- A really exciting day,
I don't know if all of
you are as excited to hear
all the talks as I was,
but there's been an amazing
amount of information
shared that's been really great.
So just to give you a
little bit more context,
I got into the area of team
science and collaboration,
about maybe 11, 12, 13 years ago.
One of my roles when I came to
the National Cancer Institute
in an administrative
capacity was to help bring
scientists together across
different disciplines.
And it was really there
that I started to learn
about collaboration team science,
but also became very
interested in trying to
understand what contributed to
successful team functioning.
What are those elements
that brought teams together,
kept them together, and what were the
things that didn't, that got in the way?
So what I'm gonna do is
give you a little bit of
sort of an introduction to
what I've learned over time.
A little bit of introduction
to something we call the
field guide as a document
that I've developed with
some colleagues, and I will
show you that at the end,
but a lot of my content comes from that.
I also thought it might
be helpful to share with
you my perspective from
having been very involved in
helping planning in the context of teams,
what I would describe as
consulting for teams and
organizations that are
interested in shifting their
cultures to a more collaborative culture.
Working with teams where
trust has dissolved,
where they've gone off
the rails and they've
wanted to get things back on track.
So maybe a little bit
differently than some of
the people that you've
heard about, from today,
I really consider myself a
practitioner in team science.
Kind of roll up my
sleeves, work with teams,
really try to understand
what contributes like
I said to successful team functioning.
And those are some of the things that I'm
going to try to talk through today.
So, why don't we just launch in,
I'm not giving you a lot
of background because
you already have had
brilliant background from
the previous speakers, and so
we'll just sort of dive in.
So I thought one of the things
you might find interesting,
or I thought I could bring
to you is that you know in
the work I've done I've
had the opportunity
to be a quote unquote team science expert,
which is never where I thought I
would be in my career trajectory.
But it's been really interesting,
and it's been really fun,
both from an individual perspective,
the team perspective, and the
organizational perspective,
to really think about what contributes to
teams functioning the best within the
context of their organizations.
And so I thought it might be helpful for
you to hear from me, if
I'm at an organization and
I'm trying to understand
how well they're doing in
the arena of team science,
how is their culture?
Are they very focused in team science,
are they talking the talk,
are they just talking,
or are they really walking the walk?
And if from looking at a proposal,
a grant proposal for example,
what are the types of
things that I look for
in that proposal that
conveys to me that the
team is really focused on
team science and collaboration,
that they've really thought about this,
they're not just talking about it,
they're not just using
the words cause they think
it'll be perfect for the reviewers,
and so I want to help
you understand that if
I'm sitting on one of these review panels,
I know if you're authentic or not,
and that might be hard to
believe, but it's true.
(laughs)
So, just some of the elements
that if you look at the slide,
like what am I looking for
if I'm on a review panel,
or what's being asked of me.
So, how is the team going about
identifying the team members?
How are they building, forming,
and sustaining the team?
How are they planning to lead the team?
What type of research is being done?
How are they gonna engage the community?
Are they really gonna
engage the community,
or are they just gonna go
out and talk to a few people?
What about communicating,
everything from the
logistics to the actual
process of communicating,
as well as managing the team.
So writing a research proposal with
a team science component,
is not a whole lot
different than writing a
research proposal without
one, in that you have to
have some really
compelling science, right?
You've got to have a challenge,
a scientific challenge,
and we've talked a lot about
that today, this morning.
We heard some really neat
examples of things that
people are doing and how
they get their heads around
some of these complex problems.
So adding the team
science component piece,
the team, you might call
it a management piece,
or a collaborative piece,
how is it that you are
going to convey to the
reviewers that the work that
you've actually put into forming the team,
how the team's gonna work together,
what's the advantage that
these different perspectives
that you've brought together?
What are they gonna bring
to the research project?
We talked, I mentioned
communication already,
how are disagreements gonna be handled?
You are going to disagree,
I can guarantee it.
It's not that disagreements bad,
you just wanna have a
plan for how to manage it.
How are things gonna be shared?
If you're on a team and
somebody decides they don't
wanna share their data with you,
until they're ready to present it to you,
two days before something else is due,
that could be really problematic.
And, what's your
philosophy for training and
mentoring in an era of team science?
I put a little note at the bottom
that all of these things together,
can come together to form
what you might call a
collaboration plan or a
collaboration agreement.
So there are things that
are gonna benefit you,
they're gonna benefit the team,
and they're gonna benefit
people beyond that as well.
So what I'd like to do,
is I'm gonna kind of
took those initial
things that I showed you,
and I'm gonna sorta broke them down
into little bit more specifics.
So thinking about team
member identification,
so what are the scientific
backgrounds and expertise?
What are the interests,
the motivations and
how does that fit in the context
of the project as a whole?
When I worked with my
collaborators to try to
understand what were the
elements that contributed to
successful team functioning,
we interviewed five
different teams in their entirety,
so not just the leaders,
but every participant on
the team, and we studied three teams that
we would describe as very successful.
So in my context, it was
from basic science all the
way to the clinical setting
through FDA approval.
To one team that failed,
they had just sort of a
miserable failure, and
it just didn't work,
and they kind of had to disband,
and one that was in the
process of just being formed.
And using all of this
information and all the
data that we collected
from the interviews,
we were really able to identify what
we considered some pivotal elements.
I'm gonna talk about a few of those and
I think among the most
important fall under the
team building and management,
so I'm gonna talk about
trust, setting expectations,
and a little bit about team development.
And then under effective
leadership, I'm gonna talk a
little bit about leadership,
and also about shared vision.
The collaboration plan falls under sort of
an area of setting expectations,
so we'll talk about that as well.
So just to hit some of the
things on the right side,
thinking about the
disciplinary backgrounds,
I talked about authenticity already and
communication skills, I think
I'll jump to the next slide.
So what I thought might be fun to do is to
put together a couple
of scenarios for you.
