Andrew Maclaren: 0:00

in the Byzantine empire, they used smoke signals to relay messages back from the frontier to Constantinople, the capital, and they had a whole system set up, which was, they had towers built, and they would have pyres on the top that they would light. And if there was a threat on the frontier, the first one closest to the frontier would be lit. Yeah, it's in the Lord of the Rings film, right? Okay, exactly. It's exactly, it's exactly that.

Mark Ridley: 0:43

Andrew, did you see recently that, uh, Andy Jassy, who's the CEO of Amazon sent a note to all Amazon employees demanding they will come back to the office?

Andrew Maclaren: 0:54

Yeah, I did. And it just made me kind of go, hmm, how would I, how would I react to that if, if that was what happened to me? Um, at the university where we, you know, we work quite fluidly, quite hybrid. Um, and I also have quite a long commute. Wouldn't be the,

Mark Ridley: 1:15

as,

Andrew Maclaren: 1:15

it wouldn't be the most palatable thing to me.

Mark Ridley: 1:17

As it turns out to a lot of Amazon employees. So today in

Andrew Maclaren: 1:20

Yeah.

Mark Ridley: 1:20

We we really want to talk about we don't want to talk about Amazon. We want to talk about virtual teams But it's obviously really timely, um, especially with the the background of that that message from Andy Jassy Um And I think one of the things that would be really fun to do today is actually really talk about what is a virtual team, what is a remote team, what is a hybrid team, you know, what do we talking about? And actually, I think we can go into some of the historical precedents that was set that because humans have actually been remote for quite a long time in ways that we might not think about. But let me go

Andrew Maclaren: 1:53

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, read it out, read it out. Yeah,

Mark Ridley: 1:57

So this got a lot of pushback. Um, uh, uh, Andy Jassy sent this, this message out and there was an immediate and very strong reaction from a lot of people inside, inside Amazon. Um, so, but what I would like to do is I want to read. Some of his message. I'm going to go through it quite quickly. I've cherry, I've cherry picked it. But some of the communication here is really interesting as well. So thinking about teams and communication, I found it really interesting to read the message. And I think it's important to sort of understand the context of what he was saying, because he didn't just say it. Come back and work in the office. There was more context to it than that. So from, I'm shortening this, but from Jassy's message, it says, culture is unique and has been one of the most critical parts of our success in our first 29 years. But keeping your culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time. When you consider the breadth of our business, associated growth rates, the innovation required across each of them, and the number of people we've hired the last six to eight years to pursue these endeavors is pretty unusual and will stretch even the strongest of cultures. Strengthening our culture remains a top priority for the S team and me. And it's maybe important just to say the S team is Amazon Senior Leadership Team.

Andrew Maclaren: 3:10

I was gonna, I was gonna ask that.

Mark Ridley: 3:12

He goes on to say, we want to operate like the world's largest startup. That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency. For most big opportunities, it's a race, high ownership, fast decision making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply connected collaboration. You need to be joined at the hip with your when inventing and solving hard problems and a shared commitment to each other. And then it finishes, or it doesn't finish, but at the end of the bit that we want to, to go through our two areas that the S team and I have been thinking about the last several months are, one, do we have the right org structure to drive the level of ownership and speed we desire? And two, are we set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for our customers and the business that we can? We think we can be better on both. We've decided we're going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office is significant. I've previously explained these benefits, but in summary, we've observed that it's easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture. Collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing a simpler and more effective teaching and learning from one another are more seamless and teams tend to be better connected to one another. That's it. that's

Andrew Maclaren: 4:29

to unpack there.

Mark Ridley: 4:30

there's there is a lot to unpack but um, Yeah, I think as a piece of executive communication, it's pretty good It could probably be a little bit more bottom line up front. It sort of leads into its point a little bit too much of my liking but um he sets out a stall that very particularly innovation and invention is difficult It's more difficult than it is being co present. And then he says, everyone has come back to the office. And as far as I can tell, I don't have any insight into this, but from, from what is publicly available, this was sent to all employees.

