort of two ends of the spectrum represented there as well, which is on one hand, they don't realize all all of the benefits of sophisticated language in doing those functional communicative things. So on one level, there's a lack of, uh, recognition of the role in lang of language in things that sometimes aren't framed as being linguistic or communicative. So, you know, we've talked before about goals. Um, goal setting can be framed as something incredibly Uh, instrumental and functional, and the fact that they exist as a means of communicating something and they are in themselves a communication is sometimes lost. So, the, the reach of the concept and importance and constitutive force of language, um, in, in team, work is not always fully represented. And then on the other end, it's like, well, but it's, it's also not just those things. It's also not just communication. It's, it's about, the development of culture. It's about identity. As I say, it's about meaning making. Um, and sense making in, in the world in which you, you, you operate. And all of those things aren't necessarily just about communication. Uh, so yeah, there's two ends of the extreme, which is on one end, not really. Not, not, um, fully fleshing out the role and importance of communication. And then the other end extreme is recognizing that it's not just about communication either. Going back to Chomsky, some of the other stuff that I've been looking into is. Getting into the weeds about the evolutionary story of language, um, and what, what significance it holds for what we, what we enjoy and, um, what we value about teamwork in, in the modern day. If you think about those debates that I mentioned, just trying to quickly represent what is discussed in those circles, in those sort of theoretical linguistic circles that Chomsky occupies and is the most famous, famous voice within. it kind of revolves around. a single debate, and I say the disclaimer again, I'm being reductionist here, but it's that debate Well, where does language come from? Chomsky's position is that there was this kind of gene mutation. I think it would be right to say that he would, he would represent that, as a spandrel

Mark: 11:31

what's a spandrel?

Andrew: 11:33

So it's nicked from, architecture, I suppose you could call it like an unintended consequence of, of a set of gene mutations that leads to a different capacity. A supposed example is like, uh, feathers in birds evolved to keep them warm, but they happen to be incredibly effective, uh, Um, facilitating flight. So they evolved for one reason and it gave you a capacity elsewhere. Spandrel in art, it comes from architecture. It's something to do with the, the negative space between two arches. Anyway, that's what he would, Uh, claim is that that mutation or step change happened in our genetics, which gave us the facility for language. Um, and it's often referred to as universal grammar. So it's just this sudden capacity for understanding of an infrastructural set of rules. Gives us the ability to abstract and, um, make use of, of words in a way that, um, uh, gives us this complexity and sophistication, uh, of, uh, of communication, um, that we didn't otherwise have. The alternative view, uh, if I can frame it as that, um, issues from Steven Pinker's work. Um, and Paul Bloom, they would describe it more as a, as a linear evolutionary model of the way in which language came to be. And their argument is that We as, as animals form the ability to communicate in the same way that birds can communicate, in the same way that whales can communicate. Um, we have a physical vocal apparatus that allows us to make sounds, um, and differentiate those sounds in a way that communicates meaning. And from that apparatus, uh, and our, you know, our need to, uh, develop more sophisticated means of collaborating and interacting so that we can survive, uh, we develop language. And, uh, you've also got. Kind of more recent work from from Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff, who basically kind of maintain that idea that, well, it's a linear evolution. It's evolved from the same physical kit that we've got to make noises and communicate. But we've, on the platform of that, through, Yeah. Co evolution of our brains to, uh, is to, um, develop the capacity for language and the argument against that in from the sort of Chomsky side as well. You know, well, if we've, if we've evolved that, why haven't, um, why haven't? monkeys, chimps, why haven't they developed the ability to create more sophisticated language? so the argument back is essentially like, uh, well, loads of things. There's loads of common parallel evolutionary tracks that don't necessarily causally relate to a further evolutionary step. So just because you might share a great deal of common genes and physical capacities doesn't mean that you're, you're destined to evolve in the same direction. I suppose the. The upshot of it either way is that it really is language that has facilitated our capacity for complex idea sharing, and sharing ideas, you know, across temporal divides. So, ability that language has to move forward and backwards in time, you know, you can refer to something that happened in the past, you can project forward and anticipate something that might happen in the future. You can refer to what's happening in the present. these seem like quite basic functions of language, but it's, it's actually incredibly sophisticated. Uh, And using syntax and semantics, you can order the same building blocks in different ways to represent different, time dimensions, different conceptual dimensions, relationships to, to other people. Um, and all of these things. Then give you the, the infrastructure to construct society and, uh, innovate around problems and challenges that you face as a collective. And that's the thing is from a physical point of view, we are not, we're not equipped as, uh, as, as predators to adequately, uh, dominate other, other species. You know, we don't have the physical size that other species have. We don't have the venom uh, or the fangs or yeah, to, to, to, to prey on, uh, on, on other species. But we do have the, we have developed the, the, the cognitive functions to organize ourselves in such a way that allows us to, um, to dominate. To summarize those two sides, that's what, um, you know, Pinker and his friends would refer to their view as the kind of broad language faculty. So it's this idea that, well, we've gathered a whole load of co evolving features together around and they've culminated in the, in the evolution of language and Chomsky's would be referred to as the narrow language faculty was like, well, it's sort of issued from one genomic mutation and hey, presto, we've suddenly got all this equipment and yeah, there's a great deal of even contemporary research that are looking to improve both things. And I think, More aligned to the Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom side of the debate personally. Um, but the point is that a theory is a theory until it's disproven. Um, and the challenges with languages is that it's quite hard to disprove. Because, uh, you need to sort of probably drill open someone's skull and put some electrodes in and things to, to, to get further. Chomsky's theory remains unrefuted, uh, uh, it's, it's not been disproven

