What kind of people would be crazy enough to cross a perilous ocean and build cities from scratch in frigid New England? And all so they could make people be more religious?

People who thought they could beat the odds, that’s who.

The charismatic preacher Roger Williams is a perfect example of this. He showed up in Boston early on and took over as Pastor… and then proceeded to tell those freezing zealots that even they weren’t righteous enough. People called him “divinely mad” for the verve with which he played prophet. He left Boston for Salem, where he tried and failed to get witch-burning Jesus-lovers to be even more pious. Then he went to the even more religious Plymouth, where he built a following around being “the really strict guy.” (not an actual quote, but accurate)

Plymouth eventually kicked him out.

(This photo below is called “The Banishment Of Roger Williams”)

Renowned Psychologist Dr. John Gartner describes Williams’ personality as “combination of extreme zeal, odd ideas, and poor judgment” as “the classic presentation of the hypomanic.”

I’d been in the middle of reading about the nutjobs like Roger Williams who built the American Colonies in Dr. Gartner’s book The Hypomanic Edge when I re-listened to this week’s episode of my podcast The Art Of The Zag, and something fascinating clicked for me.

This week’s podcast guest is Mario Gabriele, creator of The Generalist. And whereas I’m not comparing him to the loony preacher Roger Williams per se, Gabriele is a bit of a prophet to Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The Generalist is a thriving tech industry publication built on Substack, and it breaks all the rules of the media business. If you’re interested in the media biz (as a creator, a brand doing content, or at the higher industry level) this interview is absolutely fascinating.

And I believe that Gabriele’s is the kind of intrapreneurship we badly need in today’s AI / TikTok / doomscroll environment.

Listen on Spotify or Apple, or watch here:

But the reason Mario Gabriele’s story clicked for me with the story of America’s manic founders is because of a particular phrase Gabriele used to describe why The Generalist succeeded:

“The Right Amount Of Delusional”

Most businesses fail. Most startups lose all the money. Most pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic to settle America died doing so. (More than 80 percent of the Jamestown colonists died in the first year!)

What kind of personality does it take to believe you can beat the odds and not freeze to death at Plymouth Rock?

What does it take to believe that your business will succeed when most don’t?

That your novel idea will work when the rest of the world thinks a different way?

Mario Gabriele says it may have been his naivete about the media industry and how hard it is to do something different that led him to email busy executives mega-articles in an era when everyone says 60-second video reels are the only way to get attention.

“I was probably ignorant enough,” Gabriele says, “that I imagined, well I don’t know what the standard is but I bet I could do something… better?”

He adds:

Another way to get the “right amount of delusional,” according to Dr. Gartner, is to be at a particular point on the manic spectrum called hypomania. Early American settlers, prophets like Williams, statesmen like Hamilton, and entrepreneurs like Carnegie showed symptoms of hypomania: manic energy, odd ideas, and a pinch of recklessness—but not to the point of insanity.

You can chart this out similarly to how I (over)explain virtues like courage and patience in my mega treatise on wisdom and values here.

“The Instrumental Value Of Hope”

The behavior afoot with both hypomanics and naive entrepreneurs has to do with the psychology of hope. Hope can drive us to make breakthroughs specifically when people aren’t optimistic about our chances of success. Psychologists call it “the instrumental value of hope“—which is to say that having a small chance of success against poor odds can motivate us to think and work differently to overcome those odds.

After all, if the odds are against you, you’re not going to succeed by doing things the “usual” way. You have to use lateral thinking.

The key is to be just delusional enough that you try what others think is impossible—which forces creativity…. while also not going so far that you fall off the cliff. People who are too delusional start wars in the Middle East thinking they’ll be over in two weeks. People who are the “right amount of delusional” try ideas that others think are crazy, and then, crucially, they exercise intellectual humility and adapt whenever things aren’t working.

“The Business Has Changed Many Times”

In our interview with Gabriele, he explains that the secret formula to his success is not just taking a different approach than the rest of the crowd (zagging!) but by also changing the approach frequently.

When my co-host Joe Lazer pushed Gabriele on why he thought The Generalist’s zaggy strategy would work from the beginning, Gabriele pushed back. “Oh no,” he said. “The business has changed many times.” Gabriele pivoted business models over and over until something worked. (And worked well!)

People who are truly delusional tend to hang on to their ideas too tightly. It’s all entwined with their own ego / sense of identity. But people with “the right amount of delusion” that they can beat the odds are motivated to find a new path regardless of whether it’s the first path the Muses pop into their head. It’s the ol’ “stubborn on vision, flexible on strategy”.

“High Intention Work”

The pivot that ended up working for The Generalist is, like many great ideas, only obvious in retrospect. Rather than chasing mass attention—which is the prevailing model in media today—Gabriele started providing very exceptionally deep value for a small group of people.

Influencer culture has us all convinced that being as popular as possible is the “way it’s done” in media today.

But The Generalist embodies a counter-narrative: It may seem delusional to put in a lot of effort to help a few people, but in the long term this is how we build sustainable value for human beings. (This part of the interview at 20:04 goes into depth on this insight.)

Substack itself is the one social media platform that’s built on this philosophy. (You can hear about it from Substack founder Hamish McKenzie himself on The Art Of The Zag here!)

What Gabriele calls “high intention work” builds—keyword builds—value for people that bets the high frequency transactions of the attention economy. And in an era where AI is enabling high frequency content at unimaginable scale, I believe that the future of media is in this zag of building value for humans with high intention.

Rhode Island Wasn’t Built In A Day

Fun fact about the preacher Roger Williams. After trying to make the adherents of Boston, Salem, and Plymouth fit his extreme vision of righteousness, he moved to a place called Providence to start his own colony.

Again… delusional.

But this new colony was different. Williams decided to found it on a contrarian principle: all are welcome regardless of their beliefs.

Whereas the other colonies were about conforming to strict versions of religiosity, this new colony was a complete 180. Roger Williams was willing to adapt his worldview, his approach, and his tolerance for people not like him, and in the process he ended up giving a generation of outcasts, misfits, and free thinkers a home. Williams ultimately succeeded because he was change-able, deeply intentional, and only so delusional.

And his colony, Rhode Island, is the reason we teach elementary school kids that America was founded on religious freedom.

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If you liked this post, I’d love if you shared it. And check out my books and keynote speaking videos!

Make a great day,

–Shane

In this chapter, we drill into “organizational silence,” the “zone of productive conflict,” and how to push each other inside our teams to get better. If you missed the previous chapters, read them here:

• Foreword

• Chapter 1: Communist Hockey & The Paradox Of Human Teamwork

• Chapter 2: The Math Of Cognitive Diversity

P.S. Though my latest research revolves around adaptation and change, I’m still speaking about Dream Teams at conferences and leadership offsites. If you know a group that could use this message, check out my speaking page here.

Trouble In Shao-Lin

We wanted to make money. We wanted to get outta the streets.

1.

In May 1998, two massive worlds collided.

Chrysler, the Detroit-based maker of Dodges and Jeeps, had the highest profit margins of any auto company in the world. Its product development cost was half of Ford’s, and one-third of General Motors’—even though it was the smallest of the three companies.

Despite this, CEO Bob Eaton worried that Chrysler wasn’t prepared for the future. As the Internet empowered people with more information, car buyers demanded higher quality. Advances in electronics threatened to make Chrysler’s engine designs obsolete. And a surge of cheaper and superior Toyotas and Lexuses imperiled the jobs of Chrysler’s 123,000 blue-collar workers.

Daimler, meanwhile, was one of Europe’s top manufacturing companies. The 300,000 employees of this Germany-based maker of Mercedes-Benz and Maybach built some of the nicest cars, trucks, and buses in the world. Though Daimler was on the cutting edge of automotive design, CEO Jürgen Schrempp was worried, too. Daimler pumped millions into research and development but was having trouble making a big return on its investments. The company had a tiny market share in the United States, and it, too, feared mounting competition from Japanese automakers.

The two CEOs realized that their companies’ heuristics might cancel out each other’s weaknesses. Chrysler’s unbeatable efficiency plus Daimler’s legendary innovation? Killer combo. Daimler’s quality and Chrysler’s “cowboy can-do” would make them unstoppable. Combined, they’d have the tools and talent to take on Ford, GM, and Toyota, and to become one of—if not the—biggest automobile companies on the planet.

So they made a deal. Eaton and Schrempp shook hands, and Daimler and Chrysler became DaimlerChrysler. Schrempp called it “a merger of equals, a merger of growth, and a merger of unprecedented strength.”

The new company was worth around 100 billion dollars. It was the largest transcontinental merger in corporate history.

And it would go down as one of corporate history’s biggest disasters.

According to the Harvard Business Review, between 70 and 90 percent of company mergers fail to achieve synergy. That is, they don’t manage to eventually turn two companies into one business that’s worth more than the sum of the individual companies’ value before the merger. More alarming, half of mergers actually result in a worse business.

Few cases of this are as dramatic as DaimlerChrysler. Three years after the “merger of unprecedented strength,” the 100-billion-dollar company was worth somewhere between 44 and 48 billion—about what Daimler had been worth by itself.

It was supposed to be the greatest merger ever. A Dream Team of automakers. What happened?

The colossal failure has been the subject of many business school case studies. Some point to how the two companies overestimated their potential. Others illustrate how management stumbles hampered growth.

But those things alone didn’t wipe out 50 billion dollars in value. DaimlerChrysler didn’t crash because their cars got worse. Or because its managers forgot how to do their jobs. The cause of DaimlerChrysler’s epic tumble is the same thing that’s doomed the majority of mergers in modern business history.

The merger failed because of “cultural conflict.”

On the surface, Daimler’s and Chrysler’s people were very similar. They were four hundred thousand mostly male, mostly white engineers and designers and assembly-line workers and managers who loved cars.

“They look like us, they talk like us, they’re focused on the same things, and their command of English is impeccable,” said one Chrysler executive of his German counterparts, as reported in a Dartmouth case study. “There was definitely no culture clash.”

This assessment was laughably superficial.

The Germans and Americans who were now supposed to work together had different communication habits, different concepts of personal space, and different negotiation tactics. They had different core beliefs about women in the workplace and the role of leadership. They had different levels of intensity, different motivations, and different perspectives on what mattered when it came to making cars. In other words, they had, as we learned in the last chapter, significant diversity of perspectives and heuristics.

The new company spent a few million dollars on cultural workshops like “Sexual Harassment in the American Workplace” and “German Dining Etiquette.” But those were superficial, too.

From Daimler employees’ perspective, the goal of automaking was uncompromising beauty and precision. “Quality at all cost,” they would say. But to Chrysler workers, the goal was utility and affordability for their customers.

The Americans thought their new German coworkers were elitist. The Germans thought the Americans were risk takers with bad taste. Some Daimler executives even told the press that they “would never drive a Chrysler.”