Andrew Maclaren: 5:05

Yeah. I mean, maybe a couple of points that stuck out to me, which slightly contextual, but first question I had was a company, the size of Amazon does returning to the office mean that all teams as they're defined in the business. are now co-present? Because I presume there must be some team functions that are happening across locations. So. I don't want to call it a gimmick, but that's the word that comes to my mind. Like the gimmick of, we're all going back to the office so that we're all going to be together physically all the time. Is that a slight myth in terms of actually how the organization operates? And the second was, is that how the, is that literally how they operated before COVID? Or was there more fluidity before COVID? And actually COVID has narrowed the focus on these things that never really presented themselves as, as, as worthy of attention before.

Mark Ridley: 6:11

There's a few clues in the message. One is that he says in the message that if, um, if you were co located before, if you're in the office, you will be going back. The offices that had fixed desks will continue to have fixed desks. So there is the idea that, you know, you will be assigned a desk and you can work from that desk, which seems really quaint. I can't actually even

Andrew Maclaren: 6:31

Yeah.

Mark Ridley: 6:31

because I've spent so long working with with flexible hot desking in inside offices Even when you are co present that I almost can't imagine having a fixed desk anymore But he he says that the offices that previously had fixed desks will go back to having fixed fixed decks desks and there were elements He acknowledges there were elements of fluidity before if you needed to work from home because you had You know caregiving Tasks that you need to take care of, then you would be allowed to do that just in the same way that you were before, but the expectation, the normality is that you're, you're in the office. And there is also a mention that. Um, even being in the office two or three days a week, because that's really the change, it's going back to five days a week, even being in the office two or three days a week, you can miss each other. he's very specifically focusing this on the performance of invention. And I think there is a whole wider thing there about, okay, yeah, I, I get that. get that invention and innovation is difficult when you are not physically present or more difficult when you're not physically present, there have to be an enormous number of people in Amazon. He does say, yeah, we're an unusual organization. They are, they're enormous. They have grown faster than most, most organizations. They are unusual,

Andrew Maclaren: 7:45

They're the world's largest startup.

Mark Ridley: 7:48

which is what they want to maintain. You know, the growth rates are huge. The invention that they do is really significant, but, um, what he. he's saying is we want to come back to invent. There's a whole load of operational roles that, you know, the invention part of that, um, falls to the wayside a little bit. And, um, one of the things when I was researching it for this episode, one of the things that I found, um, which I, I've shared with you as well, and we'll put in the show notes for this, is there's also a paper was, uh, co authored by, um, Michael Arena, Glenn Carroll, Charles O'Reilly, John Golden, Scott Hines, um, and, um, That is a collaboration between researchers at Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, and Amazon Web Services. So two, two researchers from Amazon themselves. And this paper was really interesting. So you can tell, the paper was from 2022. So perhaps it informed, um, Jassy mentioned that he had previously talked in February 2023 about the benefits of co location. So maybe it informed that. I would be surprised if it didn't. And researchers were from AWS. Andy Jassy used to be the CEO of Amazon Web Services. Now Andy

Andrew Maclaren: 9:05

Yeah,

Mark Ridley: 9:06

the CEO of the whole of, of Amazon. But I would be

Andrew Maclaren: 9:08

the whole thing. Yeah.