Mark: 17:52

we previously had an episode which was on, um, the, the history of the history of teamwork. So I think it's, uh, season two, episode two of this podcast that deals with a lot of the work of Michael Tomasello, who, um, we're not going to retread any of that ground. But if anybody's listening to this, Chomsky is enormously important. And It's really important to know where he stands. Tomasello, I think, is much more strongly aligned with Pinker, as you say. Um, is an evolutionary anthropologist and studied directly the, how chimps communicate and how young adults communicate. And one of the things that I think we can say, it's not that other animals don't communicate, Because clearly they do, and there's very, you know, very varied and sophisticated methods of communication. You know, chemical, phytochemical communication, there, there's, um, body language. You only have to look at how, how dogs and domestic, domesticated animals communicate to see that there are hidden signals under there. But for some reason, suddenly, the witchcraft of where we are, uh, and TeamCraft, suddenly, for some reason, we uniquely develop this sophistication of language that we have today, to us. That's more critical than anything else. Although some of those things are really important, even chemical communication and body language really important to us, but it really is linguistics that has driven. humanity to where it is today.

Andrew: 19:13

I don't think linguistics and, and language gets enough attention, um, I, I've mentioned Elizabeth Stokoe before, if you listen, listen to her talk about, um, her frustration, which I share on the, how much attention body language gets. But you know, the whole thing about, you know, 99 percent or whatever is communicated through body language, which is A, not what was originally said, and B, fails to mention the important thing, which is Um, whatever percentage of, of signals are sent via body language, they only really mean anything in the context of spoken language, of actual, of actual, uh, linguistics. Um, so A, the apparatus and means we have of making sense of the body language It's constituted through language, so we don't, we don't understand it in the first place without language, um, uh, we can't share and make sense of it without that, uh, and B, the, the spoken language that that body language relates to, um, is what really, uh, tells us something, uh, so, I'm not saying that body language isn't important, but, um, it's, it's amazing how quickly we gloss over the depth that is contained within what we say, and by extension of that, what we what we write and so on. Um, it's it's amazing how fast we gloss over it. My dear colleague. Claudia Angiolelli, who I work with, she's an applied linguist, she, she often says she's we've all got teeth, but we're not dentists. And what she means is like, we, because we all speak all the time, it's easy to take for granted what that language represents and the sophistication that exists beneath the surface.

