B (5:54)
If I thought I was using A pound of butter. And you thought we were using a kilogram of butter. That's about 2.2 pounds of butter. Your cake would end up tasting pretty gross. Now before we get too judgy about this, it sounds pretty silly. We do this all the time. We walk into meetings, you know, if we get lucky, there's that annoying, overly conscientious person who says things like, before we get started, everyone, let's level set and talk about, you know, whether there's ink in the printer at the newspaper we work or you know, whatever obvious thing they want to get on the same page with. And we usually roll our eyes at this person and we tell them to stop talking because we want the meeting to end soon and we want to get on to the important stuff. And we say things like, we've done this a million times, do we really need to cover that kind of thing? And the answer is yes, we should have that 20 second conversation so that our probe does not explode when it hits the atmosphere. But we often do not do this. Now the good news is this is NASA. There is no single point of failure. And so just because you miscalculate your flight path doesn't mean the whole mission is going to actually end in just a complete failure. And so people started noticing things were wrong. And the good news is you can actually recalculate a flight path. So people started bringing this up in various meetings and they even had a conference about it. But then there was a big mistake that happened. Communication mishap number two. The people holding that critical information were ignored for a very dumb reason that I'm pretty sure everyone in this room can recognize. They did not fill out the right form. Now all of us know that if you send a important message over slack and everybody was on email or over email and everybody was on Slack, we just miss that critical information. But we don't think that a failure to fill out the right form is going to be the difference between our mission to Mars failing and succeeding. We think that critical information will eventually make its way to, to the important people at the top. But often this is not the case. We get very married to our processes and these can actually be our Achilles heel in really important group decision making context. Now things didn't end here. There were actually some last ditch efforts to save this mission that didn't go so well. Someone got on the phone with another person, they sounded urgent about fixing it, but that person didn't actually recognize urgency. I think the quote was something around like they didn't sound anxious enough, and so they weren't taken seriously. So this miscommunication also worked around nonverbal behaviors, tone of voice, and so on and so forth. So there's lots of ways in which this mission went awry. But I've been studying miscommunication for over 20 years now, and I have to say that what actually happened at NASA is much more the norm than the exception. That even when people are making really critical decisions, they often fall flat on their faces, and often for these very simple reasons. And this is the case even when we give people every piece of information they need to make the right choice. So now I want to talk about a very classic experiment done in social science. So imagine that you're sitting in a room with these people and your job is simple. It's to hire the best job candidate among a list of four. And we give you all the information you need. Everyone is handed a piece of paper with a bunch of information about all of those job candidates. Information like applicant A is disorganized. Applicant B has strong leadership skills. Applicant C has won many cake baking awards. A lot of this information is what we're going to call overlapping information or shared information. Everybody has it. But here's the trick. One special member of this team has what's called unique information, special information about applicants C that only they have. And here's how this task goes. If this person does not share that unique information, applicant C will come across as the worst job candidate. If they do share this unique information, Applicant C is going to come across as the best applicant. So just to be clear, the only thing that needs to happen for this team to make the right choice is that this special person shares the information about applicancy, the team hears, it incorporates into their decision making, and they indeed pick the right person. Now, much like the real world, people don't know exactly which pieces of information everyone else has. They just know some is overlapping and some is not. This is called the hidden profile task. It is a very tried and true task. And researchers from the University of Southern California did a huge analysis over 40 years of this and found that most of the time, teams make the wrong choice. By and large, small teams, big teams, huge teams, tiny teams, teams, online teams in person, teams in which the person who is holding that unique information is an expert. Doesn't matter. And I have actually found in my own research of about 370 teams, 20% unanimously picked applicants. See? So the question is, what's going on here? Well, the obvious explanation and one that we often see is that teams focus on that shared information the most. They kind of throw around the stuff that they all know. They focus very little on that critical information about applicancy that only one person knows. And so what we learned is these critical pieces of information are incredibly fragile. They're like little pieces of information in the wind that can kind of blow away. And because of this, we lose this information, but we can't actually tell that our interactions with one another aren't going as well as we think they are. And critically, because in these interactions, everyone is motivated to make the right decision. No one person is trying to bulldoze or push their person through. These team interactions actually feel good. And so we can be communicating terribly and not know it, because the red flags that we usually look for, those interruptions and so on and so forth, simply aren't there, making this type of poor communication just really clever. And underneath the surface of what's going on in these team interactions, now in this study, people are all speaking the same language quite literally. But also social scientists are very good about holding things constant. That could potentially explain this effect, use of jargon, use of different types of cultural languages, and so on and so forth. But in the real world, that is not how we talk. We show up to these interactions using all kinds of different languages. And I don't mean that literally. I mean the local languages that we often develop in our communities, in our friend groups, in our workplaces, acronyms, synonyms, turns of phrases that we use all the time.
