What gives a team the 'collective edge'?

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1:05this is eat sleep work repeat it's a podcast about workplace culture good day to you i'm in a very good position actually very uniquely for me i've got lots of podcasts lined up over the next few weeks and a lot of them a heck of a load of them recorded so i'm going to be talking to some really good people and some of the guests are some of the most dazzling people that I've ever delved into their work, understanding teams, dynamics, identity. So I'm really looking forward to what's coming up. So that's good. So there's a busy schedule of more programs coming up. Today's podcast is a really great discussion.

1:45Colin Fisher is a professor at UCL School of Management And he's written a great book that delves into the dynamics of teams, why the collective is often better than the individual when it comes to getting work done. But quite often we make mistakes when it comes to teams that we don't necessarily build them, calibrate them and sustain them in the right way. A classic example of that is that many of our teams become bigger and bigger and bigger. And with that, they become less effective. Colin, at the start of the discussion, lays out what he thinks the optimal size for teams is. And I think the number will surprise you.

2:23I think it will really sort of provoke you. And yet most managers, let's say for their senior leadership meeting, they'll invite more and more people along because they perceive it as a way to endow another person with status that they're turning up to that meeting. So it's in service of us making our teams less effective. And that's a really interesting lens to look through and a really interesting way for us to reflect on what makes a great team. A personal obsession of mine, I'm really interested in that. I work with organisations on that. So I think that's going to be a really interesting exploration.

2:59So great discussion. This is Colin Fisher, Professor Colin Fisher, talking about his brand new book that's out now called The Collective Edge. Here's Colin.

3:10Colin, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if, to kick off, you could introduce who you are and what you do. I'm Colin Fisher. I'm a professor of organizations and innovation at the University College London School of Management. And I'm the author of a new book, The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. The overall point I took from your book was that so often we see the world through an individualistic lens, you know, even at work, but, you know, in our home lives. And actually thinking about the collective elements of life, collective elements of work, might be an important reminder for us to think about how we work in groups.

3:48That's how I understood the big theme. Is that how you thought about it? Absolutely. I mean, I think the main inspiration for writing the book and doing this work is that so much of the advice we get is either about changing ourselves as individuals and thinking about how we can be better people, how we can behave differently, or it's way up at the organizational level and thinking about the culture and structure and strategy of the whole. And what we kind of miss there is this group level of what the kind of unique dynamics that emerge and often are ignored in small work teams, in your work group, in just these kind of pockets within both at work and at life that I think matter as much or more than just paying attention to what we can do as individuals and what we should do with these much bigger social structures.

4:48Really interesting because the reason why it really resonated with me is that probably one of the abiding issues of work right now is that a lot of people say work doesn't feel the same. and most of that complaint is typically directed to our experience of teams. And I guess, you know, part of that might be that our team is dysfunctional in the way it's created or our team doesn't feel like it's got a focus. And I'd love to just start specifically there with your definition of what it means to be a team because I found when you articulated that, a lot of the stuff that came subsequently made sense based on that.

5:29Yeah, so I think of what my mentor Richard Hackman called a real team as being kind of the best way to understand the difference between teams and other kinds of groups. So a real team is a small, interdependent group of people who are working toward a collective purpose. When I say small, I usually mean this kind of three to seven range, but we could be a little bit bigger, maybe even a little bit smaller than that. But those elements that we're interdependent, that we depend on one another for what we're trying to accomplish, and that we have some kind of shared purpose, are non-negotiable in thinking about what differentiates teams from different kinds of groups.

6:15That 3 to 7 is so interesting, isn't it? Because it's not uncommon for groups to expand either because we need more resource or because maybe someone is elevated to a higher position to try and give them some sort of reward for performance. And often we frequently find ourselves in, you know, the modern experience would be in a team, in a video call with these 20 people in it. And so when you describe a perfect team as being three to seven people, it doesn't necessarily feel like our most relevant direct experience. Might be our favorite team, but it's not the team we're in right now. How would someone think about that?

7:01firstly from a perspective of a leader but secondly as a perspective of a participant is there any way to mitigate the effect that being in a big unwieldy team has upon us? This is probably the number one problem that I deal with when I'm talking to people who are managing teams at work where most of the groups that managers are given accountability for are bigger than three to seven, right? Like most people have more than three to seven direct reports, and they often sort of think of my team as everyone who I'm working with. And that often gets us to numbers like 15, 20, 30 people. and the mistake is to think that just because I'm in my head calling this my team, that means every time we want to get something done, every time we want to meet, everyone needs to be on that Zoom call.