Mark: 21:10

I was just cheekily googling in the background. So don't, don't assume that I know this. I think that one is Ferris and Moravian and Wiener. So 1967 studies. Um, that was, that seems to be the one that, um, that has the most attention, that 55 percent of language, of communication is body language, 38 percent is tone of voice, and 7 percent is the, the word spoken.

Andrew: 21:32

well, he said himself, like, he said himself, he's like, that's, it's, it's complete. It's a completely incorrect representation of the research to say that it's not what was in the paper. And, the original source that is attributed to that idea of 90 percent of communication happening through body language, that's not what the source said. Quite Um, conveniently omits the fact that there, there are, there is an important linguistic context to any body language that is really what underpins the meaning that you, that you get from it.

Mark: 22:09

It's very similar to our Tuckman research, actually, but, you know, you dig into it a little bit more and you find out that, you know, there is, there is goodness there, but it's not necessarily what everybody currently understands it to be. And it's so widely dispersed that it's never questioned. But anyway, back to, back to linguistics and communication.

Andrew: 22:27

Yeah, so I think one of the important things that comes from looking at the evolutionary background to the importance of language and teamwork. Um, and one of the things perhaps that kind of connects it to the present day, uh, is. is about storytelling. And that's a thing that is noted as being this linguistic device that is not, nowadays we maybe even kind of associate the concept of storytelling as being a form of entertainment but storytelling as a device was the way in which, uh, people learned. the technological innovation of Written language and ways of recording written language such as books and then of course much more recently printing press. These are, these are the very tip of the iceberg of, our linguistic, uh, development. Verbal storytelling being passed between people to warn, you know, the kind of cliched example is, you know, don't eat that, don't eat that flower, don't eat that blue flower because, you know, you'll get sick or you'll die. Okay. Um, and the, the way in which, uh, language allows you to create story, uh, in, in such a way that's memorable that going back to the idea of capturing things like dimensions of time, uh, is, is unique to, to us. It's not just about, right, so the device existed to, uh, pass on lessons from generation to generation or from, uh, from family to family. Uh, it's not just about that. It's also about the co evolution of our application of storytelling and how that then itself made language evolve into something more sophisticated as well. so, H. L. Goodall Jr., uh, Walter R. Fisher, they talk about Homo Narans, the storytelling animal, uh, and, uh, You know, trying to bridge that part of the discussion between our evolution and the present day storytelling is, is, is such a, commonly referred to powerful device in contemporary work and, you know, business and politics and so on. Our guest on the podcast, Alina, she talked about her, uh, her love of the work of Francis Frei, who's, she's done some recent work on, on the power of storytelling. And it's, I do think it's the ability for Lessons and vital information to be packaged in such a way that make them memorable, that make them transferable. That is one of the really powerful features of storytelling and why it remains such an embedded means of communication.

Mark: 25:31

I was reading something recently that was, um, published by Roger Martin. So Roger Martin is a, uh, a, a strategy thinker. Playing to book Win was one of his big books. He was the, uh, dean at the Rotman School, at the University of Toronto He does these comparisons of his work and other people, other thinkers work. And he actually did a bit of a teardown of another book that I really like a book called"The Goal" by Eli Goldratt and, um, The Goal is an interesting book, there's nothing groundbreaking in it, it was actually almost rewritten chapter for chapter into a book called The Phoenix Project, which lots of techies will have read. Um, what's really interesting is The Phoenix Project, which went on to sell certainly hundreds of thousands, if not millions of copies, largely to people working in tech. The Goal has definitely sold millions of copies, maybe 5 million copies. And it's great, I really enjoyed it. Um, What Roger Martin says is that book, particularly The Goal, has sold millions of copies, and it is a parable about something that is taught in the first semester of business school. There's nothing, there's nothing particularly complex or special about what Eli Goldratt is saying, it's just that it is so compelling, so everybody reads it, and I think it just speaks to that importance of storytelling, and I think even today when you're working with teams, the ability to connect with the team with a story. Whether it's one to one or with an entire team, to bring something alive with a real example, um, and weave it into a parable is an incredibly compelling way to share knowledge, to set a shared intent, to build a culture.