Though their complexions were similar, DaimlerChrysler employees were different as can be.

Less than ten years later, the two companies broke up. Schrempp left amid shareholder anger. Eaton had been long gone by then. A private equity firm paid a reported $6 billion—10 percent of Chrysler’s 1998 value—to spin the Americans out. Soon after, that company went bankrupt.

Aside from the massive price tag attached, this is not a rare story in the business world. More than half of mergers lose value rather than maintain it. Half of those say the most significant factor in the failure was “organizational cultural differences.” Thirty-three percent say “cultural integration issues.”

In other words, most mergers that lose money don’t do so because of bad business. They lose money because their people can’t deal with their differences.

It doesn’t take a whole merger for this to happen, either. The same thing occurs when companies simply hire people from different demographic backgrounds and merge them into their workforces. At the time of this writing, 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies had hired a head “diversity officer” of some sort to help recruit and keep demographically diverse employees, because teams made of people of different races and genders and ages, they argue, would be smarter—much like what we argued last chapter. But like mergers, hiring statistics show something disheartening. Adding people who are different to the team usually causes problems.

The research is straightforward. Racial, cultural, and gender “diversity tends to lead to increased conflict,” conclude professors from four universities in a sweeping study for the Strategic Management Journal. Adds Dr. Nigel Bassett-Jones of Oxford Brookes University, “Heterogeneous groups experience more conflict, higher turnover, less social integration and more problems with communication.”

This puts organizations in a pickle. “If they embrace [demographic] diversity, they risk workplace conflict,” Bassett-Jones writes. “And if they avoid diversity, they risk loss of competitiveness.”

Welcome to the paradox of differences.

As we learned in our exploration of law enforcement and the parable of Problem Mountain, cognitive diversity makes us smarter. But unfortunately, all the studies show, it also makes us more conflict prone. And that conflict often blows our teams up before we can make use of our differences.

A review of seven hundred US companies by Harvard professors concluded that not only did most demographic diversity programs have no positive effect, but many made things worse for minorities. Research on government diversity hiring programs found no evidence that they “created a more equitable work environment for women or people of color.” Zero. And more disheartening, research from Portland State University found that assigning only minorities to run “diversity management” programs “further marginalizes these already marginalized groups.” It actually deepens the divisions.

On a civic level, a study by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam shows us that the greater a town’s or country’s ethnic diversity, the fewer people voted or volunteered. As we mentioned in the last chapter, diverse cities tend to produce more inventions and patents. But Putnam’s research showed that they also had lower social trust—meaning people were more nervous around their neighbors. And follow-on research shows that this social trust is a more powerful predictor of economic growth than “levels of human capital or skills.”

Ahhhhhhhhh!

But wait. Didn’t we spend the last chapter talking about how differences are what give us progress? Didn’t we learn that companies with diverse leadership make more profits? Didn’t we discover that police departments and intelligence agencies get better when they include women and other different kinds of people?

Get ready to be depressed. Despite everything we learned last chapter, a study of 464 police departments across America found that the departments with the most racial diversity had the most officers be fired or quit. Studies show the same is true of most businesses in general. Sure, differences lead to problem solving, but they also tend to lead to conflict among collaborators.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Chris Jung in the early 1970s. You’re starting your first job after graduating from the FBI Academy. You show up to your office and find that you are the only woman. You’re also the only agent of Asian descent. The male agents all get along extremely well. They go to beers together every other Friday. They talk in sports metaphors and have their own “bro” code. When you speak and act a little differently than the gang, some of them are annoyed. When you suggest a wine bar for Friday’s drinks one week instead of the sports bar, they laugh at the idea. When you get ignored or interrupted in meetings, no one seems to notice but you. Perhaps you stand up for yourself, and they get irritated.

Worst of all, half of your colleagues don’t even realize any of this is bothering you.

There’s a reason we use the term “culture fit” so much at work. It’s because when we have it, we have peace. If you’re the cultural outsider in a tight-knit team of coworkers, your unique ideas and perspectives are useful. But your presence causes some friction. If only you could be more like the rest of the gang.

And that’s the upshot with DaimlerChrysler. If the newly merged company’s employees hadn’t had so much cognitive diversity, there would have been less conflict. And with less conflict, that merger wouldn’t have lost so much money.

Or so they thought.

2.

A few years before Daimler and Chrysler joined forces, another merger was taking shape in the government housing projects of New York City—a merger that would change the life of Robert Fitzgerald Diggs.

Diggs had ten siblings and grew up in ten different projects. His last memory of his father was from when he was a toddler. It was of Dad smashing up furniture with a hammer, right before he left Mom.

Diggs’s mother’s meager wages kept the family in government-subsidized apartments. Queens, then Brooklyn, then Staten Island. In one basement-level room, Diggs and five brothers slept on two twin beds. Sometimes heavy rains would cause the sewer to back up and fill their window view.

He was a thoughtful kid. He would later write about the silver lining of that miserable life. “Living where shit floats was a source of precious wisdom,” he observed.

Religion became his lifeline. First Baptist Bible study. Then Islam, with its lessons about mathematics and peace. Then Taoism. Ten-year-old Diggs decided he liked them all.

But he got swept up in street business anyway. Selling drugs, running around with gangs. At one point, a teenager shot and killed one of Diggs’s friends. In the ’80s neither Jesus nor Muhammad could keep kids in the projects out of “the life.”

In his early twenties, Diggs moved to Cleveland. He immediately got caught in cross fire between rival gangs. One day when he was driving his cousin’s girlfriend home, he was ambushed by jealous gang members. They shot at the car, the girl, and Diggs. Diggs returned fire. The car took a beating. A person took a bullet. And Diggs went to trial. The city wanted eight years for “attempted murder” because Diggs fired a pistol into the dark.

A black kid from the New York projects didn’t stand a chance against a motivated Cleveland prosecutor looking to make an example of what happens to gangbangers who move to his town. But Diggs went to the law library. He studied day and night to prepare a statement for when he took the stand. When his turn came, he delivered an impassioned speech. He told his story.

The effect was so powerful that three of the eleven white jurors hugged Diggs after declaring him “not guilty.” The headline in the local newspaper read something like, “Jury Cries as Diggs Sentence Comes.”

It was a second chance. “I got eight years of my life back in my own hands,” he said. He stopped smoking and drinking until he could take control again. He quit hanging out with gangs. He moved back to New York.

Growing up, Diggs had an eclectic assortment of hobbies. He could quote the plot of any kung fu film the local library had on order. And his second religion (after his homespun Christianislamotaoism) was chess. He and the other kids in the projects played for thousands of hours. And like his peers, Diggs was entranced by a new type of music emerging from he Bronx in the late ’70s and early ’80s: hip-hop. He started recording hip-hop beats on makeshift equipment at age eleven.

After the trial, Diggs began taking long, meditative walks.

On those walks he developed a vision. He would blend his favorite things—chess, kung fu, religion, and music—into one. “Meditation allowed me to connect them all, to see their possibilities,” he later wrote. “I realized that nobody else could do that at the time, because nobody had that particular group of experiences.” He would use them to start the greatest rap group ever. But it wouldn’t be any rap group, he decided. It would be an empire. A rap army. And he would name it the Wu-Tang Clan, after his favorite kung fu movie, Shaolin and Wu Tang.

It was a ridiculous idea.

This begins our second merger. Diggs recruited the best amateur rappers he knew from the Brooklyn and Staten Island projects. They ended up with nine guys, including Diggs. A few of them he knew already: his cousins Gary and Russell, and his roommate Dennis. Most of the others were drug dealers, guys Diggs had met in the street business. Some were even from rival gangs. Diggs used their love of hip-hop plus the carrot of getting out of the projects to lure them together to hear his plan.

It was simple enough. “Give me five years, and I will make you number one.” Diggs would create the beats, and each rapper would write his own lyrics. Each would create his own kung fu persona, and Diggs would decide who got to record what. Each man would pitch in a few bucks, and Diggs would produce their first single.

The nine men agreed and pooled whatever cash they had.

And so, in October 1992, Gary Grice (aka GZA), Russell Jones (Ol’ Dirty Bastard), Clifford Smith (Method Man), Corey Woods (Raekwon the Chef), Dennis Coles (Ghostface Killah), Jason Hunter (Inspectah Deck), Lamont Hawkins (U-God), Jamel Irief (Masta Killa), and Robert Fitzgerald Diggs—who from then on became known as the RZA—booked a recording studio.

And then they nearly killed each other.

3.

On the surface, the members of Diggs’s hip-hop crew were as similar as the respective engineers and managers at Daimler and Chrysler. They were all young black alpha males who’d grown up in the projects of New York City. They all loved their hip-hop craft, and each was more or less down with kung fu.

But that was about where the resemblances ended.

Some of the guys were from the Stapleton projects, others from Park Hill. A couple weren’t even from Staten Island—they were from rival projects in Brooklyn. They made a big deal about this.

And egos aside, their personalities were far from similar. Some were calm, others violent. The oldest was twenty-six, while the youngest was pushing seventeen.

They loved hip-hop, but each of them had a different style of hip-hop. ODB was charismatic and rhythmically unpredictable. GZA and Masta Killa were cerebral and laid-back. Method Man had grit-voiced braggadocio. Raekwon rapped fast and aggressively, while Inspectah Deck waxed intricate. Ghostface’s style was more emotional, while U-God’s was blaxploitative.

Diggs thought these contrasts were cool. But nine cooks with different taste was a recipe for food poisoning.

Like Daimler and Chrysler employees suddenly working together, social trust in the Wu-Tang Clan was low. RZA and Method Man, perhaps the two most talented artists in the group, argued like crazy. But no two trusted one another less than Raekwon and Ghostface. Rae thought Ghost was a “crook.” They’d been enemies in the neighborhood for too long.

“We didn’t know each other enough to really trust each other,” Raekwon told me later, referring to the group as a whole. “Differences is differences, ya know?”

As the nine young men gathered to work on hip-hop, they immediately got in each other’s faces. Some of them carried guns with them when they went out, which meant their constant bickering could easily turn to violence.

But Diggs managed to keep their guns in their pockets long enough to present part two of his plan.

“It was almost like he did a Gotti move,” Raekwon recalled years later. “He brought all the families to the table.” And then he did something clever.

Being in the crew didn’t mean your voice was going to be on the record, RZA announced. He was going to produce Wu-Tang’s tracks the way hip-hop itself was born in the underground party scene.

Every session was going to be a battle of lyrics, RZA told them. He’d make a beat, and they should come prepared to compete on the microphone.

After all, he said, “Hip-hop was a war.”

4.

Andre: Hip-hop all started in Jamaica with DJ culture and sound system culture.

This is Andre Torres, the executive editor of RapGenius. I was sitting with him in a converted warehouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, trying to bone up on my hip-hop history. Having grown up on pop-punk and country music in the middle of farm territory, I didn’t even know how to pronounce “RZA” (it’s “Rizza”) when I first started lining up interviews with Wu-Tang and other rappers.