So you're now reviewing a grant,
you're looking at the things that the
proposers putting
forward, and this is how,
there are three different
scenarios on the next slide of
how the person making the proposal is
describing the team, okay?
How they're gonna form the team.
The first one says, "Once I am
funded, I will form the team.
I will be the leader.
I will outline the goals and objectives,
and will give the team
explicit directions in
order to successfully achieve the
goals and objectives of this project."
Okay.
A little bit of giggling, yeah?
(laughter)
Have I really seen stuff like this?
Oh yeah.
B) "The team is well established.
We've been working together for years
and are very comfortable together."
Okay, so-so.
A few nods.
C) I have reached beyond
my comfort zone and
identified individuals whoa are also
interested in this complex problem.
They represent a variety
of disciplines ranging from
close to the science, to expertise in the
technological methods, to
community level responsibilities."
Okay?
So this just gives you a
little bit of a sense of the
breadth of things that I have
seen, just as an example.
And you might be able to
make a pretty good guess as
to which one I was most intrigued by.
A.
No.
(laughter)
So the point of this next slide is just to
really convey to you that
you know, team science,
is all about bringing
people together, right?
Bringing them all
together around a project.
So that's what really sits
in the center, the project.
The complex science.
And what I want to try
to convince you of in
the next few minutes that
I'm speaking is that if
you are not also tending to the vision,
trust, the institution,
communication, power dynamics,
sharing credit and resources,
and setting expectations,
that these are some of the things that are
going to cause the team to derail.
These are some of the
things where instead of
focusing on your science,
you're gonna be ending up
helping people focus on
their personnel issues,
correcting something that didn't happen,
negotiating or arbitrating difficulties in
whether someone should be
sharing a reagent or their data,
and that's not really where you
want to be spending your time.
The first element that
I'm gonna talk about is
something that I think is
probably very comfortable for
most people, and that is
developing the shared vision.
I mean if you think
about this part, this is
very compatible with
the research proposal.
So what is the vision
of your research, right?
So if you're on an elevator
and you are going up,
you know we talked about this
earlier, you're going up.
What's your elevator ride speech?
What are you going to
tell that person with a
million dollars in their pocket that
you're going to do, that you can do,
you only have thirty
seconds, but what is that?
What type of impact are you gonna have?
That's one reason to be able to say your
vision clearly and
succinctly, is that captivates
the person that you're talking to,
you want to have some sort of a hook.
The other reason your vision
needs to be compelling,
is that that's the reason
people will join you,
that's the reason people are
gonna follow you, it's your vision.
If you have something that
they can't imagine not
being a part of, they're
gonna wanna be with you.
And so you have to figure
out how to go there,
and sometimes you have
to worry about figuring
out how to get there together.
So one of the things that we learned when
we were interviewing
these different teams,
the ones that were very successful and
the ones that weren't,
is that, and I think,
I found this to be very intriguing,
so in those teams that
were very successful,
everybody could describe the
grand vision of the project.
It didn't matter who we talked to.
We could talk to the administrator,
we could talk to the summer student,
we could talk to the animal handler,
as well as the PI's, and they would be
able to articulate the
vision for the project.
The other thing they were able to
do was articulate their vision for
their component part of the project.
So not only did they
understand the big picture,
but they understood
what they were doing in
the context of the big picture.
Now the more senior we got, the more the
senior folks had a sense of all the
different components, and
the more junior we went,
you know they knew their
stuff, and not as clear on
the things that are happening beyond them.
But I think you get the idea,
that people really have spent
a lot of time talking about
this vision, revisiting the
vision, correcting it,
adjusting it as you go.
Sort of like you have to adjust the
trajectory of the airplane
from D.C. to San Francisco.
If you're a degree off you
might not make it there, right?
So you kinda have to
keep adjusting as you go.
The other thing that we
learned through doing
this research, is that building trust,
developing trust is
really really critical.
And you know, I think when I
used to say this in groups,
maybe seven or eight years
ago, people would kind of
roll their eyes at me, we knew that
trust was really important.
I think sometimes people
say, this is pretty
fluffy stuff Michelle, it's kind of
hard to get your hands around.
But after we published the field guide,
and after I was being
asked to work with teams
or institutions, to work with their folks.
What I really saw is that
when things weren't working,
it's because that foundation
of trust either had
started to crumble or wasn't fully formed.
And so it really had a lot of impact.
So I'm gonna actually talk to
you about trust a little bit.
I think the other thing
that surprised me a
little bit about trust, again,
on colleges by training,
basic biology, you could spend your
whole career studying trust.
There is a phenomenal
amount of literature.
And so it's actually kind
of an interesting place
to spend some time and learn about.
So I'm gonna talk to you
about three different types
of trust that I've learned about,
that I think have been really helpful to
share in the scientific setting.
So one's called calculus based trust.
So calculus based trust is built on the
calculations of the relative rewards for
trusting or losses for not trusting.
So what does this mean?
This means when you're
driving in the street,
you have to trust the other
people who are driving?
Right?
Just like they have to trust you.
Another example of this
is, so my background,
as I said, so lab scientist.
So one example is standard
operating procedures in the lab.
One of our standard
operating procedures was a
very simple one, but
when people violated it,
people got really really upset.
So here's the scenario.
I go, I mix up a solution of
using the sodium chloride,
I use the last of the
reagent, I put the top back on
the bottle, and now what am
I supposed to do with it?
Replace it, right?
Right.
And then there was always that person in
the lab who just put it
back on the shelf, right?
And so they do it the first time,
you give them a pass, you
explain the rule, right?
But the next time, if they
do it again, your trust in
them starts to, starts to
I guess dissolve, right?
And if they keep doing
it, and keep doing it
that can create a real tension in the lab.
So if you think about the
context and think about the
value of just standard
operating procedures in the
context of your team, in the
context of your operations.
It's a nice scaffold for developing trust,
and I'll come back to this in a moment.
The other type of trust is
called confidence based trust,
and confidence based
trust, my best example is
again another lab
example, where there was a
guy who worked down the hall from me,
who I described as having golden hands.
