The key ideas

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

Daniel Coyle, 2018

In a contest to build a tower from spaghetti and a marshmallow, kindergarteners beat business-school students. Journalist Daniel Coyle spent several years observing special forces, Pixar, a basketball team, and restaurants to understand what makes a group strong. His answer: safety, vulnerability, and purpose, built from small details.

Who it is for

For managers, coaches, teachers, parents, and anyone who works in a team and wants to understand why some groups work smoothly together and others do not.

Vulnerability does not come after trust; it precedes it.

About the book

Four people, twenty sticks of uncooked spaghetti, a meter of tape, a meter of string, and one marshmallow. The task is to build the tallest tower, with the marshmallow on top. Some teams consisted of business-school students, others of kindergarteners. The children won by a wide margin.

Why can a group of intelligent adults perform worse than a group of five-year-olds? Journalist Daniel Coyle spent several years observing strong groups: special forces, a basketball team, Pixar, and restaurants. He concludes that three skills create a strong culture: building safety, sharing vulnerability, and establishing purpose.

An important qualification. This is a journalist’s book: stories of successful groups plus research he selected. The stories explain the mechanism well but do not prove it. And almost all the book’s subjects are groups that have already succeeded.

Idea 1. The spaghetti tower

Designer and engineer Peter Skillman ran this contest. According to figures Coyle cites, the kindergarteners’ towers averaged 26 inches, about 66 centimeters. The business-school students’ towers were less than 10 inches, about 25 centimeters.

In the author’s description, the students were busy with something else: who was in charge, whether they could criticize another person’s idea, and what the rules were. The children simply grabbed materials, tried things, knocked them over, and tried again.

Coyle has a name for what occupied the adults: status management. In his view, it can consume energy that could have gone into the task.

In a new job, you spend the first weeks figuring out whom you can interrupt in a team meeting. The work itself moves slowly.

Some of a group’s energy may go into figuring out who is who rather than the task. The less uncertainty there is about that, the more attention remains for the work.

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About the author

Daniel Coyle is an American journalist and author of books about talent and teams, including The Talent Code. With cyclist Tyler Hamilton, he wrote The Secret Race.

All books by this author: Daniel Coyle

Terms from the book

  • Braintrust
  • Belonging cues: Coyle’s term for small actions, such as attention, eye contact, taking turns in conversation, and interest in a person, that may signal that someone belongs and is safe here. The author’s concept rather than a strict scientific metric.
  • Status management: The author’s expression for the effort group members spend figuring out who is in charge and what they can say, instead of working on the task itself.
  • Vulnerability loop: An exchange of signals described by Jeff Polzer: one person reveals a weakness or mistake, another responds with a similar signal, and trust between them may grow.
  • Magical feedback: A label Coyle cites for feedback accompanied by a phrase expressing high expectations and belief in a student. The result of one study, rather than a universally effective technique.

All terms

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