Mark Ridley: 9:09

wasn't, you know, something cutting through that. And in that paper, It's a really interesting paper and it's very well researched and it's like some great examples from Microsoft as well. There is a quote directly from this, the adaptive hybrid innovation with virtual work paper. It says, to mitigate these concerns about innovating in a virtual environment, we propose the adaptive hybrid work model. This method helps leaders to recognize a company or team's specific stage of innovation. Ideation, incubation, or scaling, and then directs employees to work in person or virtually according to the requirements of that stage what's really interesting in that research is this Stanford and AWS research paper. Um, looks at where it is appropriate to be co located and where it, where it is appropriate or reasonable to be remote. And what Andy Jassy has done in his, uh, his missive to the entire Amazon staff is actually break from that research paper, said, no, now everybody needs to be co located all the time. And there's obviously some reason to do that. behind that. There's the, the research in this AWS and Stanford paper. And then there is Amazon coming all the way back to the office, which I think is a really good jumping off point for us to then look at. Well, okay. he is clearly saying that co present teams are more effective than hybrid or fully remote teams, there are companies that make virtual teams. um work and also, virtual teams have been around for a long time. So I think probably now, maybe a good time for us to actually try to define exactly what a virtual team is.

Andrew Maclaren: 10:46

The thing that's important for us to do, uh, is give a definition and then slowly step away from it and not not treat it with too, in too strict a form because. Um, I mean, there's a lot of research that's been done in virtual teams. Interestingly, I think we consider it to be a phenomenon that has, uh, gripped us post pandemic, but there's, people have been researching this for decades, actually, um, and it's certainly, I'd say, the early 90s, as The capacity of the internet was starting to demonstrate itself. People were kind of saying, well, there's a revolution. We're never going to have to go into the office again. We can, you know, there was, it was almost one of these classic kind of utopia situations of, of this new technology is going to, um, unleash, Something that that we never before thought was possible. So it was all very upside. And then, as it's been actually used and virtual teams have started to proliferate, actual data has been collected and we've started to understand the nuance of it. Definitionally, um, What we're talking about is two very clear cut things that define a virtual team. Um, and that is that members of the team, not necessarily all of them, but certainly, uh, key component members of the team are separated by some kind of distance. And I guess what we'd say there is they're physically separated. Um, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are in a different country or in a different continent or time zone. They're, they, they, where they do their work from predominantly is not co located as it would say. So that's the first feature. Um, and you know, by virtue of the fact that they are not co located, the second feature is that they rely on some kind of communication technology to. Do their work together.

Mark Ridley: 13:02

Can I add one, one thing to that?

Andrew Maclaren: 13:04

yeah,

Mark Ridley: 13:05

I, I think, I think a spot on those, those definitely two, two of what I would see is the three things that makes it, makes it a virtual team. The first, which we shouldn't overlook, is it's a team rather than a group or a committee or a, a political party.

Andrew Maclaren: 13:20

of course.

Mark Ridley: 13:21

so, So to be a virtual team, first you have to be a team and you have to, you have to sort of labor under all of the things that makes you a team in the first place. Because I think it's easy to look at remote communication. I was thinking about when we're preparing for this, I was thinking about sort of military leadership has been diverse and global, fully remote and empowered by communication years, but that doesn't make it a team. And so very specifically to constrain what we're talking about. It is first and foremost a team, um, and then geographically diverse, or as you quite rightly say, um, dispersed enough that communication by technology is, or, you know, non, non present communication is required, and then that communication is probably facilitated by some sort of technology.

Andrew Maclaren: 14:08

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Um, remembering that there's a lot of technology mediated communication that happens in organizations that isn't necessarily facilitating teamwork.

Mark Ridley: 14:21

Yeah.

Andrew Maclaren: 14:22

but, uh, nonetheless. I'd say those three will define it for us. And you will find all kinds of definitions in different, uh, significant pieces of research on virtual teams. Um, a little note to say you. I also hear them referred to as distributed teams. Um, and in the Andrew Jassy stuff, we've also heard about this concept of hybrid teams. Um, I say that we remain relatively relaxed about where the boundaries are between the definitions of those things. The distributed team concept was probably, um, an ancestor of what we nowadays call a virtual team.

Mark Ridley: 15:03

Yeah.