8:02Everyone needs to be in the room. Because, I mean, I think we all have the experience that if you want to really know what everybody thinks, to hear from everybody around a table in a room or on a Zoom call, if you've got that kind of three to seven people and you've got an hour-long meeting, you've got a pretty darn good chance of achieving that. I'm going to know what everybody else is doing. We're going to be able to resolve any misunderstandings and kind of come to decisions through consensus. But now if I up that to 10 people, yeah, chances we might achieve that, But we also might not. And if I've got 20 people, we've got no chance.

8:44There's no way we're going to know what everybody's thinking. We're not going to get the perspectives and information from everybody. We're not going to be able to come to a true consensus where we really know that everybody's on board and everybody agrees. And so the trick when you have these bigger teams is to think, what do I really need everybody to know? and are there ways to convey that knowledge that aren't all of us hopping on a Zoom call? And really most of these calls are one person kind of presenting to everybody else. And that in those situations, we can record videos now, we can summarize, we can have auto transcripts generated.

9:29There's a lot of other ways to get one-way communications of information out to a large group of people in a way that makes more efficient use of everyone's time. But when we're all in a room together, and whether that's a virtual room or a physical room, I really encourage managers and leaders to think about work that we really need to all be simultaneously co-present for. What kinds of things do we need that? And those are things like getting consensus, generating new ideas, to make really important decisions. And so when we have these bigger teams, if we have a norm that we don't want meetings to consistently have 20 people in them, we're shooting for this three to seven number.

10:19So what tasks, what decisions need to be made? And then we can rotate. Like we don't all have to be in every decision. And if we know that eventually it's going to be our turn to be on these important committees, to be part of important things, we can kind of have the trust in one another that we can break into these smaller subgroups. But to me, that's the essence of being a good leader of a system of teams is chunking off work in meaningful ways and giving it to people who have the right information, the right skills, the right perspectives to be doing that work. and then, you know, making sure that that's delegated in a way that's equitable and that's fair and that people feel like they're getting to have their say and that we're not in these meetings with 25 people on a Zoom call because nobody likes that.

11:18And that's really what gives teams and group dynamics such a bad name is that we're already set up for failure where we can't operate like a real team as soon as you've got that many people in a room. Is this because then, so quite often leaders know that there's some people in the room that are going to do something and they believe that they're giving a service to everyone else to have them there present while those discussions are taking place. It's trying to create a sense of being collective and collegiate. People find themselves in a succession of calls where they only speak in that 30 minutes to say nothing from me and close out.

11:54Is that it? It's the illusion of being included that is dragging our collective work down. Yeah, I think you've really hit on one of the important causes of it, which is it's easy to be overly inclusive, right? That feels generous. That feels like you're doing a service to your work group and to everybody around to say, oh, yeah, you're invited too. But that means groups and organizations tend to only change size in one direction, and that's to grow. So it's easy to get bigger. It's much harder to ever get smaller because to say, hey, actually, you've been attending this call, and now you're not going to, that's a much more difficult conversation to have.

12:41And so essentially most managers just avoid having it. And that honestly, the worst offenders of this tend to be CEOs and their top management teams. That top management teams over the years are growing and growing and growing to the point that they're no longer effective decision making groups, that they're too big to have meaningful conversations about the strategy that they want to undertake. And in fact, there was a great study by my co-author Ruth Wagaman and some of her colleagues that asked top management teams a really simple question. How many people are there on your team? Of the, I think, 111 teams that they surveyed, only 7 % agreed on how many people were on that team.

13:3393 % of top management teams gave different answers on even how many people were on the team. And when you think about that and say, well, how are we going to collaborate effectively? Well, it's really hard to collaborate effectively if you don't even know who you're supposed to be collaborating with. And so this issue of growing team size, that it's harder to keep track of who I need to coordinate with, It creates way more coordination costs the bigger we get, is such a fundamental part of the problems that we end up having in teamwork. What is really interesting for me is that quite often when Brits, especially, but I think broader than Brits, are diagnosing why their team isn't working right now.

14:16One of the things that they might do is they might go through the heuristics of how teams worked well in the past. And they perceive some sort of social connectedness, some strong social relations were part of that cohesion. And so one of the things they set out to do is say, okay, we need to dial up our social connectedness. Even if we're not in the office on Fridays anymore, we go to the pub after work, then let's build some social connectedness into what we do, because that obviously is a precursor to strong team performance. And I came away from reading your stuff thinking, beware, that the idea that social connectedness leads directly into better team performance is moot at best.