Andre: It eventually made its way, with Kool Herc, to the Bronx because he was Jamaican. They would have sound clashes. You know, one sound system DJ battling another.

Shane: They were playing at the same time?

Andre: Yeah.

Shane: So, these battles . . . were two disc jockeys trying to get people to come over and dance on their side of the party?

Andre: Yeah, to a point where you were going to drown the other guy out.

Rob: Sorry I’m late. Came all the way from Staten Island.

This is Rob Markman, Rap Genius artist relations.

Shane: No problem. We were talking about how hip-hop developed.

Andre: I was getting into . . . this tension that started literally with the DJs and sound systems. It wasn’t about the MC—

(Master of Ceremonies)

—It was all about the DJ. The MC really was in support. He was there to just “big up” the DJ.

Shane: Sort of the like the hype man.

Rob: That’s what it was. The first MCs, they weren’t even talking about how good they were. It was like, “How good my DJ is.”

Then when another DJ came on the set, his MC would talk about how good his DJ is. Eventually it started competitions. The MCs would take different shots at each other.

Andre: One of the turning points was the Busy Bee vs, Kool Moe D battle at . . . Harlem World?

Rob: Yeah, it was Harlem World.

Andre: In 1982. You can hear part of it online. That was a break from what started out as, you know, “Throw your hands in the air!” You know, the little short party couplets.

I listened to the clip. Busy Bee’s hyping the crowd up by shouting things like, “Ba wit the ba yo bang da bang diggy diggy! Say ho! Come on y’all!”

Andre (cont’d): Busy Bee was the top dude. Kool Moe D was on the come-up with a group called Treacherous Three at the time. He was looking at Busy Bee like, “This dude ain’t all that.”

Then he comes up and just destroyed him with like five minutes of way beyond any just straight party. He was getting personal.

Kool Moe Dee: “Hold on, Busy Bee, I don’t mean to be bold. But put that “ba-ditty-ba” bullshit on hold. We gonna get right down to the nitty-grit. Gonna tell you little somethin’ why you ain’t shit.”

Andre (cont’d): That was a new way of doing this MC thing. It became more like, “Oh, I’m going to come up and I’m going to crush you and make you look like a fool.”

Rob: It was a crowd-pleaser because it was like nothing you ever heard.

Andre: They were loving it.

Rob: Busy Bee at the time—Busy Bee is the man. He’s part of the reason that you come to the party in the first place. You know how they always say most people watch a Floyd Mayweather fight to see him lose? It wasn’t that you came to see Busy Bee lose, but when he got taken out, it was just a new twist. That’s when it started shifting.

Andre: Yeah!

Rob: These battles became legendary. You would tape the live performance and people would pass those around and treat those like records.

Andre: Eventually when these recordings make it to record, it sort of sets the standard.

Shane: So that idea of the battle basically created hip-hop?

Andre: Without a doubt.

Rob: They had a song literally called “Meth vs. Chef.” RZA made them battle for it.

Andre: Which, I think, forced the creativity.

5.

In their efforts to win over partygoers, 1970s Bronx DJs and their hype men didn’t only give birth to a new genre, they created a laboratory for musical innovation. Week after week, competing musicians would write new lyrics in preparation for the next battle. “If you got beaten, then you couldn’t wait till the next Friday to try again,” hip-hop historian and author Jeff Chang told me. You came back to the party with something fresh.

The musicians often found their advantage by hacking their sound equipment itself. There was no such thing as a “fader” switch to allow you to turn the volume down on a speaker while still listening to it in headphones. A DJ named Grandmaster Flash soldered such a switch onto his gear, allowing him to mix and match pieces of two different records back and forth like it was magic. This is a staple of any kind of DJ performance today but at the time was groundbreaking. When electronic sound machines came out, DJs broke them open to add computer memory. This let them play “samples,” or snippets from other songs, or even violin or drums by pressing keys.

Battling pushed musicians to be more inventive, and to combine diverse ideas into new sounds. Even though on the surface the hip-hop battles were often competitions between individuals, the competitors became a sort of team that pushed the genre forward. Out of their battles sprang not just hip-hop, but R&B, techno, electronica, and whatever the hell dubstep is.

Diggs paid for the studio time to record the Wu-Tang Clan’s first single in quarters.

There, he channeled his rappers’ diverse aggressions into the microphone. Each member dug deep and showed up to record as if for a real battle. “Wu-Tang Clan truly did take a martial arts approach,” Diggs later wrote, “to the sound of the music, the style of the lyrics, the competitive wordplay of the rhyming, the mental preparations involved.” They made a single called “Protect Ya Neck”—with eight rappers and seven verses—and started selling it out of the trunk of a car.

The sound wasn’t just unique. It was epic.

A few months went by, and then a DJ on a local New York radio station played the track. The Wu-Tang couldn’t believe it. High off that momentum, they holed up in a basement on Morningstar Road to record a full-length album: Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers.

Diggs siphoned electricity from the neighbors to run his borrowed equipment: an eight-track, a sampler, and a keyboard. He cribbed drumbeats from old soul albums and sound effects from the film Shaolin and Wu Tang.

Diggs didn’t come out of the basement for months. His eyes grew sunken. His Afro grew nappy (his words). Ghostface shoplifted canned food from the local grocery to feed him.

Finally, the RZA took off his headphones and played the record.

36 Chambers was a masterpiece. Their combined musicianship had created a sound no one on planet Earth had ever heard.

It would take three years of playing underwhelming clubs and selling records out of trunks for the world to finally notice. But when it did, 36 Chambers went platinum. Wu-Tang Clan’s second album would debut at number one on Billboard. Its members would go on to collectively sell 74 million records over the next twenty years. They would inspire a host of future Grammy winners—from Kanye West to Kendrick Lamar to white boys like Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.

Critics from Rolling Stone to the Village Voice would eventually call them the greatest rap group of all time.

6.

Our two stories present us with another paradox. Both in the case of DaimlerChrysler and in the case of the Wu-Tang Clan, teams which at first appeared similar were in fact hiding fundamental areas of difference. Cognitive diversity led these apparently homogenous groups into big conflict. In one case, that conflict destroyed a company. In the other case, it changed music history.

As we can see, it would be too hasty of us to repeat the myth that “the conflict arises from our differences is bad.”

But it would be equally hasty to generalize the opposite.

Conflict in the hip-hop industry was often far from productive. Things got ugly in the rap scene. The first hip-hop pioneers were competing only for a crowd in a dance hall. But in the late 1990s, the war came to be centered on issues of money and “turf.” East Coast rappers developed beef with West Coast rappers, and vice versa. Instead of challenging each other musically, some artists started challenging each other with guns.

Things came to a head when two rival rappers were assassinated in close succession.

“The big moment of truth was after Tupac was murdered and after Biggie was murdered,” Chang, the hip-hop historian, explains. “This massive evolution of style occurred because of the battle. But then the battle spilled into the streets. Conflict helped the industry innovate, but at what point does conflict become counterproductive?”

To get at the answer, we’re going to go back in time.

The year is 1901. It’s a sunny summer day, and you’re walking down Third Street in Dayton, Ohio. Two-story brick buildings line the road. Small storefronts, manufacturing shops, ice cream parlors. Birds are chirping, pedestrians are chatting. It’s an idyllic Midwestern scene.

As you stroll past the striped awning of a bicycle shop, you hear a jarring sound coming from inside. Shouting.

If you were to walk by this same bicycle shop again, you’d learn that the shouting went on every day. It commenced in the morning, paused around noon, and resumed after lunch.

This nonstop ruckus was commonplace at the company’s previous location on South Williams Street, and it carried on unabated, at the company’s next shop in North Carolina.

But the fighting was not, as it might appear, a symptom of an abusive relationship. It was simply the way these two shopkeepers worked.

When they needed to solve a problem, they would raise their voices and start arguing. But then the shopkeepers would do something interesting. After a fair amount of debate, they would stop, switch sides of the argument, and start yelling again. The one who’d just debated against something would now argue for it, and vice versa. They’d do this until they worked out a solution to whatever they were stuck on.

For most of us, schizophrenic yelling matches may sound like a hostile work environment.

But most of us aren’t Wilbur and Orville Wright, the inventors of human flight.

As a kid, I discovered a great way to irritate my own brother: shooting him with a makeshift rubber-band gun comprising my forefinger and thumb. In physics, there’s a concept called “potential energy” that’s illustrated well by this brotherly attack. A regular old rubber band lying on a table has very little potential energy. If you leave it alone, it’s not going to do anything. But when you pull the rubber band from two directions and stretch it, suddenly it has a lot of potential energy. If you let go of it, it will go flying.

And the more you stretch the rubber band—or put another way, the more tension you put on it—the more potential energy the rubber band has. The farther you can shoot it.

Of course, at a certain point if you stretch the rubber band too much, it will snap. All that potential energy breaks the rubber band, and now it’s inert again. We might chart the rubber band’s potential like this:

We can use rubber-band physics as an analogy for potential energy in a relationship between a group of people. Whenever different ways of thinking collide, they create tension. A cognitively diverse team is like a group of people pulling on different sides of a rubber band. The more tension, the farther the rubber band can launch if it’s pointed in the right direction. Psychologists call this cognitive friction—where cognitive diversity collides and creates potential energy.

Just like a rubber band, if the tension in a group of different people gets too great, things break down. The group snaps. It makes no progress.

At the other end of the spectrum—in the absence of tension—there’s also no progress. A group of people standing around a limp rubber band goes nowhere.

Between these two extremes—between inertia and destruction—lies a zone of possibility. This is where the magic of group progress happens. We might call this area where cognitive friction creates potential energy the Tension Zone. But to simplify, and because Tension Zone sounds like a Kenny Loggins song from the 1980s, let’s just refer to it as The Zone.

In American slang, “being in the zone” implies that a person is focused and able to perform their best at something. So it’s not inappropriate for us to say that The Zone, in capital letters, is where that kind of magic happens for a team. And the important ingredient, the thing that gets teams into The Zone, is not peace and harmony and sameness—it’s engaging the tension between their perspectives, heuristics, ideas, and differences.

When we look at the history of great collaborations, we see this pattern everywhere. In fact, every successful cognitively diverse relationship takes place inside The Zone. And it’s the key to explaining our merger paradox.

At one point when they were working on their airplane, Orville and Wilbur Wright had a problem with the propeller. They needed something to propel the vehicle forward, which a spinning blade could in theory accomplish, but it was unclear how to make it work, to get the plane off the ground without sending it out of control. So, as usual, the arguments began.

They shouted back and forth at each other for weeks. They flip-flopped sides of the arguments, and eventually realized that they were both wrong. The solution wasn’t a propeller; it was two propellers, each spinning a different direction. Which is just about the perfect meta-analogy for how The Zone works.