If I couldn't get an assay to work,
if I couldn't get a procedure to work,
I'd go down and I'd ask
him if he would help me.
I didn't know him very well, but I knew he
was super super competent, and he was
super super generous with his time.
And so he'd usually in a couple of hours
have me on my way and it would be working.
So that's competence based trust.
You don't really need to know somebody,
but that competence is
there and you trust that.
The last type of trust is
called identity based trust,
and this is the type of
trust that we tend to
preserve for those that
we care most deeply about.
Our partners, our loved
ones, our family members,
our best friends, sometimes this can be
established in the work
setting, but not always.
So just giving you the sum, these three
different types of trust, gives you a
little bit of a sense
of the different ways in
which trust can be established in the
work setting, in the research setting.
The other thing that I
learned about trust was
that people generally fall into two camps.
They fall into high trust
camp, or a low trust camp.
And so this is the scenario:
you and I just met,
we start chatting, we start
thinking oh we actually maybe
we could start working together
and start a collaboration.
Do you start with me high
trust, like you're going to
trust me right out of the
box, or are you going to start
low trust, and I'm gonna
have to prove myself to you.
So who in this room
would start high trust?
Low trust?
Come on, low trust?
(laughter)
You know, it's about fifty-fifty in the
population, it's about fifty-fifty.
And this graph just tries to depict that,
if I'm starting high trust with you,
I'm looking for you to
sustain that trust, right?
But if I'm starting low
trust I'm looking for
you to build that trust with me.
And so again, this is just again,
we've heard a lot about the
value of reflection today,
so if you were to think for a few minutes,
if I'm starting a
collaboration with somebody,
very rarely do I walk up to somebody and
say hi I'm Michelle, I'm high trust.
Right?
You know?
(laughter)
So you're gonna have to
kind of figure it out.
But if you're low trust, and
I'm starting out high trust,
what does that mean for
what we're doing together?
And so again, it's something
good to kind of think about,
especially as you start
bringing your team together.
Kind of gives you a sense of how you can
start working together most effectively.
Setting expectations is
another characteristic of
the things that really
strong leaders do well.
So what about roles, what
about responsibilities,
who's gonna do what,
how are you gonna do it,
when are we gonna meet, all
of those little details.
And so setting expectations
is a great example of
the kind of establishing
that calculus based trust.
It's a great example of
saying "these are our rules,
this is how we're gonna work together",
it gives everybody a
starting point, and it gives
everybody a foundation for
a similar starting point.
So I'm just gonna share
with you three examples of
types of tools you can use
for setting expectations.
All three of these we
have templates in the
back of the field guide,
and I will show you a
picture of the field guide
at the end, which you can
access online as a PDF,
it's freely available.
Oh and I think it's
referenced in the book too.
So one of 'em is a
collaborative agreement,
Cara referred to this as a
prenuptial agreement earlier.
The reason that my collaborator
Howard Gadlin used to
call it a prenuptial agreement was that he
always said there were no two people more
foolish than people falling in love than
two people starting a collaboration.
(laughter)
And so really the collaborative agreement,
we provide a number of
questions that people can
use to answer, that once
answered can really provide
the foundation for a
collaborative agreement.
The welcome letter is another tool.
And there's this guy at the
NIH, his name is Rich Moriah,
he works in the Child Health Institute,
and before anyone can start in his lab,
he hands them an eight page letter.
In that letter, yes eight pages.
In that letter, he outlines
what he expects of the student,
or the trainee, what
they can expect of him,
and how he expects that
they'll be working together.
So I don't think a page really has to be
eight pages in length,
but what that letter
really does is it sets
very clear expectations,
and we actually took that letter,
and have taken it in a
number of situations when
we've been working with people and teams,
and we've suggested to
them that either as a team,
or the leader of the team
write a collaborative,
or write a welcome letter, to help
really set the expectations for the team.
And it has really helped people a lot.
So it's another way of
just laying things out.
The last one is institutional agreements.
And so, one way to think about an
institutional agreement, is
that challenge that we've
been talking about in terms
of recognition and reward.
Right, so if you're bringing
somebody on to the team,
and you know they're
going to be going up for
tenure eventually, is it
possible to establish an
agreement with the
institution where you state
outright that this individual
has been recruited to
participate in team
science, so part of the
recognition and review
process should include
looking at that as a
component of what they do.
So again, three different ways of thinking
about expectations, or
setting expectations.
The next slide should be coming up,
there we go, don't go away.
Okay, so this is the
model of team development,
and I thought this would be
helpful to share with you,
whoops, I knew it was going to do that.
I thought this would be
helpful to share with you
because teams go through
predictable phases as
they are brought together and
as they are moving towards
becoming what I would call
a well functioning machine.
The cool thing about these
different stages that
were introduced by Bruce
Tuckman in the 1960s is
that they rhyme, so you'll
remember them later today.
So there's forming, storming,
norming, performing,
and Bruce Tuckman came at these in part by
studying research teams but he also
studied other teams as well.
So the forming stage
is just like it sounds.
The team comes together.
The storming phase is
a lot like it sounds.
This is where the differences
of the team among the
different team members
become very obvious to
people and people start
feeling a little threatened,
they feel a little uncomfortable,
they might feel like
this is my turf, not your
turf, don't get too close,
no I'm not gonna share my
data, I'm in a bad mood,
leave me alone, and so
it's really the team has
not figured out quite
how to work together.
We've heard a couple of things today.
So one of the things
that we've heard about is
the extent of diversity in
the context of the team.
With more diversity there's
gonna be more storming.
Regardless of the type of
diversity, because you know
people will just be,
have more differences,
be at odds about different
aspects of whether it
the work or personality styles,
or dimensions of their background.
And what we tend to do
is, especially when we
just meet people, we tend not
to encourage disagreements
or conflict, we tend to
try to smooth things over,
to create harmony, right?