Andrew: 27:09

Yeah, and It has the, it also has the advantage sometimes of being somewhat indirect, I think there are certain things that are, it's like you, some things are dry in substance, or some things are uncomfortable to, to, to address, confront. And a story packages, uh, those important messages in such a way that you get them, but they're, they're, they're, uh, they arrive in an indirect manner, which means that you're ready to receive them. You're willing to receive them, which I think is is quite important. And, um, that the willingness to receive things, I think, somewhat relates to to the concept of common ground and being, you know, able to meet and meet in a place where where everyone's ready to engage and common ground is another really fundamental feature of what, uh, what makes for effective communication, especially in teamwork. So, uh, that's, that's another thing that I've, uh, I've been thinking about a lot is. is just the role of language in achieving common ground. And it's something that, I don't think it's that it's overlooked. I think what happens is that It's a bit like that, we're all, we all have teeth but we're not dentists, uh, it's, it's taken for granted so much that we sometimes fail to, uh, acknowledge just how powerful the concept of something like common ground is, um, and it takes for it to be really disrupted for us to recognize its importance. so although it's a little bit of a detour, I think it's probably worth it. some of the work that I'm involved in at the moment is looking at the role, the impact of time delay on communication in, in deep space. Um, so looking at astronaut communication, particularly between ground crew and astronauts, and when you get into massive long distances in space, you start to get. A signal delay. So signal latency, as it's called. If you get as far as Mars, then you've got a 22 minute one day, one way delay. All of that is just a bit of contextual information, but you can imagine you've got a crew of pioneering astronauts, six of them on their way to Mars. There are sort of two, two thirds of the way there. There are two thirds of the way there. You're mission control in Houston and you're trying to communicate with them, you want to send them an important message. It's going to take 16 minutes for that message to arrive, and, uh, it's then going to take 16 minutes for the message that they respond to you with to arrive back with you. the really pioneering work that's being done in this area, uh, is, uh, You know, in my opinion, it's being done, uh, by there's a kind of small group of people dotted around the world that are working on it. But, um, research wise, Ute Fischer, um, who's, uh, Georgia Tech and, um, Kathleen Mossier, and they're both former NASA researchers, uh, and then British company called Braided Communications, uh, who are looking at how can technology support in overcoming communication delay. the, the reason I'm mentioning that is because one of the fundamental things that they've discovered when you start to look at, right, well, what, what happens when you have communication delay and, you know, delays can happen over phone lines of fractions of seconds, or they can happen as, you know, in the case of deep space over many, many minutes. and one of the really vital areas to try to maintain is common ground. Uh, but then the question is, well, what's common ground? What's, uh, what, what do we, what do we mean when we say we've got common ground? Um, and it, it actually relates back to much earlier work that Ute Fischer was also involved in. Um, and I would say arguably the person that's ended up being most associated with this earlier work was Judith Orosanu. And again, this was all done at NASA. Um, so our very early 1990s, they did work on what they call shared mental models, shared situational awareness. And they were obviously looking at this in the context of very high functioning teams and for space exploration and for, aviation. And the whole thing about that is, is about, So, do we, through our communication, are we, quote unquote, seeing the same thing? Is the sense that we make of the situation that we find ourselves in aligned in such a way that we are able to work together to deal with it or, uh, you know, solve a problem or decide on a course of action? And this is again another example I think of where in when we talk about language and communication and teamwork. This is where we get we do that we do we do a leapfrog thing. We skip over important details and move on something else. So when I'm, for example, I'm observing a team in, uh, in some research that I'm doing. And in the debriefing session, there is a conversation that comes up about, uh, a shared mental model. So going, this is this Orasanu and Fischer work from very early nineties for NASA. That, you know, you did, it was really obvious, you did really good work there. You were using a shared mental model. And the reason we can tell you were using a shared model is because it was evident from your practice that you were both working towards the same goal, but you didn't need to communicate and that's brilliant. Now, there's a problem with the way in which that's framed and I'm giving, I'm giving a negative example to demonstrate the importance of language in this whole concept, so that example I gave you, you know, you're using a shared mental model because so you didn't have to communicate. that is not an untrue statement. That is not a, uh, uh, that is not a factually inaccurate. conceptualization of the idea of a shared mental model. It's in fact what Orasanu and Fischer talk about is once you get to the kind of high functioning level of having shared situational awareness, you're operating from a shared mental model, you know, mental being the operative word, you require less explicit communication because you are, benefiting from implicit communication