Orville and Wilbur knew that neither was going to think up the design of an airplane by himself. Their arguments created tension that pushed them into The Zone where progress was possible.

But while arguing helped the brothers explore new intellectual territory together, it also created the danger of going too far—of devolving into real fights, or hurt feelings, like a rubber band ready to snap.

So, to keep the tension safely within The Zone, Wilbur and Orville did their little debate switcheroo. This technique helped them to decouple the arguments from their personal egos, which in turn helped them look at things from different perspectives without getting too mad. It depersonalized the conflict, ensuring that the goal was always to make progress up the mountain rather than to kill each other.

“I don’t think they really got mad,” said a mechanic who worked with them. “But they sure got awfully hot.”

In his basement studio, Robert Diggs harnessed the cognitive friction between his rappers’ diverse styles and personalities—and also the tension between his own diverse tastes—to create a new sound. By channeling the potential energy from the Clan’s rap battles into a collective goal, Diggs was able to make the hip-hop world’s most powerful rubber-band gun, so to speak. He managed to keep things inside The Zone long enough to make Wu-Tang superstars.

Diggs’s strategy of scrambling different rap styles together spilled into each individual rapper’s technique. Raekwon shared his experience of street life through culinary metaphors. Method Man mingled drug references with Green Eggs & Ham and classic Dick Van Dyke songs. Inspectah Deck reflected on gang violence, Greek philosophy, and science.

I bomb atomically

Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses

Can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries

Lyrically perform armed robbery

Flee with the lottery

Possibly they spotted me

Battle-scarred shogun, explosion when my pen hits

Tremendous, ultra-violet shine blind forensics

–Inspectah Deck, “Triumph”

At times, though, the conflict at Wu-Tang went too far. Over the years, the group fought and sparred and walked out on one another dozens and dozens of times. In 1997, as Chrysler and Daimler were crafting their merger plan, persistent infighting forced Wu-Tang to drop out of its massive tour with rock band Rage Against the Machine.

Which reminds me. What about our poor friends at DaimlerChrysler? Their relationship wasn’t nearly as volatile as Wu-Tang’s. The Germans and the Americans were different, sure, but they never got in any shouting matches.

It turns out their problem wasn’t too much conflict at all. It was the exact opposite.

7.

Any science writer who ends up writing about relationships eventually ends up at the Gottman Institute. I was no exception to the cliché when I started digging into the science of Dream Teams.

At their research center in Seattle, Drs. John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman study romantic partnerships and what makes them tick. I found them because of my interest in what makes lovers stop ticking. What causes partners who once thought that they’d be better together to call it quits?

The answer is surprising, but quite simple.

“Interaction patterns, such as disagreement and anger exchanges,” they report, “may not be harmful in the long run.” In fact, conflicts can be “predictive of improvement” in partnership satisfaction over time.

The reason is not because arguing makes us happy. It’s actually because if you’re still arguing, you’re probably still together. There’s potential energy in the rubber band you’re stretching together. If you keep talking long enough—and those arguments don’t spill over into violence—you’re going to eventually work things out.

Indeed, the biggest leading indicator that a marriage is about to end is not, in fact, when couples argue. It’s when they stop talking.

Two experiments help us connect this to our exploration of differences and teamwork. First, a group of researchers from Harvard, Berkeley, and University of Minnesota decided that they wanted to know just how much training people to be mindful of demographic diversity helped big companies with lots of employees. So they found 829 businesses that emphasized diversity training and tracked how they fared over a period of thirty-one years. In 2007 they published their surprising results. That is, that so-called diversity training programs had “no positive effects in the average workplace.” In fact, they found “in firms where training is mandatory or emphasizes the threat of lawsuits, training actually has negative effects.” Emphasizing how not to offend people who were different scared employees into disengaging.

Then in a 2015 experiment, another group of professors took a group of white men who were applying for an IT job, and separated them into two groups. Before the job interview, they told half of the men about the great efforts the company they were applying to used to focus on racial diversity. The other half weren’t told anything about that. The job applicants who’d gotten the diversity message did worse in their job interviews. Their heart rates rose. They were more nervous. They talked less. Talking about race differences made them freeze up.

And this was, according to the professors, “regardless of these men’s political ideology, attitudes toward minority groups, beliefs about the prevalence of discrimination against whites, or beliefs about the fairness of the world.”

These two experiments reveal something about human nature. Our most primal reaction when we are put together with people who aren’t like us is precisely the reaction of these test subjects. We tend to freeze. We get nervous about the tension we see coming, so we clam up. Even if we have good intentions toward other people.

A managing director who oversaw demographic diversity at one of the world’s largest banks put it well to me one night over dinner. “One of the biggest problems we have is we hire all these different kinds of people and then tell them to fit our way of thinking,” she told me. She would soon leave her job to oversee diversity at the world’s other largest bank, where the same thing would happen. “They have all this potential to add to the culture,” she said. “And you watch them slowly learn to keep quiet.” If you’re different from other people in your group, it’s incredibly easy, and incredibly common, to stop speaking up.

I tried to confirm this phenomenon myself. In 2016, I conducted a nationwide survey of employees of a hundred major US corporations. I asked these employees about the differences between themselves and their coworkers and managers—whether they were in the minority or majority in various categories like race, gender, age, experience, education, and geographic background—and then asked various questions aimed at discerning how much they were able to use their different ways of thinking at work. I then cross-referenced this with data on how innovative their companies were. The upshot of the study shouldn’t surprise us, given what we’ve been talking about. Businesses that rank high in “innovation”—the ones that grow quickly and produce game-changing products and services—tend to encourage the airing and clashing of diverse viewpoints. Not just having differences, but speaking up.

The data were persuasive. No matter how demographically diverse, organizations that let their people use their different mental tool kits are going to be more effective at finding new peaks on Problem Mountain. Companies that don’t innovate tend to make people follow a single, “approved” way of thinking. Their different kinds of people keep quiet about their different perspectives and heuristics. They break less ground than companies that encourage everyone to speak out.

And this, it turns out, was the festering sickness hidden in all those failed mergers we talked about.

In 2011, a group of professors from University of Athens decided that they wanted to see exactly how people behave after their companies go through a merger. So they found some companies that were merging, met their employees, and put tracking devices on them.

They then sat back and observed where the people went, who they interacted with, and what they said to one another. Numerous studies already supported the theory that integrating cultures was the most difficult part of a merger. But this was the first time anyone had looked at how much people from different companies actually spoke to one another.

The answer, it turned out, was not much. The professors observed that most mergers did not lead to an increase in fighting, but instead they led to an increase in something they called “organizational silence.” Basically, this is when team members don’t talk about important issues, or at all. Companies that had organizational silence developed a lack of social trust among their employees. And this led to mergers failing to live up to their potential.

Rather than deal with the discomfort of cognitive friction that comes with everyone’s different perspectives and heuristics, the people inside of most newly merged companies get quiet. And that, it turns out, is worse for business than arguing.

Organizational silence has contributed to some of the most spectacular mistakes in history. After the infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco—one of the biggest US foreign policy blunders of the twentieth century—several former cabinet members would later admit they regretted not speaking up. President John F. Kennedy’s team stood tacitly by while a gung-ho CIA persuaded the president to secretly land troops in Cuba. “In the months after the Bay of Pigs,” Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions, though my feelings of guilt were tempered by the knowledge that a course of objection would have accomplished little save to gain me a name as a nuisance.”

Imagine that once again you’re the Chris Jung of your team (hearkening back to our previous chapter about delivering the subpoena to the mob boss), the person who thinks differently among a group of similar thinkers. How much time does it take before you start holding your tongue rather than keep bringing up ideas that create conflict for the group?

Where there’s difference, there’s tension. And where there’s tension, there’s often fear. And fearful people often avoid speaking up.

This is what the employees of Chrysler and Daimler did.

In the beginning, the Germans were afraid of coming across “heavy-handed.” So they “stayed away from Detroit.” Fearing conflict, DaimlerChrysler executives were reluctant to mesh the two organizations too closely—not even the brands. Married on paper, Mercedes, Dodge, Jeep, and the rest were strangers to one another. “Schrempp . . . told himself there is no point in trying to smash these two companies together,” said Chrysler’s former vice chairman.

Chrysler’s chief, Bob Eaton, seemed withdrawn. He went weeks at a time without speaking to the head of Daimler. Whereas Eaton had once been fond of preaching what he called “participatory management,” now he seemed like he’d stopped participating altogether.

Peter Stallkamp, one of the Chrysler executives responsible for the company’s success in the ’90s before the merger, told CNBC, “The managers feared for their careers, and in the absence of assurance, they assumed the worst. There were a good eighteen months when we were being hollowed out from the core by the Germans’ inaction and our own paralysis.”

Could we really have expected this to go well?

Within a couple of years, two crucial Chrysler VPs had packed up and left for jobs at Ford. A heavy cloud hung over the organization. Managers weren’t engaged, employees weren’t engaged. All the predicted “synergy” went out the window. Things began to fall apart at DaimlerChrysler. “What happened to the dynamic, can-do cowboy culture I bought?” Jürgen Schrempp lamented.

Most of the cowboys were still there. They’d just checked out of the rodeo.

8.

If any member of the Red Army hockey dynasty can be called a “secret ingredient,” I’d argue that it’s longtime team captain Valery Vasiliev. And not for the reasons one might initially assume.

You may recall from the first chapter of this book that Vasiliev was the guy who had a heart attack during a game and kept playing. Vasiliev was a hard worker, the embodiment of the cliché “leaving it all on the rink.”

Compared to his teammates, Vasiliev could barely skate. He never scored. But his team didn’t care. Because when Vasiliev was around, they did better.

This was due, in large part, to the role Vasiliev played in sparring with their coach. Coach Tikhonov, for all his rigor and discipline, was a tyrant. He would deny the players access to their families during practice season and wouldn’t allow them to go to the funerals of loved ones. He would berate and pummel and abuse the players when they screwed up—and Vasiliev would fight back on their behalf, berating the coach when he made mistakes, too.

Fascinatingly, neither man seemed to take this stuff personally. Vasiliev would show up to practice the day after a physical fight with Tikhonov and act like nothing happened. When Tikhonov pulled the good players and made the team lose the Miracle on Ice game in the Olympics, Vasiliev allegedly choked Tikhonov on the bus.

“Tikhonov knew Vasiliev would push back, do what these great captains do,” says Wall Street Journal sports journalist and author Sam Walker. It was part of the process. “It wasn’t a personal thing; it was about the team.”

The Red Army didn’t just benefit from the cognitive friction of its coaches’ diverse stylistic inputs—the dance and ninja training, the marathon skating drills. They also benefited from the constant tension between coach and captain in the name of bettering the team.