And so what ends up happening is we end up
not having those difficult
conversations that we
really need to have if we
want to get through the
storming period, does that
make sense to everybody?
Yeah.
So in order to get to the norming stage,
you have to go through storming,
you can't skip storming.
So if you just try to
smooth everything over in
the storming phase, it's going
to come back and haunt you.
So again you get through
the storming phase,
and get into norming.
And norming is where
everything starts to gel.
It's when the trust really starts to form,
when the norms of the
group are established,
where everybody is feeling
more comfortable together,
roles and responsibilities are clarified.
You're doing better.
And then that can get you
into the performing stage,
and that's sort of like
the well oiled machine.
So I've already mentioned
that storming is not optional
The other thing about this
cycle is that if you bring in
new team members, or you have
some people leave the team,
it's going to go through
another cycle of storming.
Might not be as dramatic as the initial,
but it'll go through again.
And I think maybe it's nice to just,
maybe I can point out briefly,
is that I've worked with teams before that
are kind of stuck in the storming phase,
it's hard to get through
the storming phase if
you don't really understand
what's happening,
and so after introducing
this model to them
I've had in a couple of
groups somebody will go
"Oh! We're storming!",
and people go, "Oh yeah, we're storming."
And all of a sudden it's okay, and it's
okay to have those more
difficult conversations.
So just like even having
a vocabulary word for
it gives you permission to experience it.
And now you have a new vocabulary word.
So the other dimension of
collaboration that became
really clear through the
conversations that we've had
with people, is that collaboration
also introduced threats.
So really what we're
asking people to do is
to move from a self identity
to a group identity.
Or we're asking them to move from
independence to interdependence.
And so whereas they're used
to having single status,
they're used to having power,
making their own decisions,
they're used to having
autonomy, now they have to
share these things, they
have to interact with
somebody else, there's shared power,
we're gonna be making decisions together,
we're gonna be deciding how resources are
put towards the project together.
And this can be really
challenging for some people,
not everybody, but especially
maybe your world is
different than mine, but
in my world we've got a
lot of scientists who
have pretty big egos.
And so it can be really
hard to move out of that
realm where you've been
trained as an individual,
and your whole life has
been focused on having
individual accomplishment
and now trying to
move to something that's broader.
So this is just a quote that
kind of gets to that so,
"The greater the proportion
of experts a team had,
the more likely it was to disintegrate
into nonproductive conflict or stalemate."
And it just kind of gets into the thing,
if you bring a whole bunch
of experts together who
are really really smart,
you've obviously brought
them together for a reason,
and so if people kind of
get stuck in their expertise,
that makes it challenging.
So we heard some really
great and really eloquent
articulations this morning
about growth mindset, right?
So this is where growth mindset
becomes really really important.
And I'm gonna actually touch on
that in a few minutes as well.
So what about diversity?
We've heard a lot about diversity already,
I'm just gonna touch on a few things,
because I think it's
valuable to think about.
So team science is an
exercise in diversity.
You have different perspectives,
varied experiences,
range of expertise,
you're gonna ask people to
challenge methodologies and
approaches, you're gonna
ask them to question
interpretations and results.
So we think about, what you
really want to achieve is
an environment where you can
have productive collision.
So what does this mean?
It means, well look at
that, Mac to PC kind of
messed up the words, but you get the idea.
You know you really want to contain the
effective and personal conflict, right?
So that's really not where you wanna go,
you do wanna have
disagreement, or be able to
talk very openly about the
science, and the ideas.
If you don't think it's a good idea,
or if it's the result
you're not so sure about
that interpretation, you
need to be able to have
those conversations, cause those are the
conversations that move
the science forward.
Those are the conversations
that move the ideas forward.
You can't have them.
But if people start getting personal,
that's where things will start to devolve.
So we've heard a little bit
about this already today,
so I'm not gonna spend a long time on it.
There's a nice study
done by Hong and Page a
number of years ago where
they were really able to
show that a diverse group
of people is much more
effective at solving problems
than a homogenous group.
And then they basically
did a random selection of
intelligent participants
from a diverse group and
they also took the best
performers and they had them,
and they compared them, and
basically the bottom line was
is that the people chosen
randomly outperform the
people who were chosen as experts.
So the bottom line if
you wanna think about it
this way, is a team of experts does not
necessarily equal an expert team.
A lot of people have
heard about this in the
context of the moneyball
examples as well, right?
It's the same type of idea.
The other thing that we've heard about a
little bit, is that more
women, smarter teams.
So this is a quote from a
paper by Woolley and Malone,
so, "there's little correlation between a
group's collective intelligence and
the IQs of its individual members.
But if a group includes more women,
it's collective intelligence rises."
And so we heard a little bit earlier about
impact factors in including women as well.
I just thought I'd throw this up,
because I thought this was fascinating,
if you were watching the
news over the weekend,
you saw that California
was the first state
to mandate female board directors.
So I thought this was
kind of interesting in
the context of this,
and so I think they've
jumped on board, and think
that diversity is important.
Of course this is highly controversial,
so just check your Twitter feeds and
you'll see the controversy behind this.
But I thought it'd be good to mention.
And we've also that mixed
gender scientific teams
produce more, higher impact research,
and so I won't go into this in detail.
What I thought I would do
is, I wanna show you a video,
that I think will reinforce
very nicely some of
the stuff that you've already heard today,
around inclusion and diversity.
Am I going to Chrome?
Thank you.
- This is using a video tracking software.
- All right.
- Explain.
- My coworker Wanda and I are sitting in
front of an HP Media Smart Computer.
State of the art computer,
wouldn't you say?
- I'd say.
- We're using the face tracking software,
so it's supposed to follow
me as I move, I'm black.
I think my blackness is interfering with
the computers ability to follow me.
(laughter)
As you can see, I do this,
no following, not really following.
I'm back up, I get really really close to
try to let the camera
recognize me, not happenin'.
Now, my white coworker Wanda is
about to slide in the frame, you
immediately see what I'm talking about.