on the basis of your experience of working together and confronting the same scenario. The bit that's often overlooked when you get into these, so these debriefing scenarios that I'm mentioning, for example, is You only arrive at a high functioning shared mental model that uses implicit communication by going through a process of using explicit communication to develop the shared mental model. and that takes me back to common ground because that ability to express explicitly what is going on those are the fundamental ingredients of achieving common ground. and common ground is constituted itself in language. if you don't have the words or the appropriate language and vocabulary to construct explicitly communicated common ground, then you end up with a vacuum, you know, a vacuum of understanding. There's a really lovely book by David Marquet, who was a nuclear submarine captain in the U. S. Navy, and the book's called Turn the Ship Around. I really love the book. It's a book, I would say, probably more presented. along the lines of leadership. So how, uh, his reflections on the processes he followed as he took over a submarine, the Santa Fe, uh, which was not performing and he turned it into one of the highest performing submarines in the whole U.S. fleet. But there's some fascinating stuff to do with teamwork and language covered in the book, which I love. Um, and particularly it refers to, Some of the language that Fischer and Orasanu and Mossier have used in their research are in common ground. what's really useful for teams to understand is that where you find yourself in need of really effective communication are in times of doubt, ambiguity, and uncertainty. And what you need is a, vocabulary and a language that is understood to communicate around those difficult concepts of things like doubt, ambiguity, and uncertainty in a way that allows you to navigate through it effectively. if you don't have it, You end up talking at crossed purposes. You narrow the possibilities for the team to successfully come out the other side. and what you're actually trying to do when you confront these things is you're trying to repair, you know? So if you face uncertainty or ambiguity or doubt, what you're trying to do is repair it. To a point where you know the way forward. Um, and the funny thing that I see. So if I, if I watch, uh, so some other work that I'm doing, looking at, uh, medical teams, what you very often find is that, uh, They go in loops of that high performing shared mental model. We know what we're doing. We know that we know the management process for this particular problem. I know that you know that I know that we know what we need to do. So we're going to do it. You take. gas, measurements, uh, so, you know, samples of their vitals. I'll get, I'll order this prescription, you do that, um, blah, blah, blah. When they encounter uncertainty, suddenly they look back around to this, okay, we need explicit communication because we don't know, we don't have a, we don't have a set up means of dealing with this. And that's when suddenly you need that sophisticated nuanced language to repair the uncertainty. question comes back to common ground is, do you have a language? in your team that gives you the means to confront these sorts of situations. If you've not talked about it, you know, again, the word talk comes in. So, like, you need to have, you need to use your communication to, address issues of lack of communication. if you haven't talked about those issues, then you fail to identify where you'll be able to reach common ground. I have a completely, um, unrelated, but really interesting example from other research that I did. And it was looking at in, in the entrepreneurship world. Uh, so with my fantastic colleagues, uh, Lucrezia Casulli and Stephen Knox. So we've looked at, um, Entrepreneurs and we looked like tech kind of entrepreneurs and art based entrepreneurs. And the really interesting thing we found was the art entrepreneurs. Found it really difficult to access and identify with the support, uh, resources that are available to them to move their endeavors forward. And the reason for that is because all of the support services are grounded in the language of high tech, high growth, quintessential entrepreneurship, right? Silicon Valley, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they didn't have common ground in language with the resources that are available to support them. The things that they were doing were exactly the same as the high tech companies, but the resources and the support spoke the language of the high tech entrepreneurs. So the high tech entrepreneurs find it very easy to communicate with all those, uh, support resources because they had common ground in language. As soon as the support people are talking about, market capitalization or, um, you know, your raised targets or this, that, and the other, all of this language was kind of anathema to an artist who's still trying to, create a market for their product to sell it. But, you know, market, product, and selling are none of those words or things that artists tend to identify with in their, in their, in their endeavors. Uh, the result was no common ground. The result was no support for, or less support, or, or support that was accessed in a far more difficult way than the high tech people. It's a very interesting example of that kind of lack of common ground, um, leads you to problems. And that was a thing that David Marquet found in his, uh, work on turning the ship around on it in a submarine was, uh, let's find common, let's find common ground for problems, let's find common ground for ambiguities. going right down to the detail of the role of one word in creating common ground. They talked about shutting valves instead of closing valves because close sounds like blow and blowing a valve is the opposite of closing a valve.