Andrew Maclaren: 15:04

Um, and you've also, hybrid teams is. If it's not intuitive enough, uh, already a hybrid team is a team that is sometimes co located and sometimes operating virtually. And that that sits in a Venn diagram of of what the new normal is, which is, you know, a lot of organizations have maybe fixed days in the working week where everyone has to be in the office or, you know. By virtue of different people's flexible working arrangements, they all overlap on certain days, and that renders the team a kind of hybrid team. But I would say what we're going to talk about. whether you are a kind of thoroughbred virtual team born virtual and you're operating in, you know, you work from an office in your house and all the people you connect with are scattered all over the world and you only really pursue your work together, um, virtually, or whether you exist in one of these kind of new normal situations where flexible work means that you do a lot of your work virtually, what we're going to talk about still applies. Uh, so We can be relatively relaxed about the definition.

Mark Ridley: 16:10

probably the nicest thing that I saw when we were looking at this to come up with a good definition was the description of it being a scale, you know, it is not, it is not virtual or not virtually, it is a scale from fully, fully present, co located, synchronously all the time to, Um, let's say, for example, uh, having to communicate with, uh, astronauts when they're in space. Um, so, so potentially lead onto some of your topics, exactly as you say, it is a scale from, um, from very, very traditional formats of work that can only be done in person to adding levels of remoteness to that too fully. remote teams that have potentially never met in person, but still function like teams.

Andrew Maclaren: 16:57

So, say, if you're doing, if you're achieving a substantive amount of your work assisted by technology and regularly your ability to Work in kind of co presence is limited, then you're probably kind of admissible as a virtual team. But as I say, the elements of, um, and the kind of characteristics of what working in a virtual team are like still apply, even if it's basically, you know, my team all works in the same office, but we're not actually all there all the time. And that requires us, therefore, to use technology. So let's remain a bit fluid about it. It's also, I think, important to acknowledge. this is not some kind of newfangled way of working that has emerged since we were all in lockdown during COVID. Um, if you go back to that core, core, core characteristics, distributed geographically, or at least physically distributed, um, and relying on some form of technology to achieve, uh, communication. Well, in the Byzantine empire, They had, they used smoke signals to relay messages back from, you know, back from the frontier to Constantinople, the capital, um, and they had a whole system set up, which was, they had these sort of, um, towers built, and they would have fire, uh, pyres on the top that they would light. And if there was a threat on the frontier, the first one closest to the frontier would be lit. Yeah it's in the Lord of the Rings film right Okay, exactly. It's exactly, it's exactly that. So, um, you know, we're talking about the 9th century there. So that was an early form of virtual team interaction. Um, and. Fast forward to the 20th century, an early example of trying to effectively organize around virtuality, uh, was the, the kind of space race period in the 1960s.

Mark Ridley: 19:15

One of the things that does really stand out is, you know, I, I know you used the, the example of the, the signal fires. Um, and we had semaphore across ships. Those early examples were really not virtual teams. They, they certainly came before virtual team communication, but the. I think, as you say, it took, it took probably until the middle of the 20th century for it really, for communication technology to have evolved to a point where it can actually be used in teamwork, rather than in something which was communications or between organizations between relatively separate entities.