Wanda, if you would please?
- Sure.
- Now, as you can see, the camera is
panning to show Wanda's face,
it's following her around,
but as soon as my
blackness enters the frame,
which I'll sneak into the frame,
I'm sneaking in, I'm
sneaking in, I'm in there...
- That's it.
- And there we go, it stops.
(laughter)
- My hands are here, Wanda please get
back in the frame, get back in.
As soon as white Wanda appears,
(laughter)
- The camera moves.
Black Desi gets in there, uh nope!
No face recognition anymore buddy!
(laughter)
- I'm going on record, and I'm saying it,
Hewlett Packard computers
are racist, I said it.
- So, it may be obvious why
I wanted to show this to you.
But I think we've talked a lot about the
importance of diversity inclusion,
we've talked about the importance of
different perspectives,
and I think one of the
things that we've also
talked about today is
who's on my team, do I have
the right people on my team?
So one of the things that I
would always challenge you
to do is take some time
to reflect and step back
and say are we missing anybody?
Is there a perspective
that we don't have on
the team that really needs to be included?
It won't surprise you if I tell
you that this video went viral.
That there was this very
complex reaction from
Hewlett Packard, it was
very full of excuses,
I think is the best way to describe it,
if you wanna go unpack this,
there's a lot of stuff on
the web, and there's interesting videos.
The bottom line is they ultimately did
fix the problem, so that was good.
Let's see, so let's talk about
communication a little bit.
So, I'm watching my time...
So I think what we're gonna do,
I'm gonna talk a little bit
about communicating effectively,
I'm not gonna, I think one
of the elements that you've
heard is the importance of how do
I communicate across different languages?
If we bring different
disciplines together,
we're not gonna understand
each other a priori,
and we really might have to do some,
I think we heard some you know,
new discipline 101 type of
training so that we better
understand each other.
Which, can be very effective.
So, we've talked a lot
about the growth mindset,
so I'm gonna build on that a little bit.
So I was recently exposed to the work
of Roger Schwarz and associates.
Where I was, I think what
intrigued me most about
his work is that it goes
beyond suggesting that
we need to learn new skills
or employ new behaviors.
And I think some of the things that I talk
about kind of are in that vein.
Well if we behave like this, or if we
do this, or remember to build trust.
What he really says is
that we can do those
things much more effortlessly and
efficiently if we really
shift our mindsets.
If we really make this an
authentic component of who we are.
So he talks about needing to have
values of being transparent,
and being curious,
informed choice,
accountability, and compassion.
And then making the following
types of assumptions that
are again, what he describes
as mutual learning.
That I have information,
and so do other people.
Each of us sees things others don't
People may disagree with
me and have pure motives.
Actually, ever since I've
learned about this work that's
the one I keep saying when
I'm in meetings and the
person across from me is
saying something that I just
cannot believe that they're
saying, and I pull myself
back and I say, "Remember,
they have very pure motives,
they care about this as much as you do."
So really to kind of make sure that we're
doing the listening we need to do.
Differences are
opportunities for learning,
and I may be contributing to the problem.
So that's another one, as it's
very easy for me to think,
"well I'm right, I know what's
going on", but sometimes
maybe the way I'm behaving
could be having impact as well.
So if you're interested
in this he's written a
couple of books, one
focused on smarter teams.
So I have a riddle for
you, not really, but,
so what do gift giving and
team science have in common?
So I don't know that there's
an easy answer to this,
but I wanted to try to tee
this up with a bunch of
boxes and ribbons, because
I think we've really talked
about this as part today
is that part of the
success in the work
that you do in teams is
this opportunity or ability to brainstorm.
And so this goes back
to the growth mindset as
well and the ability to
really work with each other.
If we can think about ideas as gifts,
each others ideas as gifts,
just think about when
somebody gives you and idea
they're giving you a present.
A big beautiful blue box
with a nice green ribbon.
Alright?
And so that's a present for you.
So what can you do with that gift?
What can you do with that idea?
Well, I'll give you some
examples of things we
tend to do with those
presents that we get.
Sometimes we say, "Oh, that's a bad idea."
Right?
We do, don't we?
Sometimes we say, "Oh, how
are you gonna do that?"
Sometimes we say "Sure," or
"that's interesting, but"
And the buts just a way
to pick your foot up and
stamp on the box and turn
it into little bits, right?
"I have a better idea."
"It'll never work."
"The group won't like it."
Right?
And if you think you can
replace but with however,
just remember that however is a fancy but.
Okay?
How do you wanna respond
when somebody gives you,
what do you say when
somebody gives you a present?
- Thank you.
- Again, what?
- Thank you!
- Yeah!
So thank you!
"And, let me build on that idea."
So take that idea considered a present and
even if you don't agree
completely, add to it.
So I actually did this very
purposefully about a week ago,
where I had a group of people
in my office around the table,
and I really, I probably, I
came into the meeting with
a bad attitude, I thought I
knew what the answer should be.
And the first person spoke
up, and I was about to say,
"Oh, really?"
And I caught myself, I said,
"Just be quiet", I said,
"Oh, thank you very much,
does anybody else have ideas?"
And the other ideas
started coming out from the
other people around the table, and we
ended up at a place
that was so much better
than I came into the room with.
So that's just my own little vignette.
So thank you, and is the foundation
for creativity and innovation.
It requires trust.
It can help you bridge, like for me,
my not really very good idea to a
much better idea through
the piling on of ideas.
And it can help sustain,
maintain, and strengthen teams.
So if you really want to
give your team a challenge,
for one day tell them that they can't use
the word but and see what happens.
So I promised you a couple
of words on leadership.
When we did this work and we started to
learn what was contributing to
successful team functioning,
I think I was really hopeful that we
would find that there was
a formula for leadership.
You know?
X plus Y equals something something,
but there really wasn't.
However, there were characteristics of the
leaders that were pretty consistent among
those teams that were successful.