Keith Yamashita, the founder of SYPartners and coach to Oprah and Steve Jobs whom we met earlier, likes to talk about how “micro-actions add up.” A hundred small instances of being included as part of the group can lead to organizational trust, and even explain how people like Tikhonov and Vasiliev could fight like they did and still work together. They never stopped engaging each other in the name of the cause. On the other hand, a hundred small occasions of being ignored or excluded—even if each occasion on its own is innocent or not a big deal—leads us to feel like outsiders, perhaps even hated. The team member who sits on the bench, doesn’t get the high five, doesn’t get asked for input may as well be a ghost.

This is why research by Gallup shows that when a manager ignores his or her people, the chances of those people being “actively disengaged” are a whopping 40 percent. And, as writes Gallup’s Tom Rath in his book StrengthsFinder 2.0, “Having a manager who ignores you is even more detrimental than having a manager who primarily focuses on your weaknesses.”

The Red Army didn’t have that problem. And neither did Wu-Tang.

In terms of self-destructive potential, Wu-Tang’s merger of nine volatile personalities far outstripped DaimlerChrysler’s “merger of equals.” And yet despite the arguments, despite walking out on shows, despite some very public brawls over money, Wu-Tang managed to produce seven albums together over twenty-five years. There was no organizational silence. They were the family that never truly fell apart, because they kept coming back to hash things out.

And as uncomfortable as the infighting was, Diggs recognized that it was this very friction that made them powerful.

“When steel rubs against steel,” RZA said, “it makes both blades sharper.”

9.

The 1983 movie Shaolin and Wu Tang opens with a dojo scene. Students from two rival schools are tussling. One is Shaolin, which specializes in a secret fist technique. The other is Wu Tang: masters of a secret sword strategy.

Both masters throw in the towel early. “Don’t show him too much!” the Shaolin master warns. The elders are less afraid of losing than they are of the kids giving away their secrets.

Before long, the bad guy, the evil Qing Lord, learns about the schools’ secret techniques through his spies. Realizing that they pose a threat to his power, the Qing Lord hatches a plan to eliminate them. He holds a martial arts contest, hoping that each dojo will destroy the other.

But the two rival kids from act 1 get wind of what the Qing Lord is up to. They join forces. When they combine their unique heuristics—the Shaolin fist and the Wu Tang sword—they create a deadly combination. The Qing Lord is appropriately defeated.

“You’re genius to have mixed the two!” the empress tells the young warriors in the final scene.

Robert Diggs didn’t just mix two techniques. He mixed nine of them. And in kung fu tradition, each of his nine master rappers mixed various styles, foreign ideas, and non-musical metaphors into his own musical process.

A decade after bringing the Wu-Tang Clan together, Diggs could finally afford to travel the seven thousand miles that lie between New York City and the real Shaolin. He could finally afford to see the real Wu Tang Mountain.

“When we stood on this mountain and looked up at the range of peaks called the Nine Dragons, this is what we saw,” he recalled. “Three mountains forming a giant ‘W’—the symbol I chose to represent a crew of nine men, nine years earlier. It was as plain as day, and has been for a million years. But some things aren’t visible until you’re truly ready to see them.”

Diggs’s obsessions gave him a unique set of perspectives when he looked at his own mountain—the mountain he and his brothers would have to climb if they were ever going to get out of the projects.

Kung fu taught Diggs that friction sharpens our mental weapons, and that those weapons are more powerful together than alone. Spiritual mathematics had taught him that seemingly conflicting things can combine to form something wonderful. And chess taught him, like Valery Vasiliev and the Wright brothers, to depersonalize conflict in the name of getting better.

“The most important thing is to realize that the problem is on the board,” Diggs would reminisce. “It’s not with you.”

As we can see, there’s enormous potential energy in diverse perspectives and heuristics. But we can’t unlock that energy unless we knock our heads together. Dream Teams, in other words, predictably require tension.

It’s a compelling idea—the power of The Zone. But as Diggs learned, as Daimler learned, as the Wright Brothers learned, making our cognitive diversity work for us isn’t easy. So often, the same tension that can lead to progress instead leads to destruction or inertia because we can’t handle our differences.

The problem—and, as I would soon discover, also the solution—lies in a tiny cluster of cells at the center of our brains.

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Stay tuned for the next free chapter of Dream Teams next month!

Make a great day—

Shane

P.S. Though my latest research revolves around adaptation and change, I’m still speaking about Dream Teams at conferences and leadership offsites. If you know a group that could use this message, check out my speaking page here.

I eventually scheduled the interview I wanted. But then Wu Tang’s publicist told me this:

“You know who you really want to talk to for your business writing is this poet I represent...”

Uh huh.

I for sure thought she was just trying to upsell me on publicizing more of her clients. But I wanted the Wu Tang interview to actually happen, so I said yes.

Turns out my interview with the poet—his name is Sekou Andrews—was even more interesting than the Wu Tang interviews. (And they’re hard to beat!)

Sekou is a full time poet, which as he puts it, is like telling people you’re “a full time mermaid.” He uses the art of spoken word poetry to make business and leadership messages stick. He applies poetry techniques to public speaking (which he trains CEOs to do).

And he… well, I may as well stop right here and let Sekou explain in his own words, because I just interviewed him again for this week’s fascinating episode of The Art Of The Zag.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Why Nike enlisted Sekou to help them in an ongoing effort to transform their culture and customer approach—and how he used poetry to make a big impact.

• How science-backed techniques from poetry and storytelling break through the clutter in our noisy media environment, and get people to put down their phones and pay attention.

• A whole lotta wisdom that will leave you energized all day after you listen to this!

There’s a reason I’ve stayed in touch with Sekou all these years, and it’s because he’s the kind of person who embodies what I care about: thinking differently, so we can help people become the best version of themselves.

Have a listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Youtube, and I’d love to hear what you think!

Make a great day—

Shane

I was part of a private Signal group of CEOs, started by a prominent investor who had invested in all of our companies. People posted occasionally about tech industry news or job openings. But on this day, our shared investor posted this:

“If you have money in Silicon Valley Bank, get it out now.”

(I’m paraphrasing, because the message has since disappeared.)

A scramble of questions ensued, along with reports from these CEOs after they’d successfully withdrawn from their SVB bank accounts. I didn’t bank with SVB, so I wasn’t faced with the moral dilemma of contributing to a run on the bank versus the rational self interest of not getting screwed.

Within two days, SVB went under.

This is the topic of this week’s The Art Of The Zag, with Dr. David Schoorman:

Listen to the whole episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch on Youtube.

Ignorance Is Emotional Bliss

Depending on who you ask, 85 to 94% of Americans trust their banks. Compared to trust in media (which 28% of Americans do) and trust in the overall US government (which only 17% do), banks are killing it in the trust department.

Until they don’t.

Economists widely believe Silicon Valley Bank could have pulled through its rough financial situation had it not been for the unprecedented speed at which the tech bros in Signal threads like mine had pulled their money out.

SVB’s business problems didn’t kill it; panic killed it.

Runs on the bank are a dramatic example of the subtle psychology of trust that most humans don’t consciously grasp. I say this with confidence because it was only a few months ago that scientific research has properly broken down this psychology. In 2025, Dr. David Schoorman of Purdue University (whose groundbreaking work on trust psychology I wrote about a few years ago here) and colleagues published a paper in Academy of Management Review about “The Experience Of Vulnerability In Trusting Relationships.” Whereas Schoorman’s previous work broke down the psychology of how we decide to trust people and institutions, this new research delves into how we blow it in relationships where we’ve already decided to trust someone.

A bank is a perfect example. If you’ve put your money in, you’ve made a tangible decision to trust. You are vulnerable to the bank losing your money. But you trust that it won’t.

Once we have decided to trust in this way, we humans are pretty locked in. It takes a full-on betrayal to drop our trusting stance.

Or, Dr. Schoorman’s research finds, we just have to feel the emotion of ANXIETY.

We usually think of trust being broken by the one we trust—aka the “trustee”—Schoorman explained to me in an interview. But much of the time trust is dropped by the trustor—the one who chose to trust in the first place. Schoorman and his colleagues, Gary A. Ballinger of University of Virginia and Kinshuk Sharma of University of North Texas, modeled out how this occurs over a series of exercises.

“We can show the circumstances that may cause a trustor to bail out on a relationship,” Schoorman explained. “The model shows how processing new information about ability, benevolence and integrity can cause increases in hope and especially fear and lead to a premature decision to exit the relationship.”

A premature decision to exit the relationship is the perfect way to describe what customers of Silicon Valley Bank did… which tanked the bank.

If Wall Street analysts are correct, had people not exited the relationship, Silicon Valley Bank wouldn’t have tanked at all.

So what happened? According to Schoorman’s model, anxiety happened. And that anxiety was because of transparency.

If your bank is having business problems, Schoorman explains, “Your bank may be sharing that information with its investors and in turn the investors are spreading the bad news on social media,” Schoorman explained. “This increases the perceived risk of your investment and produces increases in fear which may lead you to withdraw your money.”

If instead your bank wasn’t as transparent about its problems (say, until it had solutions worked out), the panic wouldn’t have happened.

And this brings us to the thing in this newsletter I’m planning on getting more than usual number of angry replies about: location tracking.

Why Tracking Your Partner’s Location (Or Your Employees’ Work) Destroys Trust

Dr. Schoorman recently applied what I’m calling The Trustor Bailout Model to his own university students’ romantic relationships. He polled students about how many of them tracked their partner’s phone location. More than 80 percent did so, he said, citing safety as the main reason.

However, after digging in, Schoorman said, “Many were willing to admit that there was an element of control that they wanted to have.”

Regardless, here’s how location tracking erodes relationship trust:

1. The person being tracked knows they’re being tracked and goes about their life. Everything is fine. They are in a relationship where they are trusted.

2. Then the person doing the tracking checks their partner’s location, and what they see causes them to feel anxiety.

3. The Tracker—aka the trustor—then starts asking questions, driven by the anxiety, having lowered their trust in the trustee because of the story the trustor writes in their own head about what they’ve seen in the tracking app.

4. The person being tracked gets angry, believing that their partner is no longer trusting them like they used to.

5. Fun ensues.

Examining this situation impartially, you can see that additional information caused the trustor to lower their trust.

Schoorman reports that students who took the challenge of deleting their tracking apps “felt much better about their relationship since they stopped tracking.”

And the same goes for bosses who track their employees’ time rather than letting people self-report. A boss who can zero in on detailed tracking information is likely to lower their trust when their brain has to fill in a story about activity they don’t understand, which starts a downward spiral in the employer-employee relationship.

Some But Not All Transparency Is Good For Trust

This is a hard one to grapple with emotionally. I don’t like the idea of less transparency in my relationships. But the research is clear: information transparency often ruins trust when it doesn’t need to. (Or more specifically, we often feel fear and screw up our relationships when we get information transparency.)

There’s good news, though. This is not an either/or situation.