Andrew Maclaren: 19:51

yeah, right. And I think. Even when we were talking about the definitions there, one of the reasons it's flexible is because the definition, as you see it in the literature, has perhaps become more specific over time as improvements in technology have unlocked, uh, our ability to, to actually achieve. Work effective teamwork more readily. Um, and yeah, and there's, if you look back into deep distant history, that's that evolution is, is, is, is evident in how advanced technology was because the Apollo missions in particular, I'd the extent to which they, um, relied on technology and really, um, experimented with, uh, pushing the boundaries on all these fronts, uh, was, was it, is a, it's a leading example of, of, and, and, and therefore an early example of using, uh, communication technology to achieve teamwork. But it's a classic, it's a classic virtual team because you have. Three guys in a tin can, up to 250, 000 miles away, uh, heading towards the moon. And you've got a whole set of teams at Mission Control communicating with them. And they're relying on technology to do so. And that was, that was the quintessential origin story, I would say, of contemporary virtual teamwork. Um, and I think some of the, some of the stuff that I like about, because it's all, it's all very well, it's all very well documented. But you also saw early examples of some of the difficulties that virtual teams experience. I love the story of Apollo 7. we all know about Apollo 11, moon landings, Neil Armstrong, blah, blah, blah. Um, the, the, the Apollo numbers lower than 11 were all staging posts to getting on the moon, right? They were all rehearsals for different stages in the process of achieving a moon landing. Um, so Apollo 7 was one of those, and, I love the story of Wally Schirra, who's the commander of Apollo 7, and basically, they fell out with mission control. And, There's a lot more nuance to the story than that, but it boils down to like Wally Schirra, commander of Apollo 7, threw his toys out the pram about stuff. Um, but I'm summarizing here. I'm skipping over details and, you know, I'm probably sailing close to the wind of slightly misrepresenting some of it, but, um, just for the sake of brevity. But basically the, the, the. The history with him was because you'll know that the Apollo one mission, um, they were, there's this famous fire that happened and it killed all three astronauts that were due to, uh, to man, the Apollo one mission. Um, so. That Gus Grissom, uh, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, who all died, and that kind of, you know, it traumatized the whole, the whole Apollo set up. And you had all these other astronauts who knew they were going to go up. Um, and so Wally Schirra, who, he was a veteran of both Mercury and Gemini. So he was actually like the Apollo missions. He was a, he was a naval test pilot. He was then Mercury, Gemini, highly decorated, original NASA astronaut. And this was the end of his career. And I think perhaps that had a part to play in it, but basically he was paranoid as a result of, you know, concerns over safety and suspicion as to whether things have been resolved. Apollo seven was his last mission. Like he was retiring after Apollo seven and he got a cold like a day into the mission, he got a cold. Um, and apparently getting a cold is really unpleasant when it's in zero gravity because

Mark Ridley: 23:51

I don't even

Andrew Maclaren: 23:56

leave your body. Yeah, so it's pretty miserable. It's horrible. High pressure in the head and so he's very grumpy. But, um, long story short, they got paranoid about mission control not telling them stuff and Um, he was really concerned about the, the integrity of the, of the spacecraft. And there were, there's lots of anecdotes from the transcripts in, in Apollo of him being kind of short and sharp, a bit, you know, a bit, uh, snippy, let's say with mission control. And it all came to a head with him being like, we're not wearing our helmets for re entry. So when they're coming back to earth, he's like, we're not wearing our helmets. And it kind of was because of his cold, because he didn't want to put an extra thing that was really tight around his head on his already, um, over pressurized head. He was like, I'm mission commander, none of us are wearing our helmets. The mission controller like, well, you, you kind of should wear your helmet because it's dangerous re entry and, you know, it's highly volatile unpredictable. He's like, no, we're not wearing it. Um, but you know, what was underpinning all this was like a, uh, an erosion of trust in the other part of the team he was separated from, and this is one of the things, you know, we'll come back to talk about some of these things. I'm sure shortly, but, some of the difficulties virtual teams have is especially when you've got, which is commonly the case, you've got a virtual team where some members are co located in one area and other members are co located in another area, and the implicit trust that develops between those who are co located, And, on the other side of the coin, erodes the trust that they have for the team that's elsewhere or the part of the team that's elsewhere. And this was a classic example, breeding suspicion and, uh, and paranoia about the intentions of the others. and it happened in Apollo 13 as well. You'll maybe have seen the film, the Apollo 13, the, you know, the successful failure as they called it. But, the astronauts. on Apollo 13, they did the same thing when they felt like Mission Control were trying to micromanage them through the crisis. They removed all of their health sensors, um, because the flight surgeon was annoying them. well documented and, and they do it, they actually even make a reference to it in the film. That was the same thing. They were growing suspicious of, because you've got to remember, like, so they're a virtual team, three of them separated, long distance coming back to Earth. They didn't know if perhaps mission control had realized there was no way they were going to get back. And they were basically just kind of giving them a palliative care. They were, they were telling them things just to soften the blow of their inevitable death. and there was a bit of a mutiny and they, they ripped off all of their sensors and they're like, well fine, you're not going to tell anything about us anymore because we're annoyed at you.