15:01Some degree of connection between people on a human level is really important, but the idea that that needs to come before or high performance in our jobs is far less relevant. And I'd love you to sort of go through that, really. I think one of the things I took away is the idea that maybe a team needs a really strong launch, which is all to your structure point, and get to work. And I'd love to know, if someone's thinking, my team right now isn't working, should they be thinking of a relaunch? Should they be thinking of how to relaunch? What advice would you give them if that's where they feel that they are right now?

15:38So, I mean, I think a relaunch is a great idea if you feel like your team's struggling. And what I mean by a relaunch is to reaffirm or revise the goals that the team has and make sure that everybody is aligned on what those are. to discuss the norms of how we're going to communicate, how we're going to share information, and how we're going to create a culture of what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety, where everyone feels like it's safe to take interpersonal risks, that we can speak up, that we can ask questions, that we can make mistakes and talk about what we're learning from them.

16:21And that if we're doing these relaunches, that's one of our best tools for helping a team that's already struggling. But I think that people get confused with the idea of what I call these launches or relaunches. And what's commonly thought of as team building, which I think is this more this idea of we're going to have more social events outside work. We're going to go to the pub after work. And there's nothing wrong with doing those things, right? Like I want to emphasize, I'm not telling you, you shouldn't go to the pub with your mates from work. That's a great thing to do. And if you want to do that, you know, and everyone enjoys it, you should do that.

17:02But if you expect that then to translate into our team performing better, the evidence is quite murky. And that if you're going to invest in, you know, trying to strengthen the performing capacity of your team, what the research shows is that trying to build what researchers call relational trust, which is I trust you with my deepest, darkest secrets. I trust that you have my best interests at heart. And if we do that before trying to work together, there's not that much of a measurable performance benefit. But if we build work-based trust, which is you do your part of the task to a high standard and deliver it when you say you will, that I can rely on you as a partner at work.

17:53And that the only way to develop work-based trust is by evidence. It's to see it. So that the strongest kind of team building is actually doing stuff that's as close as possible to the work that we're going to do. And that might mean, you know, have a launch and get straight to work, but see if the first thing you can do is a relatively low stakes task where if you make some mistakes, if you need to adjust our norms, adjust how we communicate, that we can do that. Or a lot of organizations that work in team-based structures all the time have high-fidelity simulations. And these are things like what the military does, what airline cockpit crews do, what every sports team imaginable does, what the great bands do, which is you practice.

18:47you have rehearsals and in those rehearsals you reflect on how the work is going you talk about it and you try and make improvements upon it and that when we do that consistently over time we get better so much faster and that we can actually detect the effects on team performance in a way that we can't for people who are doing pure relational trust-based things things like going to the pub, things like, you know, off-site where you're doing trust falls or something like that. Those just don't have that much evidence behind them. To sort of lean into that, you gave a piece of research which you said at University of Washington, Professor Michael Johnson and his team designed a clever experiment where they put teams in a bad situation and then asked members what they'd like to change, processes, personnel, or structure.

19:36Now, you say 84 % changed their processes, 16 % changed their personnel, but only 5 % made the only change that reliably improved performance, adjusting their structure. Is that an overall way that we should think about this, that actually better performance normally comes from structure rather than from personnel or from processes? talk me through what each of those mean and explain because that five percent only changing that and that was the origin of better success i'd love to lean into that because it seems to be sort of the direct response of you saying maybe a role play simulation can be one of the best ways to get us up and running so team structure um in the book i talk about four components of team structure the structure is that's kind of the bones and the dna of the group and that's the composition.

20:30So who's on the team? Is it this small group of interdependent people that we talked about for real teams? The goals that we have. So do we have clear, important, challenging goals that we all share?

20:49So the goals, the task, the social norms that we have. So as I was talking about how are we going to communicate what's the processes that we, not the processes, but what do we consider normal? What do we expect of one another in the group? And I'm blanking on one right now. So goals, structure, because I did them in tasks, sorry. And the task that the team is giving. So is the team given a whole piece of work that's meaningful to them where they're going to see it through to the end and not something where they're asked to write a report that they don't know what happens to that report and they throw it over the wall and never see it again?