Mark: 41:07

a bad, that would be a bad decision.

Andrew: 41:09

we take for granted that these important features are built into our language and it's language that we have chosen to achieve common ground. So I'm going back to aviation. It's why if you hear a pilot communicating with the ground and they're identifying themselves and Their flight number has a nine in it. They don't say nine, they say niner, because it makes it difficult to, to confuse. Um, it's why, uh, horizontal distance and vertical distances are used different, units of measurement in aviation. Because if you're talking about kilometers or you're talking about feet, you don't have to distinguish whether you're talking about vertical or lateral, because if it's in kilometers, then it's, it's horizontal. If it's in feet and it's in vertical distance. Um, and these are, these are deliberate mechanisms built into language to allow us to achieve common ground and understanding.

Mark: 42:02

One of the things that stands out, and you said almost exactly what I was thinking as you were describing it, that the, the existence of common ground means that you're, you require less explicit communication. I train a lot of teams how to do incident management. And one of the defining characteristics of those teams is that they are generally not in a crisis. So they are not in uniformed services, they're not in Accident Emergency. So those teams require specific drilling, and I use that, that word very specifically, because people in uniformed services, in kitchens and a lot of other, um, high stress environments drill regularly to build common ground. But what happens in these organizations is they don't have, maybe it is the shared mental model to start with, but building the common ground, building the habitual, uh, processes that, that are used. And so after a little while, so generally, if I'm teaching people how to do incident response, I encourage them to declare an incident at any moment, the drop of a hat, you declare an incident, because then you practice it in a low stress situation. Because the last thing that you want to do is exactly, as you said, be trying to develop the common ground in the high stress situation and not understand that everybody has the shared mental model that has the shared common ground. So what you see in those situations is communication is very explicit and starts looking very military. You start seeing people handing over ownership. I'm in control. You're in control. You know, it sounds almost exactly like a pilot handing over to another pilot, and that's just in a tech situation. But the other situation, which I think is really interesting is how impactful somebody joining a team that already has a really cohesive common ground because suddenly it destroys it. And what I see happen a lot in that situation is the assumption of shared common ground can be really divisive in that team. Not only does it leave the, the outsider, the new joiner, um, as somebody that then has to learn that, but it can also lead to mistakes because there's an assumption that that person has the same common ground. But they don't. They don't have the shared mental model. They haven't learned it yet. And so that can lead, because the communication isn't explicit, because there is an assumption of common ground, that that's where mistakes happen.

Andrew: 44:19

yeah, there's another, there's another conversation to be had sometime about, you know, Um, the two way relationship there between the when a new when a new member joins the team. The introduction of a new team member changes language, but the that team member also has to. Integrate to the prevailing, uh, linguistic approaches of the team that they join, and somehow they need to meet in the middle. I think one of the biggest problems that exists is simply a lack of recognition of that process, um, and a little bit of, uh, entrenched attitude of they just need to assimilate entirely 100 percent to the way we do things. I thought I might end with, uh, telling you some of my favorite things that, if we're trying to get into the strict communicative devices that do exist, that sometimes we, You know, by having a language that allows us to differentiate between them, we understand their role in performing teamwork. Uh, and although it's a little bit of a false ending, it brings us to a nice conclusion going back to my fandom of the work of, Judith Orsanu, Uta Fisher, Kathleen Mossier, So they've done a lot of stuff and they've looked at, for example, I think we're interfaces with my, my research activities. So the crossover between aviation and health care, for example. but I, uh, I particularly like some of the things that they've identified in, in what we have learned from aviation. the only thing I would caveat this with is I do sometimes think that in aviation, it's like an amazing achievement what we've done with communication and aviation. And at the same time, sometimes it takes away, it sanitizes what language really is, you know, in a way, what we've done is we've created artificial intelligence with humans in aviation, like it's so highly protocol driven to such an effective and safe extent, that, you know, we can put two pilots have never flown together before in a cockpit, and they will just do it beautifully. The problem is that, um. If you become so protocol driven that you don't have the, the elasticity in your language to cope with unexpected events, then you suddenly you, you hit the limits like hitting a brick wall, or indeed flying into the ground.