So the leaders were self-aware,
they had a lot of self-awareness,
they understood themselves pretty well.
And so that goes to the value of
those assessments that you get to do
every once in a while,
like the MBTI or the Disc,
but people who really take that on and
understand themselves, they
had really strong teams.
I think what that does
also, it establishes an
ability for you to
become more aware of the
things that are happening around you,
so self-awareness and
then other-awareness.
They had a shared
responsibility for success.
They were accountable
for issues and problems.
They were great mentors.
They knew how to manage up and across.
We heard a little bit
about safe environments,
to speak in, but creating a safe
environment where other people feel
comfortable speaking up is critical.
So just think back, if
you're working with somebody
and every time you open your
mouth they step on your box,
you're not gonna feel very safe and
you're not gonna want to
keep giving presents, right?
So you want to create an environment
where people are happy to keep giving
each other presents all the time.
They can have difficult conversations,
they can speak up, they challenge ideas,
they give their best everyday.
And I think one of the things that I
really appreciated in meeting a lot of
these leaders is that
I think sometimes when
people step into leadership positions,
they do not realize how closely
people are watching them.
That they are really watching them
to see what they're doing.
So what I'm trying to say is it doesn't
matter what you say,
it matters what you do.
Cause people are gonna
model your behavior.
If you say one thing
and do something else,
they're gonna watch what
you do and model that.
This is another quote,
so "The most productive,
innovative teams were led by people who
were both task and relationship-oriented.
"What's more, these leaders changed
their style during the project."
So what does this mean?
It means that the leaders
are very task oriented.
So that's great to be a project leader and
to be focused on the task.
The other thing that the
really good leaders were
able to do was have a relationship focus,
and those that didn't start
with a relationship focus,
actually built it over time, and
became more relationship oriented.
So back to the little bunch of elements
that I promised you I would talk through.
We talked through some of
them, but I want to end,
I think this is my last
sort of content slide.
So team composition, bios, and management.
So I did the thing like
I did earlier on with
three examples of things
that I've actually heard,
either in the context of reviews,
or evaluations of teams or team science.
So example number one: my postdoc
and I are the initial members.
Once funded, we'll identify
additional team members.
I've worked in teams before,
so this is on management and planning,
I've worked on teams
before, so I know what
to do and how to manage a team.
The example two is, here's the team,
and so we're thinking about how do we
include diverse perspectives, right?
So there's a chemical engineer,
two environmental engineers,
and two materials science engineers.
So I think we heard in
the course of today,
that really just having all engineers on
the team probably doesn't
really make it convergent.
It doesn't really go beyond into
other disciplines, that could be and
should be included in
the context of the team.
The example of how the
team would be managed is:
each of the PIs will head a team,
the teams will work toward
an aspect of the shared goal.
The PIs will meet once a month
to talk and compare notes.
So the third example is
there's a biomedical scientist,
a physicist, an economist,
an agricultural engineer,
president of the Organic
Farmers Association,
and near and dear to my
heart, I will admit it,
is the organizational team consultant.
And so description is: we worked over the
last year to develop our
vision for this project.
Moving forward here is the plan for how
we will communicate, share data/results,
resolve conflict, set expectations,
bring on new team members,
and engage the community.
So the reason that I said
that the organizational
team consultant is near
and dear to my heart,
and I think it goes a lot to what John was
saying earlier about some of the
role of the boundary spanners,
is that it can be a real coup for you and
for your projects to bring in somebody who
really understands how teams function.
You can find these people, maybe they are
some of the research professional,
research development professionals
in your organization.
Maybe they're in the psych department,
maybe they're in the soc department,
you might be able to find people
who have a real good sense,
they might be in the business school.
But having somebody who
you can go to and say,
"we're storming, we need somebody to
help us work this through."
Different dimensions of how to function as
a team could be really really beneficial.
So my last slide, this is a
picture of the field guide,
you can find it if you
google team science at NIH,
or put in this URL it will
redirect you somewhere else,
but it will get you to the
field guide landing page.
I'm indebted to Howard Gadlin,
Christophe Marchand, and
Samatha Levin-Finley,
who have been working
on the field guide for a
number of years, this
is the second iteration.
My email is there, you're
welcome to contact me.
So I want to thank you for your attention,
a lot of what I talked
about is in the field guide,
and of course I'm happy to chat with you.
My next responsibility
though is to tee up the
activity that you're
doing next, and I think,
did you all get handouts, yeah?
While I was talking?
So what we're gonna do now,
is we're gonna head into
an exercise, where we're gonna give you
about 20, 25 minutes to talk,
and what we would like...
Oh, I have to change the slide!
There we go.
[Male Voice] - can I just one...
[Michelle] - Oh please!
[Male Voice] - Something
went haywire with the
handout in terms of the
ordering of the questions.
They do have a certain logic to them,
so what Michelle just put up is the
most useful ordering, I
just wanted to note that.
(laughter)
[Michelle] - You can stay up here.
So what we would like you to do for the
next 20, 25 minutes, we'll
see how you're doing,
is to talk about these four areas.
We want you to talk about
your mission statement,
what is the mission of
your project, what is,
and I want to make sure
you understand this is
not for sharing, you don't
have to, you know it's
not gonna be sharing with the whole group,
but just to get you, give you a chance to
kind of talk through your
elevator ride speech.
What is the focus of what you're doing,
why you're doing it, how you're doing it?
Want you to talk about it's linkage
to social innovation or value.
Want you to talk about disciplinary
or sector categories of
team composition and
multi-level stakeholders.
And want you to talk about mechanisms to
facilitate effective transdisciplinarity.
And so, you guys all have this like
super awesome work agenda, and work book,
so if you look on page
eight, you'll start to
see that there's this area called
supplementary materials, team formation
and interdisciplinary team work.
You've got overviews and
practical steps to consider,
so you've got several pages of this.
And so if you feel like
you don't quite know
what you should be talking about,
or you want some additional prompts and
things to think about, there's a lot of
great content here that you
can use as a foundation.