21:34So if you get those structural elements right, process tends to follow structure. And this is where people are making the mistake that what we see in groups is the process. And the two main elements of process are the effort that members are putting forth and how well we're coordinating with one another. And that this tends to be where people see problems. So you see somebody in our team's not trying as hard as they could. You see that we're having these kind of redundant things where two people are doing the same thing. There's a lot of miscommunications. we're having problems in the handoffs or there's like very long lag times between the things that we're interdependent for.

22:20And so we naturally see those problems. They're the most obvious things. And we say, oh, well, you know, we're not trying as hard as we can. What we need is a pep talk to try harder. But that usually not trying as hard as we can is a sign that there's something wrong in the structure, that we're actually not clear on what the goals are. We don't understand why it's important that we do it. We're not given these whole pieces of work. Or very commonly, we're in a team that's way too big, and we quite rationally do not need to try as hard as each individual can because there's 20 of us trying to do work that five of us could do.

22:59So, you know, what we need to do is see these problems and say, yeah, these are process problems. That's a symptom. It's the runny nose in the kind of analogy of what's sick. But, you know, we don't solve runny noses by just jamming a bunch of tissue up our nose and trying to stop the runny nose directly. We try to diagnose what's the underlying cause of this runny nose, and then we treat that. And this is the mistake that people are making in that study from University of Washington, is they see the runny nose and they turn right to trying to fix the runny nose and they don't invest in diagnosing what's causing it.

23:37And that that cause, nine times out of 10, is going to be structured somewhere in the structure. And that sometimes that stuff that you can change easily, like if it's just not clear to people what the goal is and we just need to get more aligned on what that is or why it's important, that could just be something that you can communicate directly. or it might be something that's tougher to change, like we don't have the right mix of people on this team and we need to change it. So I think one of the overarching messages to anyone who's leading a team is that when you see process problems, of course, you can try easy things to try and fix those problems in a strictly processual way by changing the strategy, giving a rousing halftime speech to your football team.

24:29But most of the time, if you're going to fix something in the long term, you're going to need to go back to structure. And just asking yourself those questions, do I have the right composition, the right goals, the right tasks, the right norms? You're probably doing a better job than most people. And I think that's really what that study shows. So at the heart of that is that if we are going to think group, if we are going to think collective, then the most important thing is understanding discretionary effort, understanding that unlocking that ability for someone to give more of themselves. It's the fundamental part.

25:06And what I've taken from what you said here and both what you say in the book is that sometimes a leader can't over-articulate these things, reminding people, here's where we are today, here's the goal today, here's what our team is here to do, here's why that subgroup exists of five people over there, what they're here to do. And sometimes just reminding people where they are on the map is just a really important part of helping to unlock that discretion and reaffirm. One of the things that we often fall into the maybe understandable trap of doing is doing what, in fact, you hinted at there, sort of creating metaphors in the sporting world and seeing a parallel of seeing an energized team and an unenergized team.

25:49And in fact, you know, there is a strong degree of outcome bias there. Because if a team wins, then we'll appraise their effort throughout the match as outstanding. But if a team loses, then we're very quick to start picking on things that are there. But there was a really interesting sort of substantiation part that you mentioned, which was a piece of Polish research into footballers and soccer players, I'm presuming. And the idea that we often see when a manager changes is that there's an elevation in the distance they run or the energy they expend. But you said when it was actually studied, it was found it was just a reversion to the mean.

26:25And in fact, they were just back to running like other motivated players. And actually, the issue had been whether it was a lack of clear articulation or a lack of sort of contextualization, but they'd dipped, their heads had dipped, their energy had dipped and they'd actually dropped out of that aligned part of being a collective. And that for me was a really fundamental take. I'd love you to go into that then, like the notion that our job here is unlocking discretionary effort and actually that's just about keeping people aligned and understanding why they're in a group in the first instance.

27:02One of the people I've talked to as part of the book was a military leader who said he was given the advice that the best leaders are the reminder-in-chief and that all they do is keep articulating these same things because in our daily lives, it's so easy to forget. And I've experienced the same thing, that the best leaders really have the purpose and the goals at the top of mind. It's in all their communication. It's quickly reiterated at the beginning of almost every meeting, every communication. And that just keeps people aligned because coordination is hard, that we all live in our own heads.

27:46We've all got sort of our own ideas about our individual tasks, our individual goals. And that, you know, at one time we had a very clear sense of why we were there collectively. but it's something that is ever shifting and ever changing and that collective goals are always a little bit in tension with this individual discretionary effort, especially at work, right? Like if we tried as hard as we possibly could every day at work, that might be good for a short-term task, that might be good for the organization, but it's probably not great for the individual. And so there's always going to be these times where we as individuals don't want to try as hard as we possibly could, and yet the group or the organization would want more from us.