Mark Ridley: 26:49

Yeah, the trust thing is And that was one of the reasons that I really wanted to say it has to be a team first, because trust is an implicit part of being inside a team. And as you've said before, and I now quote regularly, uh, Trust is, is earned in drips and lost in buckets. And what I found fascinating is some of the best teams research that I found was from the late 90s and early 2000s. It is not, you know, and, and very similarly to a lot of the other teams research that we've done. There is some really fantastic and still. completely relevant material that, um, that comes from 20 years ago. There was, um, was a piece of work I think it's by Jarvenpaa and colleagues, and it's called, Is Anybody Out There? The Antecedents of Trust in Global Teams. they first talk about what trust is. Broadly it is an expectation that, um, others will act in a certain way. Um, and that because you have, um, a shared understanding of what the common goals are they will act in, in your interest in a certain situation. they also talk about, um, in a traditional face to face context trust takes time to evolve. Cummings and, uh, Bromley suggest that collective trust has an effective cognitive and behavioral intent component. it was found that based trust factors are a precursor to the development of effectively based trust. And that it is broadly, so in this, in this research, it is broadly much more difficult to establish trust when you are in a, in a, this remote situation in a virtual team than if you're co located. There are so many things when we're co located that help build trust. And I'm sure that, you know, many people, you That have worked in hybrid or remote teams where they are using email or video calls to talk to colleagues. It takes a lot longer to build trust in remote. a remote setting than it does when you're co located. Because all of those tiny cues that you get, whether it is somebody offering to make you a cup of tea. We've talked before about the power of somebody offering a cup of tea to their team. But that expectation of behavior is a small signal. It's one of those small drips that builds trust, builds expectation. Because I don't think the trust is always, this person is going to act in my interest. It's sometimes trust is just, I know how this person will. react in this situation. Yeah, I can trust them to act in a certain way. Sometimes that's sufficient.

Andrew Maclaren: 29:21

you're talking about kind of rational trust and relational trust and see, we can logic it out that, that, uh, you know, Mark does what he says he does, what he says he's going to do. And, uh, I've got enough evidence to say that I can trust Mark to do things. Um, that's very different to how I feel about Mark and, uh, and his behaviors and how I trust him. Um, and these are things that are developed in different ways. Uh, but yeah, it's, um, I think. It's another, there's another feature that is talked about a lot in the literature about virtual team interaction, which is, uh, the task versus relationship dynamic. Um, and that's, you know, the, the trust thing is. Influencing that dynamic as well, which is, uh, virtual team interaction tends to be very dominated by task related, content or, uh, task related activity, task related discussion. it's a little bit more challenging to develop relational interaction virtually. Uh, and. Because there's a focus on task, affective trust can become underdeveloped as a result of that. it's one of the things that is evident in research on virtual teams is We kind of have to do a bit of a suspension of belief around about expectations of normal interaction. Um, I think it's really easy to think of, right, so, you know, we are recording this virtually. It's easy to assume, therefore, all of the normal rules about interaction, communication, discourse, apply. And we're just doing it through a computer. Um, actually that's not the case. There, there are, there are things that we need to be aware of and then we need to manage for them in order to, um, mitigate for their negative impact. Um, so all of the stuff that is, uh, really focused on at the kind of top level issues to do with virtual teams are to do with these relational features. So, difficulty in building social cohesion, issues with trust. there's also concept around depersonalization and dehumanization, um, which. Also has these flavors of the, the, the humanity, the, the, the affect, the relationship, uh, features of the way in which we work together. So, um, it comes back to, there are things that we get from being physically together that are tacit. salient and unconscious and they form a kind of interactional foundation that allows us to proceed the way in which we communicate with each other in a way that feels natural and normal and secure and safe and virtual interaction removes some of our capacity to achieve those things. These are kind of, social psychology, anthropological concepts, um, but things like, um, co presence, co regulation, um, another thing called bio behavioral synchrony. And all these things are just like what happens to us when we are in the same room as each other doing stuff. not to do with teamwork necessarily, but it's just the way in which we actually co regulate together, uh, because we're, we're in the same place. Um, if I'm doing like an away day, which I do for organizations and stuff. One of my favorite things to do at the very start of the day is to get everyone to breathe together. And I like to control breathing. Okay, right, everyone, you know, breathe in, hold, breathe out. Um, and it's a little bit of a gimmick because I'm like, okay, we've all just done a breathing exercise, so it's been good for us. Our bodies tune in to each other and recognize that there's actually a calming and, uh, a sense of increased security when our bodies realize that they're in sync with other bodies. That's all denied to you when you're working virtually. And it then leads to things like dysregulation of discourse and interaction, so it can become disinhibiting. So I just might be a little bit more aggressive or a little bit more threatening or, um, say a bit too much or put my point across in a manner a little bit too forthright than I would normally if I was co regulating around others in the same room. Um, and then that has a ripple effect around the way other people respond. So the medium is, is moderating the way in which we actually interact.