Okay?
So, about 25 minutes,
we'll check in with you.
- Thank you.
So really do hate to cut that off,
because that's what it's all about,
but we did want to kind of collectively,
first of all, we have Michelle here,
who can maybe answer any questions that
arose from her talk,
but then we'd love for
you just to reflect on
what was just happening.
What was easy about it, what was hard,
what was frustrating, what was exciting...
Are you actually just
talking amongst your team,
or did you reach out to
other kinds of people?
Is anyone willing to just
offer a quick reflection on
this exercise you just went through,
or if anyone has a question for Michelle.
Anyone?
[Michelle] - All right.
[Female Voice] - Sorry, I
wasn't necessarily ready to
offer a reflection, but I wanted to
congratulate you on a
really interesting talk.
[Michelle] - Oh, thank you!
[Female Voice] - so I'm
just gonna kinda start maybe
from very very low down, so
readjust your expectations.
I'd really, really appreciate,
given the clarity of
your talk, if you could just
define interdisciplinary science?
Transformational science,
and convergent science?
Because I don't think I'm stupid,
but I still feel really confused about the
distinctions that people are
drawing between these terms.
[Michelle] - So are you
familiar with systems biology?
So there's, I don't know if it's a joke,
but people say if you
ask a hundred people to
define systems biology, you're gonna
get a hundred different answers.
And so, I think that's very
much sort of what this arena is.
So for me, it's difficult
to really identify a
difference between
transdiciplinary and convergent.
I think they're very similar, I think the
easiest way to think about
it is there's a continuum.
Right?
So there's a continuum
from unidisciplinary.
I'm focused on my own problem,
in my own lab, it's very very focused.
And then you can start moving something
that we might call multi-disciplinary.
Where you've got an expertise, I have one,
we have a set of samples,
you can do one thing with
the samples, I can do something else,
I don't fully understand what you do,
you don't fully understand what I do,
but we both have results, we can bring
them together, we can write a paper.
Okay, so multidisciplinary.
Interdisciplinary, we're
climbing the ladder now,
where it's more integrative,
where we're actually on
the cusp of maybe disciplines
and we're starting to
learn a little bit about each
other's worlds and languages.
We're starting to pull things
together a little bit more,
we might even have somebody from a
very different discipline join us.
So that the complexity is increasing,
the dimensions of what
we're doing is changing,
having those different perspectives is
changing how we're
thinking about the problem,
does that make sense?
So it's almost like we're
creating a new discipline almost.
You know, we're doing it differently.
It's not just separating the samples and
going away and coming back,
but we're actually
problem solving together.
Okay?
And then you get to transdiciplinary and
this is where it gets even
more complex because by
now you're starting to
involve social aspects,
legal aspects, societal aspects,
what's the community need,
what are their challenges,
you think about hurricanes
and recovery, and what about the poverty,
and the people who have and have not,
so that's what you're doing,
going across this continuum.
Does that help?
- It feels like it's
very much rooted in...
- Oh!
- Sorry, it feels like
it's very much rooted in
the educational structure that we have and
how we define the boundaries
that we have to start with.
And so it feels like if we just had the
boundaries in different places, I mean,
I'm just trying to understand if there's a
real distinction or if it's
about boundary drawing.
You know what, like drawing maps?
- Right.
I think it's very hard to
draw lines between them,
I think it's very difficult
to say this is this,
this is this, this is this,
it's really very, it's really a continuum.
And as I said, so I was
just at a conference this
last weekend where the same topic came up,
you know everybody was like what's the
difference between convergence
and transdiciplinary,
and you know, same problem
that we're having here.
So I think I would almost invite people to
not get too bogged down
in trying to make sure
they have the correct definition,
because the next conference you go to,
a group of people are probably gonna
define it somewhat differently.
And so, maybe if we can just accept the
fact that we go from unidisciplinary all
the way to transdiscipinary to convergent,
and just that the complexity,
the levels being evaluated
is all continuing
to increase, from molecules
to man to society.
- I would say that the most
important distinction is
going from interdisciplinary or multi to
either convergence or trans.
And a good example is, I
had a project 20 years ago,
and this is very typical of that time,
where I worked with an economist
focused on land use change,
a geomorphologist focused on how streams
were altered by geomorphic processes,
a hydrologist who looked at water flow,
and then my group looked at biodiversity.
We conceived of the project together,
but then the economist ran the
land use change projections,
which were fed into a
model that informed the
geomorphic change in the
channel, which linked to
the hydrology, which informed the ecology.
But we didn't create anything that was
sort of brand new, that
was emergent from all that.
And we also didn't really focus on it as a
social problem, it was
a purely academic one.
So I think that's where, to me,
the distinctions really really important.
- Okay.
Back to you guys.
So who, this process that you just
went through of reflection
is really really valuable,
and really really important,
and so as you form
your centers and you
really start thinking about
how you're gonna do your work,
I would really encourage
you to have a retreat,
at least once a year, if not
a couple of times a year,
but to take some time to reflect
on how things are working.
Are they working, not working, et cetera.
So I would really love to
hear from a table or two,
maybe three, what was this
like to talk about the mission?
To talk about these other
things that are listed?
How you're linking to
social innovation, value,
how are you thinking of that?
What was it like to talk about it,
is it all clear in your minds?
- So for us mission statement,
especially at this point,
seems very premature,
and the mission statement
should come out of the
needs and the goals of the team.
So you could have some idea of what
technology you want to
build, or some needs that
are out there, and then
as you build your team,
and you really nail down those needs,
and you develop what
technological barriers there are,
then the vision and the
mission statement evolve out
of that, it seems if you start
with a mission statement,
then you're sort of forcing everything to
fit under that, and that
could be problematic.
- Mine is again a question too,
it's just a difference,
or how to differentiate
between a goal or a vision statement with
objectives and a mission statement,
and how should it look like?
Because we looked at, we cheated,
we looked at different agencies and
they look totally different.