28:37And so we're always just kind of managing this tension all the time, and that it's hard to do through coercive means. And I think this is what a lot of sports coaches sort of fall into when they start to get desperate, because a lot of coaches, especially during the season, you no longer have discretion over or that much discretion over who's on your team. You've already used up your stock of motivational speeches and that more, a lot of coaches when they're getting more desperate do turn to more coercive means of trying to shout at people, trying to threaten them, trying to bring out the best of them in ways that can work in really short bursts, but don't really work in the long term over a long season.

29:22And so what we see then is the coaches that are doing this, we see a decline in the effort of their players as these messages, these more coercive messages don't get through, and a kind of bounce up to the normal level of effort once a new coach is put in, which I also found fascinating. I love that study where you really get to see the real measures of effort and that this kind of idea of the new coach balance wasn't so much that people try harder than they ordinarily would for a new coach. It's that for the coaches that were getting fired, they had already kind of dipped down to a below normal level of effort.

30:04What I love then is aggregating what you've just taught me there, which is incredibly compelling, the idea that the best leaders are the reminder in chief. And aggregating that with something which is about thinking about leadership as a collective thing. And actually the whole group, if it feels, especially in a team of six or seven, you know, in that correct unit, you create this subunit and then you've almost deferred the running of the group to the group. And then the leader just reminds them they're just the anchor point because you say something that I was really taken by. You said you should think about leadership as what all group members are doing to improve group dynamics.

30:47And that's quite powerful because if everyone can then be thinking about group dynamics and about, well, you know, my job is to help the team, this unit work better, group dynamics, then you start getting to, I guess, what those leaders were actually trying to achieve by building social cohesion. You're actually just focused on our job is to improve group dynamics and that's why we wanted you there. We just want there to be better. We're poor between people and if our job is to improve group dynamics, that's why we as a group have decided it's always cameras on for our main team meeting on a Tuesday because our goal is improving group dynamics and it's this sort of guiding light.

31:24And then the actual leader is the person who just reminds everyone, here's what we decided, here's what we committed to, here's what we were doing. Sort of compelling balance for those two things, I thought. Shared leadership is I think such a fundamental shift in how most people think about what leadership really is. That if we think of leadership only as the activities of people who occupy formal leadership roles, who've got certain titles in the organization, there's no way any group's going to get enough leadership. Because it turns out we actually need quite a lot. That there's a lot of things that need attending to.

32:03And that even these small groups of three to seven people are complex social systems with a lot of things going on and that any formal leader, they've got their own job, most of them have a boss above them as well, and they've got a bunch of stuff that they're worrying about. And so the best strategy, and I really do think this is borne out by research, is to allow teams to be as self-managing as you possibly can, to give people autonomy over the processes that they use to do the work. And that this is actually a really important distinction between autonomy over what work are we going to do, what goals are we going to pursue, and how are we going to do it.

32:50And that the research shows that when you give people autonomy over how, over process, that's really motivating for them. But if you have a whole group and you say, oh, what goal do you want to pursue? That's much more difficult. That's a much more difficult thing to give a group autonomy over. And so leaders tend to be a little more directive about, here's the goal and how I'm thinking of it. Here's how I'm thinking of the future that we're trying to achieve. Does that make sense to all of you? Is there anything I'm missing in the way I'm articulating that? And then to kind of, you know, hone in on this shared vision of what our goal is.

33:37But you're not giving the team full autonomy over everything it can do, although there are some organizations that have experimented with this kind of extreme autonomy or holacracy as it's been called. but that generally autonomy over process is really good, really motivating, promotes more shared leadership and collective ownership over these group dynamics. And when people are seeing problems, then they say, hey, there's a problem. I'm not going to just tell the leader about it. I'm also going to see if there's something I can do to fix it. And that can come back to these questions of what's our goal?

34:17If I'm not clear on that goal, and rather than just sitting in the meeting silently going, oh, this is pointless, why am I here? A group that's got this kind of ethos of shared leadership, you would say, actually, I'm not sure. What are we trying to accomplish here? And now we can have a discussion where we get clear about that because somebody probably thought it was a good idea, right? I mean, they didn't call the meeting because they thought it was pointless. And so these kinds of issues that go unstated in groups that don't share leadership tend to get surfaced, tend to get discussed, and are more likely to get resolved when everybody experiences this accountability for the group and its performance.