Mark Ridley: 34:22

of the things that would like to dig into, so we talked about trust and how it is harder to establish trust in, in a, let's say, fully remote setting. One of the other things, one of the other areas where it is harder to establish, of the prerequisites for good teamwork is one of the things that we call common ground. So, um, we, we use this term common ground to really refer to shared mental models, um, and methods of communication. So it's, it's deeper than that, but, but broadly there is, it's almost what Andy Jassy was talking about when he was talking about culture, but I think it is slightly deeper than that. In, in as much as for a really effective team. You see, you see the team members will build these, uh, these shared mental models, the, this, this common ground, which allows them to do their job more easily because they know exactly what the scope of their responsibility is, what the responsibility of the rest of the group is. And I think one of the things that is also definitely true, having observed this in lots of of organizations, it is much easier to build. those shared mental models, that common ground, you are co located. There are very small cues about whether you're doing something right or wrong. Um, and again, you know, I think there is, there is truth in, in the argument that Andy Jassy was making in that original memo, which was we have to really focus on culture. He says that's one of the things that he thinks about most, and the culture will be stronger when you're co located. I mean, that's hard to argue with. It doesn't mean that it's not worth fighting for, but it, but certainly when I've worked in that combination of fully remote or hybrid teams, have to be so much more explicit. And we, we will always come back to communication here, but you have to be so much more explicit in communication. in the cultural expectations, um, of how your organization works if you're remote. And arguably it's even harder you're in a hybrid organization. So we talked about it being a scale. Fully co located is relatively easy. It's very natural for us. We have evolved to do it. Fully remote actually, isn't that that difficult either because then everybody is bound by exactly the same constraints and so the behaviors are synchronized but where there is some difference and you talked about that great example of where there were people on the ground and the um the Apollo astronauts and there was a difference in in the expectation and the the reality that they were experiencing at that time was hard to get over with with the technology with the communication. And so one of the things that I think is really important for anybody working inside a virtual team, collaborating inside a virtual team, is to really think about how, how you build trust, and also how you build that common ground in the shared mental models.