It turns out that like other virtues, transparency is good—and only good—when tempered with wisdom.

What does it mean to temper something with wisdom? It means that we bring in other virtues to weigh in on the dilemma. I have a gigantic nerdy essay on this here, but the habit I recommend is to take your list of values, and ask how they should balance out your decision.

E.g.

• How would the virtue of kindness affect this decision around transparency?

• How would the virtue of courage affect this decision around transparency?

• How would the virtue of integrity affect this decision around transparency?

Weighing the decision of how much to disclose publicly about SVB’s business situation through these different lenses might have led to the conclusion that waiting until there was an action plan for solving the bank’s problems before outlining them in detail would lead to the least amount of harm to customers. (Of course, with banks we have the complicating factor of the law requiring certain disclosures; but I have a hard time believing SVB couldn’t have done more here… methinks that hubris was afoot in this case. And they did end up getting bailed out so…)

More important than all this, in my opinion, is the notion that we should take our responsibility as Trustors more seriously. If we panic and lower our trust in people we’ve already decided to trust, it’s our fault when the relationship starts spiraling.

Maybe just don’t check your partner’s location. If you trust them, why do you need to?

Listen to our new The Art Of The Zag episode on the psychology of trust Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch on Youtube.

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Food for thought that I’m going to keep chewing on myself.

Make a great day—

Shane

tl/dr: Check out our awesome new episode of The Art Of The Zag on Nir Eyal’s new book Beyond Belief! Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Youtube.

Author Nir Eyal wins the award among my friends for “Most Likely To Say Yeah, But Does This Scientific Study Hold Up When You Try It Again?”

It’s a nerdy award for sure. But Nir is one of my favorite writers specifically because of how effectively he applies this skeptical lens to psychology and human behavior.

Needless to say, I was quite surprised a few months ago when he announced this new book with a bunch of heavenly rays shooting out of the word “BELIEF”:

Some would say that “science” and “belief” are opposites.

At first glance, it might sound woo-woo, but in fact, Beyond Belief is the opposite. It’s about the neuroscience and psychology of how beliefs alter our perceptions, and it’s endlessly fascinating.

Which is why Joe Lazer and I interviewed Nir for The Art Of The Zag. You should definitely buy the book, but if you want a taste of what’s in store, check out this week’s episode, where you’ll find out:

• How placebo pills are getting more effective in our society (and why they are so effective conditions like IBS, pain, and anxiety).

• How the stories we tell ourselves literally alter what our eyes see and our ears hear.

• Why therapy often doesn’t work, and how the “labels” we put on ourselves and others often hold us back.

• How understanding how belief works at a scientific level can change your relationships in work and in life.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Youtube.

Also, this is the first of surely many podcast recordings where both my kid and dog invaded the room mid-interview. But like the true heroes we are, we all took it in stride!

Keep on believing. I hope you make a great day!

–Shane

Re-reading and revising this chapter of Dream Teams 8 years later during this fraught time in the United States gave me chills more than once. I would dare say the “math” of cognitive diversity is more important to understand and appreciate than ever—even as the mere idea of being different or speaking up against the “approved” way of thinking is being slandered and crushed under the boots of bullies. Please share this along!

P.S. If you missed them, read the Foreword here and Chapter 1 here.

Buddy Cops & Mountain Tops

1.

The Chicago detectives were in Baltimore, of all places, investigating a train robbery (of all things!) when they learned about the plot to kill their hometown congressman.

It was February and cold outside the office bearing the name “John H. Hutchinson, Stock Broker” on South Street near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The office was a front—a temporary headquarters for agents of Hutchinson’s private detective firm. The firm specialized in fraud and corporate espionage, particularly for clients who wanted to keep things quiet.

Hutchinson’s detectives had inhabited this secret office for several weeks now. They were there at the behest of the president of a local railroad company, a man named Samuel Felton. He’d hired them to look into a rumor about a plot to ruin him by disrupting millions of dollars of train cargo. Local politics were tense in Baltimore at the time, and Felton had feared “an extensive and organized conspiracy” that included members of the city police, or even higher up. Paranoid as he was, Felton decided to hire outsiders to suss out whether the rumors had merit, before involving authorities.

And when it came to that sort of thing, Hutchinson was the best. A classic entrepreneur, he was a school dropout with a knack for solving puzzles. This led him to become a police detective, then to open a private firm. After ten years in operation, Hutchinson still personally masterminded most high-profile jobs.

For the Baltimore Railroad case, he had also staffed his finest crew:

Detective Webster was the principal investigator on the case. He was a tall British immigrant, with curly hair and a beard that can be best described as “hipster.” Webster was tough and experienced and unafraid to kick down a door or jump from a moving train—as he once did while chasing a fleeing suspect. A family man with four kids, he’d earned his stripes as an NYPD officer for over a decade.

Webster’s counterpart, Detective Warne, on the other hand, was sly, charismatic, and twenty-eight years old. Where Webster was a decisive man of action, Warne was the agency’s smooth talker and master of disguise—thin and chameleonlike, with a knack for getting people to cough up information.

The two had been chasing down Felton’s railroad conspiracy at various Baltimore PD haunts for a month when they overheard a rumor that sent them racing back to base. In the course of that month, they had determined that a group of corrupt officials and politically disenfranchised socialites indeed had it out for Felton. But as far as they could tell, the group had done little but talk trash about him and other high-profile figures in Baltimore.

Webster, who knew how to relate to police officers, had been buddying up with off-duty drunks at local cop bars. Meanwhile, Warne was spending evenings in disguise at elite social hangouts, eavesdropping on the conversations of potential conspirators. In this manner, the two pieced together the troubling details of what was really afoot:

Basically, it was terrorism. The group, frustrated at the state of national politics that they felt was leaving Baltimore behind, wanted to send a message: the government had failed. “Look at our city,” one conspirator confided, “and tell me if we are not going to ruin.” They’d considered several ways to draw attention to this point, like ruining Felton’s railroad line. But the group had recently cooked up plans to do something much less subtle: assassinate a high-profile congressman who would soon be passing through town.

The congressman—a popular but polarizing Republican—was the perfect target. He represented everything these extremists hated about the current state of politics. They suspected that his death, while shocking, would spark the dialogue they desired. They’d then knock off Maryland’s governor for good measure. Each would die as an example, one conspirator said, of a “traitor to God and this country.”

The conspiracy reached high. A police captain named Ferrandini had vowed that the out-of-state congressman would “die in this city.” And police chief George Kane, who was sympathetic to the extremists’ cause, was willing to turn a blind eye.

The congressman had made public plans to travel among the citizens—by train—from Illinois to Washington, with a series of speaking events scheduled en route. After stopping at Columbus, Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg, he would board a train to Baltimore. There a driver would take him to the Eutaw House, where he would deliver a short speech. After the speech, the driver would take him to a train station a mile away, for a final leg to Washington, DC.

Although it’s customary in America for local police to provide an armed escort for visiting politicians—often a showy spectacle of blocked roads and sirens—the plan was for Chief Kane to claim at the last minute that he could not spare any officers to meet the congressman’s entourage at the train station. The man and his personal detail would be on their own.

The conspirators would post agents along the route, sending word of the congressman’s progress toward Baltimore. They had choreographed a “street fight” to break out as he passed through the vestibule at the train station to meet his driver. The fight would distract the transit security. Simultaneously, a mob of faux commuters would swarm the area. Several of these would be armed men—including at least one police officer—who would proceed to gun down the congressman and his entourage.

When he reviewed Webster’s and Warne’s intel, Hutchinson spiraled into anxiety. This was much bigger than railroad sabotage indeed. They needed to alert some proper authorities. But how far up did the conspiracy go? Hutchinson dispatched Warne to alert the congressman and advise he go straight to Washington and skip the speaking tour.

But the congressman deliberated: given the current climate, canceling all these speeches could be politically disastrous. And tipping off the terrorists now would make them harder to catch later. Still, evidence of the murder plot was compelling. He asked Warne: Could they discreetly get him to DC after his final event in Harrisburg—and leave authorities out of it?

Hutchinson reluctantly agreed, understanding that any leak could hamper an investigation into the wider conspiracy. But he was nervous. This was not corporate espionage. It was life and death. And anyone could be a conspirator.

Except for Mr. Felton, Hutchinson decided. He’d enlisted them to investigate these corrupt officials in the first place. He had to be clean. Now it was their turn to enlist him.

So, with Felton’s help, the detectives devised a plan.

On the night of the planned murder, after a packed speaking event in Harrisburg, the Republican from Illinois’s Seventh District excused himself to his hotel room. He donned the disguise that Warne had prepared for him—a felt hat and slouchy overcoat—and exited the hotel alone through a back entrance. Hutchinson and a bodyguard met him there and accompanied him to the midnight train to Philly. Warne was waiting, having reserved a car for their “family,” whose “invalid brother” needed special assistance.

While changing trains in Philadelphia, the disguised congressman stumbled through the station, playing the part of the disabled brother marvelously. The conspirators who camped out to alert the gang ahead didn’t notice as the group crossed the station and boarded the next train to Baltimore.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Hutchinson’s crew were busy altering train routes. They’d secretly arranged for the earlier train to Baltimore to travel slower, and along a side track. This allowed the congressman’s train to accelerate and arrive in Baltimore well ahead of schedule.

They arrived early, as planned. Again, no one noticed the “invalid” in the cowboy hat as he transferred with his “family”—to an early train to DC.

Captain Ferrandini and his assassination gang were still waiting outside the Baltimore station as the train left for Washington. The disguised congressman passed through right under their noses.

Detective Warne stayed awake all night as the train clattered past Fort Meade, Glendale, and Landover Hills. The congressman snoozed as his car crossed the Anacostia River and pulled into the station. Then he woke up and stepped out into the drizzly DC morning.

Where he, Abraham Lincoln, was inaugurated the sixteenth president of the United States.

2.

We’re going to start our adventure in the science of breakthrough teamwork with cops—small partnerships that have to solve big problems. Because what makes good policework work illustrates the foundational principle upon which Dream Teams operate. This will prepare us to explore all sorts of other kinds of teams, from bands to businesses to armies to social movements.

The foiling of the “Baltimore Plot” to assassinate Lincoln is an excellent case study for us to begin with: We had two groups of collaborators. One was outnumbered, outgunned, and out of time. The other was large, connected, and coordinated. Beating the odds required Hutchinson, Felton, Warne, and Webster to conduct a last-minute symphony, solving a series of problems in a variety of clever ways. They wore disguises, ferreted out the enemy’s plans, and orchestrated delicate logistics to save a life—and potentially a nation. And they had to do it all in secret.

In fact, even the name John H. Hutchinson itself was an alias. His real name is one you may have heard: Allan Pinkerton. After the Baltimore Plot, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency become one of the most famous in history.

Which reminds me, there’s something else that I need to tell you.