34:57Your final takeaway that you invite people to think about is that the secret to groups is learning together. And I guess that was a sort of powerful thing for me to take on board because I have seen that pretty strongly in a lot of the research. I'd love you to just elaborate that because that could quite often be something that could remind a manager how to keep things fresh or how to ensure, you know, if our goal is to write down each quarter the things that we've learned, that sense of collective learning seems to be quite an important focus point. I'd love you just to give a perspective on that, really, the notion that, especially Especially in a small group, collective learning is an important and desirable goal.

35:43Collective learning is so important. And it's at the foundation of everything we've been talking about. And I think it's at the foundation of almost every team. Because anytime you're a member of a group, something's new, right? The people are new. The work we're doing is not exactly the work we're doing yesterday. and often we're not the people we were yesterday or a week ago or a year ago. And so there's always something we need to be learning, whether it's about working with each other, about the tasks that we're doing, or about new technologies where all of a sudden we're doing all our meetings by Zoom, where we're collaborating with AIs, whatever it may be.

36:28So there's always something that needs to be learned and needs to be reflected upon. And there's always ways that we can get better as a performing unit. And so the best groups are those that have built it into their social norms and into their culture, into these kind of the structure and DNA of the group, that we're going to be raising these things, raising opportunities for learning, things that we don't understand, experiments we want to try, things that we're learning as individuals. that we have a culture where it's okay for us to do these experiments and make mistakes, and that we're going to have dedicated times where we're going to talk about those things and see what we can glean and what we can do better.

37:16And I think those times, if this isn't something that you're doing regularly, at a bare minimum, you should schedule a meeting exactly halfway between the launch and the deadline at the midpoint of any task. And that could be, you know, if you're doing some kind of hackathon, it could be just an hour into a two-hour event, or it could be six months into a year-long project. But at a bare minimum, you've got that meeting on the books to say, all we're doing is trying to learn to work together better. We're going to say, what are we doing well that we should keep doing? What do we need to change?

38:00And how can we make those changes? And that at the end of every task, we're also going to do the same thing, but it's got a little bit different emphasis because maybe we're not going to continue working together after this. Maybe we're going to be going our separate ways. And the important thing is to articulate what we learned as individuals that we're going to take on board from being a part of this team, what we hope the organization can learn, and what we're going to sort of take to future projects. but that those two times, if we do that, one, you're again ahead of most teams if you're doing it at those two times but I think the best teams are doing it all the time that they're constantly inviting people to be reflecting, experimenting, making suggestions but they also have a culture where it's okay to say well, we need to kind of get to work right now and not do experiments for this period of time, but then we have these times on the books where we know we're going to be able to raise those things, where we know we're going to be able to learn.

39:05And that's the kind of trust that I think is really important to have this culture of learning in teams. A really practical and useful and very readable book. If there was one thing, Colin, that you could advise, if you could advise anyone listening to change one habit of how they work with others then what would be your sort of one single takeaway if we are going to think with this collective approach to life? Well, I'm going to fuse two of them. One is don't make assumptions about that others are thinking the way you're thinking. Make it explicit. Be the repeater in chief for everyone. And make that repetition structural.

39:48Embed it in documents. Make it a habit that you're doing all the time, that have ways of interacting that are repeatable and that foster learning, shared leadership, self-management, and keeping people aligned around the agreements that we already have. And so I think those two things of don't make assumptions and be in the business of building structures are the two things that I really hope people take away.

40:20Thank you to Colin. Great conversation. Anything to do with making teams function more effectively for me is right in the sweet spot. And I'm just intrigued with that. I've got more episodes coming up on similar and related themes. And I think you're going to enjoy the stuff we've got coming up. Best place to get hold of everything that I'm talking about is on the newsletter. And you can see that at the top of the show notes. There's been some really good stuff lately, exploring the data about how personality is changing, insight into how expectations at work are reshaping. There was some really good stuff this week, and I've put the most recent newsletter that refers to this at the top of the show notes, about how AI is rendering inter-colleague discussion less active.

41:10We're talking less to our colleagues because we're asking chat GPT how to do things. And obviously that's got an implication for the cohesion of teams going forward. Really good stuff. Anyway, you'll find the link to that at the top of the show notes. Thank you for listening. I've been Bruce Daigley. See you next time.