Andrew Maclaren: 37:12

I think a lot of it is about how intentional you are about trying to find that shared context. Um, So, I'd say like the shared context concept, common ground, is like that, it's that layers that sits above what we just talked about in terms of co presence and co regulation. It's a bit more kind of specific to the environment that you occupy, but if you are co present, if you're co located, the context is taken for granted. So when you're talking about common ground, which you know is a foundational linguistic concept, common ground is established through our shared understanding of, of our, of our context. And, you know, there are, there are layers to it. Um, but a lot of it is just taken as read because we, we, we are aware that we are sharing this kind of first level of common ground. We, we are aware that we are both aware that we're sharing the same space. And that gives us a foundation upon which to build common ground. Um, and there's a security, again, this kind of psychological security that is fostered by, by knowing that. Um, that's entirely detached virtually. And I think, Being aware that lack of shared context can be somewhat destabilizing, um, for people in virtual teams just means it's another thing that if you're operating virtually, you probably just need to give some intentional direction, some intentional time dedicated towards it. silly things like we're all, we're all going to dial in from the same coffee chain for our meeting today. And the consistency that the, you know, the, the, um, cookie cutter nature of some of these chains means that we're all actually in a way sharing the same environment. Um, we're all going to wear the same color jumper when we, uh, when we dial in, it could be, it could be any of these things. It's a little bit gimmicky, but it's, it's creating share context. However, one of the difficulties with virtual teams, which co located teams don't suffer from is some of that context is actually. about the kind of rhythms of the environment the rhythms of that shared context also inform a sense of common ground. So it's not just about what we can see around us, but it's like, you know, um, the, the circadian rhythms, the light, the noises, the who else is in the space, that also creates a cadence and a beat. To which we we align ourselves and that also creates a sense of a sense of of a shared context. So it's um, It's a challenging one, I think, for virtual teams, but at least awareness of the fact that these things make an unconscious difference to the ability for co located teams to do their work, you have to work a little bit harder if you're operating virtually to try and mitigate for the lack of those things.

Mark Ridley: 40:34

There's there's a couple of things that I wanted to dig into there. One, the first one was just another anecdote, this time, apparently from the Mars Climate Orbiter, where, uh, so this was a story that I only recently came across. So, so I have to do some more digging to make sure it's actually true, but let's just treat it as an anecdote. But, in the Mars Climate Orbiter, The team members were very geographically diverse. They were in Denver, and Pasadena. They were trying to work on getting the spacecraft to push itself into orbit. The members of the team were using different measurements, so they were using imperial and metric measurements. Um, and so they actually, they actually failed to achieve that because they hadn't established something relatively simple. And when I, when I heard that example, it reminded me of, um, the point that you had made before about how air traffic control and in aviation they use feet and knots and meters differently, right?

Andrew Maclaren: 41:34

The simple one is about separation. So aviation, vertical separation versus horizontal separation. So you will always hear vertical separation in feet, and you will always hear horizontal separation in kilometers. And that means that, you know, if, uh, if you're getting a very urgent message about an oncoming aircraft, and they tell you that, you know, they're, you're on course for a collision, they are only. 60 kilometers away from you or 600 kilometers, whatever it might be, you know that they're, they're on your vector the same vertical separation. So you need to increase your vertical separation. So you need to climb or, or, uh, or dive, or maybe descend should be, you should be a bit calmer about it. But, um, that's the point is that they contained within. The, the message is a clear shared understanding of where you are.

Mark Ridley: 42:31

shared understanding, a

Andrew Maclaren: 42:32

and yeah,

Mark Ridley: 42:33

that's been established.

Andrew Maclaren: 42:37

I think we've, we've covered a lot already. Um, we knew that we were going to have a lot to say on this subject. I mean, this is so important to contemporary work is, you know, getting the art of virtual team working. Right. I think we've established kind of where it's come from the context. Um, the fact that it's the fact that it's still a. A hot topic, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's the central subject within this recent announcement from Amazon, which is really interesting. what we should do is we'll leave it there and then let's pick back up and do a bit more of a deep dive. In the next episode into, I think, communication surprise surprise. I want to talk about communication, but a little bit more discussion on communication and protocols, things like this. Um, and then we'll round out with some recommendations. You know what? If you're listening to this, you work in an organization, virtual teamwork is part of your daily life. What are the highlights that we think people need to be aware of how can they maximize the benefits and avoid the avoid the traps that exist within virtual team working