There’s something about that charismatic, disguise-loving, twenty-eight-year-old whose work was instrumental to saving Lincoln’s life that’s germane to our exploration of breakthrough collaboration. It’s something that will help us understand the first and most fundamental component of Dream Teams.

It’s that if you’re like most people, you probably thought Detective Warne was a man.

But she wasn’t.

3.

Let us face reality. If the credibility of the FBI is to be maintained in the eyes of the public, the lawbreaker, fugitive, deserter, et cetera, and if we are to continue a flexible, mobile, ready-for-anything force of Special Agents, we must continue to limit the position to males.

—J. Edgar Hoover (March 11, 1971)

4.

Kate Warne was the first female detective we know about in US history. But it took a long time for there to be many more.

Women weren’t allowed to join police departments until thirty years after the Baltimore Plot. It wasn’t until even later that police departments assigned any women to be detectives. And the FBI didn’t hire a single female agent until 1972.

The ranks of women law enforcement agents did not swell, in America at least. At the time of this writing, only 15 percent of active duty police officers identified themselves as women, and women made up just 20 percent of FBI agents. This is despite what retired FBI agent and University of Northern Florida professor Ellen Glasser points out: “Half of criminal justice students in college are women.”

The common explanation for why is a simple one, as another former FBI agent put it to me: Generally speaking, women do not have the same strength as men.

For better or worse, this is a biology thing, not an equality thing. The Centers for Disease Control’s most recent data found that 89 percent of adult men are stronger than 89 percent of adult women. The Journal of Applied Physiology reports that men have an average of 40 percent more upper-body strength than women. And if two random strangers of the opposite sex decide to have a leg-kicking contest on the street, there’s only a tiny chance that the woman will win.

The following chart shows the grip strength, a common proxy for overall strength, of men versus women by age:

Genetics say that women are—on average—not going to be quite as good at chasing bad guys, punching bad guys, or intimidating bad guys with their size. That’s one of the reasons that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover didn’t let women become agents at all. “The Special Agent in his appearance, approach, and conduct must create the impression to his adversary that among other qualities he is intrepid, forceful, aggressive, dominant, and resolute,” Hoover wrote. The other reason for excluding females was unity. Hoover’s army of agents needed to march to the same beat to be an effective team. “We must put up the best front possible,” he explained.

And you know what? That’s okay. It turns out that some jobs, like law enforcement, are just better suited for men. Kate Warne was nothing but a rare anomaly of a female on a law enforcement Dream Team. She is by far the exception to the rule.

Except, it turns out that Hoover was wrong, and all that stuff in those last two paragraphs is garbage.

The story of FBI special agent Chris Jung and a Newark mafia boss shows us why.

5.

The morning sun reflected off the garbage floating in the bend of the Passaic River that formed the city limits of Newark, New Jersey. Horns blared and street hustlers hustled as bell-bottomed commuters poured into the cluster of office buildings on the river’s western shore. Inside one of those buildings, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were planning a raid.

Well, sort of. They were planning something. They weren’t sure what.

Nineteen seventies Newark was run by syndicates of a handful of Italian American crime families. The Lucchese family was known for controlling the newspaper delivery and kosher meat unions. The Genovese family was famous for its founder, “Lucky” Luciano. And then of course there was the DeCavalcante crime family, whose de facto boss is said to be the basis for the character Tony in HBO’s The Sopranos. They controlled the city’s gambling parlors, its piers, its garbage collection, and its murder.

Mafia bosses are hard to get into a courtroom. But in the spring of ’74, the FBI had dug up some dirt involving one of the big bosses. (The FBI agents I interviewed were willing to tell me this story but not the name of which mob boss it was. So we’ll just call him Mr. Lombardi.)

The dirt was dirty enough to subpoena Lombardi, or force him to appear in court to testify.

But there was a problem. The law required that subpoenas be delivered in person, by hand. Once you received the subpoena, you’re required by law to appear in court, or you could be arrested. And if you were a mob boss who appeared in court, you were suddenly in a lot of danger. Of saying something you shouldn’t—or worse, of another mobster getting worried that you were going to.

The mob had figured out by this time that one of the best ways to stay out of prison or the Passaic was to avoid being summoned to court in the first place. If a subpoena never got delivered, it couldn’t be enforced. So they’d developed a simple, but effective strategy: surround the boss with enough layers of bodyguards that no cop could ever talk to him in person. Thus, the Newark crime heads of the 1970s were able to move about town in style and yet remain untouchable.

Lombardi knew the FBI would love to see him in court, so his operation kept special track of the agents in Newark’s organized crime squad. And anyone a mafia guard didn’t know would get stopped upon approach, until identity was verified and permission granted.

Agents at the bureau had been scratching their heads for weeks about how to get close enough to Lombardi to deliver the subpoena. They’d tried ambushing him while he was out at lunch, but bodyguards had blocked the way. They needed a better plan.

A dozen special agents and the supervisor of the Organized Crime Squad had convened in a war room to brainstorm new ideas. They had decided that there needed to be some sort of raid. The problem is that a subpoena is a request, not an arrest. You can’t really deliver a subpoena at gunpoint because you can’t shoot someone for preventing you from delivering paperwork.

Around and around the agents went. Every idea for how to coerce, intimidate, or blast their way past Lombardi’s bodyguards was a no-go.

That’s when the rookie from another department, Chris Jung, raised her hand. The Organized Crime Squad had invited her as a guest because they were out of ideas. They were willing to consider almost anything at this point.

The male agents turned their heads when she spoke up. “Mr. Lombardi’s daughter is getting married in two weeks,” she pointed out.

And that gave her an idea.

Two weeks later, a chauffeured black car pulled up to the wedding palace where the Lombardi family was celebrating their daughter’s reception. Out of the car stepped an elegant woman in heels and a purple high-necked gown.

The security guards couldn’t help but notice Ms. Jung as she walked confidently into the reception hall. Like she had predicted at the squad meeting, the guards did nothing to stop her. That a gorgeously dressed woman like her might be a federal agent occurred to no one on an occasion like this. None of the staff questioned whether she’d been invited.

Once inside, the job was simple. Jung made a beeline to the front of the reception line, where the happy couple and their families greeted guests. The bride looked beautiful. Next to her, the father of the bride—Mr. Lombardi himself—beamed.

Until Jung stepped in front of him and handed him the subpoena papers.

“Enjoy your night,” she said.

The man stared at her as she turned and walked out. As she exited the building, the mob boss began to howl.

The chauffeur, a fellow special agent, was waiting with the engine running. “I think I ruined the wedding,” Jung said.

Anticlimactic? Yes.

But that, it turns out, is the point.

6.

Here’s a statistic that might surprise you. Women make up 12 percent of American cops but only 2 percent of police shootings.

Curiously, this doesn’t seem to lower the success rates of female officers. Cop for cop, women seem to be just as good at stopping crimes as men.

It’s just that female cops are six times less likely to shoot someone.

Even more dramatic, female officers are eight times less likely to use excessive force than male officers, according to studies by the National Center for Women and Policing. Police partnerships with female officers in them make fewer mistakes and, on average, solve problems with less collateral damage.

Wearing a fancy dress to deliver a subpoena doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as a SWAT team raid. Neither does putting a floppy hat on a congressman for a midnight train ride. But both of our stories about female crime fighters erode a common misconception about law enforcement: that the job is about bullets and muscle.

It turns out that fighting crime usually isn’t about fighting at all. We could cherry-pick all sorts of anecdotes about times when the day was saved by cops literally punching people (as television often depicts), but what happened in the case of the FBI and Mr. Lombardi is how it works most of the time. “The nature of the work,” says former FBI assistant director Janice Fedarcyk, is primarily about “good judgment and problem-solving skills.” And according to FBI reports, women in police departments and intelligence bureaus are on average more successful than men at de-escalating dangerous situations without the use of force.

All of this begs a couple of questions, however: If it’s true that law enforcement is about good judgment and problem solving, why would women tend to screw up less than men? Men are intelligent, too. Furthermore, if it’s true that women do so well at this kind of work, why do we still have so few female law enforcement agents?

It turns out that both of these questions have the same answer.

On former US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assistant director Kathleen Kiernan’s office desk sits a closed padlock. It’s there for an analogy she’s used hundreds of times when explaining why women succeed in law enforcement.

If she hands you the padlock and asks you to break into it, she says that more often than not, “Men will figure out how to tactically compromise it, break it, subvert it, all those kinds of things.”

But instead of trying to physically tackle the lock, she says, most women will initially try to find the key or figure out a way to psychologically compromise the person who has it.

This, Kiernan insists, is the way most women in law enforcement work. Most of them haven’t spent their lives assuming they can default to muscles to solve problems, so they use tools like negotiation and communication before they resort to force. And often that turns out to be a better way.

During her thirty years at the NYPD, Denise Thomas, one of the first black women to become a Brooklyn homicide detective, was revered by fellow cops. She policed high school violence, solved decades-old murder cases, and busted bad guys in the Marcy Projects back when JAY-Z was there selling crack. And most of the time, she told me, it was psychological work. “You have to have a knack for dealing with people,” she says. The job is not to fight, but to disarm the fight. “You have to defuse the situation and talk them down.”

Agent after agent, cop after cop told me variations on this same theme. As a young local police officer, Fedarcyk told me, it became clear to her that because “women do not have the same upper body strength as men, I had to develop my communication skills to learn to deflate a situation that could escalate.”

Think back to Chris Jung and the mob boss. The male agents went in circles trying to come up with ways to barge their way through Mr. Lombardi’s bodyguards. And Jung put on a ball gown and walked right in. It was an obvious strategy in retrospect, but it never occurred to the men. To the one woman in the room, it was a no-brainer.

So why don’t more women make the leap from criminal justice school to law enforcement? Some said the reason was women don’t think they’re going to be able to beat men up. Others said women dislike the boys’-club culture that surrounds law enforcement or the violent ethos of American law enforcement generally. But not being able to beat men up is also exactly what helps women to fight crime smarter.

And that’s not because female officers are bad with guns. In fact, during the Lombardi case, Jung happened to be the number one marksman in the FBI. She was the first to get a perfect score on the FBI’s timed firearms test and became the head firearms instructor for the bureau.

Despite this, in her mind, firearms were simply part of a larger strategic tool kit. “We probably are more prone to pull a gun than a man would be,” Jung says, “but not necessarily to use it.”

While I was interviewing all these detectives about their teamwork dynamics, American newspaper headlines were reporting a depressing amount of police violence. Bad cops were killing unarmed people. Good cops were being killed. And as I write this revised version, masked secret police have been recently beating and killing citizens and our migrant neighbors in Minneapolis. Race and hate are factors in all of this. The country then was—and once again is—experiencing a backlash to a state of law enforcement overreach, and human beings on both sides of the badge are suffering.