- So different groups can take kind of
different approaches to what they call
vision and mission, and then the goals.
My understanding of how it
works is your vision statement
is really your statement for the future,
it's what the future will look like
when you've accomplished your goal.
The mission is really your statement about
you know what you are going to be doing,
in order to finally get
to that mission right?
Or to the vision.
- How different is that from the
objectives put together in
a sentence in the statement.
- Well so your goals are the things that
you're going to do that
align with your mission.
So you have an overall mission statement,
and then you have a certain number of
goals underneath that mission.
And then you might have objectives
for each of those goals.
Does that make sense?
- It does, yes.
- Okay.
- Hi, our center is looking
at embedded security with
a bunch of social applications in
medical and autonomous systems.
And we're computer people in general,
we go from hardware to
software, to networking.
And actually that whole area is built on
these very vertical
layers, and part of being a
good engineer in these
fields is in fact making a
very good clean boundary
between one and the next.
So I think part of our
challenge is going to be
redefining those, let's
call them abstractions,
or the modularity between
the different layers.
So I'm not quite sure
how we're gonna do it,
but we may have to break
some of the existing models,
that are typically between these layers.
- Okay, thanks.
Oh, over here?
Meet me halfway?
- I'm sorry.
I think one of the
questions we had as part of
our discussion here is, for
example the last question is
what mechanisms or strategies
in place to work in barriers,
I think if you know you can
probably do some research,
do some literature research,
and probably follow the
book on how to do it, but ultimately
what matters is execution, right?
And how many of us have
actually done all of
these activities, so how do
you differentiate ourselves
and how do you even
measure what we are doing,
is it actually correct or not?
Like I can do step one, step two,
you can do the norming, storming process,
storming, norming process,
and keep doing it,
but ultimately, unless we
do it, you know there is
no way to sort of correct
ourselves as we go along.
And so, one of the challenges is
how do I correct ourselves as we go along,
assuming we did get the grant eventually.
- So I think that's
really wise of you to say,
and I think as you said,
you're not going to
know what you're doing until
you really start doing it,
I think the other thing is
I think you'll really be
surprised at how much
you already kind of know,
at least know theoretically,
how much the members of
the team will know, and
if you can figure out a
way to make sure everybody can speak up,
you can communicate
openly and honestly and
people can catch each other,
I think you'll find
that you do really well.
Yeah.
Who else would like to share?
- Can I just respond to that?
- Of course.
- Just a quick response to that question,
you know there are lots
of different ways to
think about teamwork and
organizational development,
not the least of which, there's a built in
learning method, to reflect,
to do double loop learning,
to begin to build that in.
And the other piece of
the puzzle is lots of
different sort of non-traditional maybe
ways of thinking about evaluation.
We tend to think of summative evaluation,
as we're gonna drive a process,
we're gonna figure out
what happens at the end,
and we're gonna declare victory,
we did really well, or we failed.
And some of the newer thinking about
formative evaluation or even
developmental evaluation,
where you build evaluation
steps in and you think
about what's our theory of change,
was it logical, does a logic model work?
Are there way then to say
then at certain step points,
not four or five years
in, but month to years in,
and I think that's a culture that
organizations need to adopt is to,
there's a great book on
developmental evaluation,
and also lots of really good
things on program theory,
that can sort of help you build in these
ways and mechanisms to evaluate what
you're doing in real time.
- This is a topic of
tomorrow's, some of the session
- So would somebody, ooh, sorry!
Would somebody like to talk about the
linkage to social innovation or value?
What were your discussions
like in that arena?
Not everybody at once.
(laughter)
- Ah, right behind me!
- Peter Adriaens here,
University of Michigan.
We're developing a center on
smart infrastructure finance,
so it's sort of the connection between
engineering and business,
and big data policy.
In the conversation here
in the social connection,
I was talking to Kurt,
even though we've been
talking about this for about a year,
about how or where the
social implications and
applications could be,
and with his background in
dealing with cities and
with companies that are
deploying some of these
finances mechanisms,
there are some new edges that came out and
a couple of thank yous,
no buts or howevers.
(laughter)
That allowed us I think to sort of
rethink the boundaries around the project.
- So maybe two questions, one
in term of the social science.
We were unclear whether
the expectation would be
that we include social
scientists who would use
established methods, or
that there would be social
scientists who would be
developing research agendas
as part of how we work
together, studying us as a team,
and developing new approaches.
And if I could just act the
second question in terms
of social impact, we wondered what the,
maybe you don't know the answer,
what the appetite of NSF
and the reviewers would be
for things that have global social impact,
and perhaps less specifically
within the US and broader.
- Okay, so I'm hoping the
program directors wrote
those questions down, because they're a
little bit beyond my scope.
- Uh, so for both of them?
- I'm from the NIH, so...
- Okay, okay.
(laughter)
- So can we have the program
director help us out?
- I think the program directors are,
they're on at five, to
do a session with you,
so you just have to wait
a couple more minutes.
- Okay, great, thank you.
- I was just curious if
there was anybody else who
would like to give us a sense of,
with regards to the linkage to the
social innovation or value.
Oh!
- Alright, so, our ERCs focused
on wireless power transfer,
so I think all of us are
looking for cords all
the time and we want
to plug in our devices.
And our goal is basically
to remove all the cords for
powering things in your
home and hospitals and
your cars and stuff like this.
And I think from some
social point of view,
I think this is very critical,
because our life is dependent
on electrical power,
and the way we draw this power controls
things inside the home and
things outside the home.
And so we are now reaching out to our
social science folks in
order to work with them
on behavioral signs, and
see how people will be
in this new society
when they don't have to
worry about the cords and power,
how will it basically
affect their lifetime,
and basically open a
lot of opportunities for
them to engage in different
ways in which they don't now.
So that's the theme our
ERC to merge people,
behavior, with respect to this
technological advancement.
Thank you.
- Great so we're going to turn this over
to Margaret, but can we thank Michelle?
(applause)