Mark: 46:46

They don't have the standard processes to describe little green men or women flying past in the spaceship. That's the thing about it. Yeah. Okay, good.

Andrew: 46:54

exactly. So, but that aside, you know, I say that with a little bit of my tongue in cheek, but some of the things I think are really, have been really usefully identified in practice in the cockpit, are things like what pilots understand that they're doing when they say things. So, uh, what they, things like they would call obligation statements and preference statements. And these are really useful things for any team to think about in their language the important thing about an obligation statement is that you express it in such a way that protects the integrity of the team in in the content of how you phrase it. They talk about in a, an aviation context, Oh, we, we probably need to deviate about now. That's an example of an obligation statement is that we, the team, we need to, I'm presenting to you a course of action that we ought to take, in my opinion. and, That can also be things like preference statements. So I, I think it would be better for us if we did X or Y and so understanding that there are things such as obligation and preference statements where you are presenting these things is quite useful to know that's the category into which they belong. And when I do that, that's what I'm that's what I'm trying to achieve. but you then have resource or task allocation statements. and I think one of the things that sometimes gets mixed up is, um, an obligation statement is considered to be from the person who makes the statement that's considered to also be a resource or a task allocation statement. And. If there isn't common ground and understanding and how these things work, then if I make an obligation statement to you, and I expect you to understand from that, that I'm also allocating the resource or the task to you in so doing, we start to lose our common ground. I by making an obligation statement, think that I've said, oh, I think we need to deviate around about now. Um, you know, in a work context, I think we need to follow up on, on that, inquiry from that client. Um, if I assume by saying that I'm allocating the task to you, and you assume by doing that, you're just presenting us with an, an obligation, um, suddenly we lose, we lose focus. And, common purpose.

Mark: 49:09

that sort of obligation statement, it feels like there's, there's still things to look into in there. We, we probably should, doesn't feel very obligatory. that was the thing that popped into my head about how explicit you can be in, in the language. But I think breaking things into those two categories, or sorry, the three categories, the obligation, preference, and then the resource allocation, um, I think is probably extremely useful for a lot of teams to consider.

Andrew: 49:33

Yeah, and the, the, you can package them in a three, so the obligation, the preference and the, and the task allocation, you know, I think we ought to get back to that client about that inquiry. I would prefer if we did it within the next two days, and I would like you to do it.

Mark: 49:50

one of the things I've said to a team recently is if, if you're asking for help, you need to say explicitly what you want, who you want to help with it so that they can either agree or disagree and when it needs to be completed by, and that's sort of the three component parts of a request is if you don't have those three things, then it's not going to happen because you're, you're missing something crucial out of that communication.

Andrew: 50:10

Absolutely. And I think another time I'd love to do a further deep dive into that work, Fisher, Orisanu, Mossier and colleagues have done because it's, um, it's really fascinating, uh, and it has consequences for teams in all kinds of contexts, not just in those sort of high reliability, uh, high stakes, safety driven contexts, but,

Mark: 50:32

We'll definitely make, yeah, we'll definitely make room for that. There's, there's so many things there. And I think as well, the particular David Marquet's work on Turn the Ship Around, I'm pretty sure we've already got an episode scheduled coming up in the, in the weeks ahead that we'd like to do on, on that one as well.

50:46

I don't know if you can see it,

Speaker: 51:02

Yeah.