In this violent context, everything we’ve explored so far leads to an inevitable conclusion. If we want to do a better job at law enforcement and reduce violence, the simplest solution is to make all our law enforcement officers women. All indications say that crime-fighting organizations would get better if they got rid of the men.

Except no. If we did that, it turns out, we’d have another problem.

7.

Pretend that you are having a housewarming party, and you’ve invited your eight best friends. You’ve baked a delicious round cake, and because you love your friends equally, you want to cut it into eight equal pieces for them.

But there’s a catch: the knife you are using, for whatever reason, is going to break after you make three cuts. How do you slice the cake into eight equal pieces in just three moves?

If you’re like most people, you probably first cut the cake in half vertically:

Then you cut it in half horizontally:

And then, again, if you’re like most people, you’ll start making a third and final cut diagonally before realizing that this only makes six slices of cake:

So what do you do?

At this point, you might try to get fancy and diagram out some funny-looking cake slices, but then you’ll remember that the pieces have to be equal for your friends to know you love them the same.

There is a simple answer, though. It just requires changing your point of view.

The solution is to go ahead and make the first two cuts, creating four slices of cake, and then to turn your head and look at the cake sideways:

And cut it all the way through.

This little puzzle illustrates something important. It shows us in a very literal way a simple truth, that sometimes the best way to solve a problem requires looking at it from a different angle. In other words, to change perspective.

Perspective is built by how we uniquely experience the world. A bystander who sees a building on fire might perceive what’s happening very differently from a firefighter, or from a person who once had his house burn down. When you ask tall people what makes for a good airline, most of them will tell you “legroom,” while short people will tell you “elbow room.” Neither answer is incorrect in this case, depending on whether you see the world from six inches higher off the ground.

Perspective is one dimension of every person’s mental tool kit. To introduce the other dimension, we return to our housewarming party for another puzzle.

Pretend that next to the cake at your kitchen table are six glasses lined up in a row. The first three glasses are full of milk. The next three are empty. Like so:

Now, say I asked you to move the glasses so that the full and empty cups alternate. But there’s a catch: you can only move one glass.

Can you do it?

For most people, this one is a bigger head-scratcher than the cake. Most of us try to move the second glass of milk to sit in between two empty glasses, only to realize that it still leaves two full glasses next to each other.

If you’re still stumped, try this:

Pretend that I asked you to solve this same puzzle, but that I also told you to pretend that you had to use the technique of a chemist to do it.

If you were stumped before, at this point the answer may have suddenly become obvious.

Pour the milk from the second glass into the second to last glass, and put the glass back.

This puzzle helps us understand the second dimension of a person’s mental tool kit: something called heuristics. If perspective is how we see a problem, heuristics are how we go about solving it. You can think of heuristics as “rules of thumb” or problem-solving strategies.

The way a chemist’s brain instinctively attempts the milk puzzle is likely going to be different than the way, say, a forklift operator’s brain does. This isn’t to say that forklift operators wouldn’t be able to solve the milk puzzle. What it says is that if you move objects around all day with a forklift, your first strategy for rearranging glasses of milk is likely going to be different than if your job is to pour liquids in and out of containers all day.

These two parts of our mental tool kit—perspective and heuristics—go hand in hand. And they explain what’s actually important when it comes to working together in law enforcement—and what’s really at play in our study of gender and cops.

To understand what I mean, let’s look at the following diagram of a mountain:

This mountain range represents the set of potential solutions to a hypothetical problem. Each peak represents a different solution. The higher the peak, the better the solution. Every problem in life or work can be represented by its own unique mountain range like this, with varying quality of solutions.

As you can see, some solutions to our hypothetical problem are not as good as others. And in this case there is one best solution—the highest peak in the middle.

Unfortunately, when we’re exploring real problems, it is as if we were hiking through fog. We can’t actually see the entire mountain range. This means that when we find a peak—a solution that works—we don’t know if we’re at the top of the range or just the top of one mountain. We have to decide whether to continue exploring for a better solution.

And here’s where our cake analogy comes back. Where we start out on the mountain—and what part of it we can see—depends on our perspective. It’s like getting dropped off by helicopter at a particular spot on the range:

Now that we’re here, we need a strategy—or heuristic—to help us explore for solutions.

Let’s say you have one mountain heuristic, and it is to march in one direction until the mountain stops going up, and then to climb down the other side for five hundred paces. If the slope turns back uphill by then, you keep hiking, upward until you reach the next peak. But if you go downhill for five hundred paces and the slope keeps going down, you turn around and hike up to the last highest point you found.

As we can see, your perspective and heuristic helped you find a decent solution, but little did you know there were other, better solutions out there.

This is where teamwork can help. Say you’re working with someone who shares a similar perspective on the problem you’re working on. He’ll get dropped off at the same place on the mountain range as you originally did.

But let’s say that your teammate has a different mountain-climbing heuristic than yours. His strategy is to hike until he reaches the trough between two mountains, and then to go up whichever one is steepest. Using this technique, he might continue past you and find that the next mountain over has a higher peak.

It turns out that our teammate’s diverse heuristic allowed him to find a better solution. He then calls down from his mountain peak at this point, and you join him.

This is how group work often happens. Whoever in the group has the best heuristic will eventually find the best solution, and the group (hopefully) follows it. This is why we put people with different specialties together—such as pairing a design expert and a programming expert together to build a website.

With this strategy, however, eventually your group will run into a problem. No matter how many people are in your crew, if you all start on the mountain from a similar perspective, the group will eventually get stuck together on one peak.

But this is where something interesting can happen.

When you introduce someone with a different perspective, it’s like she is getting dropped off on a different part of the mountain range altogether. She sees it from a point of view that the rest of the group doesn’t.

So let’s say this happens. One of your team members shows up with a very different perspective of your mountain range. Even if she has the same heuristics as you (say you went to mountain climbing school together) and explores the mountain using your “five hundred paces” strategy, she might end up finding a better solution simply because she started in a different place.

But even if she doesn’t end up finding a better solution than the rest of the group, her vantage point offers the group an opportunity. The group can now play with different combinations of perspectives and heuristics to test if there are higher peaks to be found. In this case, the heuristic of hiking to the trough and going up the steep way, combined with the new perspective, reveals the highest peak in the range.

Thus, the whole group is able to get to a solution that nobody would have found on his or her own. The ne plus ultra of the mountain range.

This is the math, as it were, behind the concept of “synergy.” The combination of diverse mental tool kits—looking at the cake sideways and moving the milk glasses differently—leads to the potential for a group to do better than the sum of its parts. It explains how a whole squad of smart people who think the same are less likely to find a higher peak on the mountain than a group of people who think differently. And it’s our first hint at why some police partnerships outwit more bad guys, and how teams like the Russian Five can beat competitors with better individual statistics.

Most great sports teams tend to rely on players having a diversity of skills in order to specialize in different positions, but as any expert or athlete will tell you, the difference between skilled athletes and world champions is not about who’s bigger or stronger. Just as it is with cops, world-class performance often comes down to an athlete’s mental game. The Red Army were great at hitting a hockey puck, but the way they thought together was different than other teams. Their style, their problem solving, their “mind reading” made a difference for the team. It’s not hard to see how Coach Tarasov’s ninja-hockey style, combined with Coach Tikhonov’s toughness, led a whole generation of players to play on a taller mountain peak than their peers.

The mountain analogy we just walked through comes from an acclaimed professor named Dr. Scott Page, who teaches “complex systems” at the University of Michigan. His research findings, from years of studying group dynamics, are conclusive: Teams with diverse mental toolkits consistently outperform groups of “the best and the brightest.”

Let’s put this together. By now we’ve seen that problem-solving smarts—not physical toughness—is key to a successful police squad. And problem-solving smarts are going to be a function of that squad’s cognitive diversity, its diversity of perspectives and heuristics.

Unlike some jobs where we want to just climb the same one mountain over and over—say, an assembly line—solving and preventing crimes is almost always a new, custom mountain problem. This is why adding women to law enforcement changes things, but it’s also why it wouldn’t be such a great idea if we suddenly made all cops and FBI agents women.

If every law enforcement partnership looked like Charlie’s Angels, we might indeed increase the negotiation skill of a lot of departments. But we’d also be shooting those departments in the foot (a thing male cops occasionally do). No men at all would mean increasing law enforcement’s likelihood of getting stuck on suboptimal mountain peaks on the other side of the range. We need lots of perspectives if we want to give our officers the best chance at solving hard problems. (And as someone who loses his keys a lot, I’ve learned that once in a while a team needs a guy with a good heuristic for kicking down a door.)

At this point, our discussion begs a rather obvious, but important question: Is gender the only kind of difference that leads to cognitive diversity in police work?

The answer is absolutely not. (And we’re not even getting into the fact—yet—that gender is not binary. We’ll address the deeper diversity of gender and its accompanying perspectives as we dig into future chapters.)

This brings us to an important subject to step back and discuss before continuing. As we’ve discovered, cognitive diversity is a key element of teams that exceed the sums of their parts. But the term “diversity” itself is a tricky one, and we need to talk about it for a moment.

“Diversity” technically just means “variety,” but the word has become a euphemism—especially in America—for one thing: race. It’s the term many people use to refer to race when they are too uncomfortable to come out and say it. And since race is still very much a hot-button topic, “diversity” has in turn become a word that makes a lot of people nervous.

Reality is, “diversity” doesn’t mean race. Nor does it mean gender, the second-most frequent thing people think when they hear the word.

Because it’s such a charged term, though, we’re going to use the word “difference” in this book as a catchall whenever we generally mean two or more things that are not the same. Whenever I use the word “diversity” from here on, I’ll try to pair it with an adjective for specificity. Like “demographic diversity” or “diversity of shoe sizes.” It’s a good habit that I’d encourage you to pick up, too, if you don’t already do it.

Now that we’ve explored the power of cognitive diversity, things are about to get interesting. But we need to be cautious about one more thing before we proceed.

Some people will be tempted to take our lesson in perspectives and heuristics and use it to jump over other types of differences—or even use it as an excuse to say that demographic diversity like race or gender don’t matter. That’s a bad idea. It’s a temptation we need to resist, and here’s why:

The most accurate way to predict cognitive diversity would be to open up someone’s head and poke around inside their neural makeup. But because we are not James Bond villains, we have to look for proxies for different thinking instead. We need to be able to make our best guess, based on other clues.

Our perspectives and heuristics come from our life’s experiences. Our neural pathways form as we live through stuff. So, the more we can identify differences in life experience, the more we can predict cognitive diversity.

Some of those experiences are obvious to spot: We studied different subjects, at different schools. We grew up in different kinds of towns. We had that crazy thing happen to us that one time.

But we can go deeper than that. Our experiences are shaped every day by all the micro-experiences we have, and those are affected by the way we see the world and ourselves. And how we see the world and ourselves is affected deeply by how the world sees and treats us. So, when we have a group of people who look different, or identify themselves differently in some ways, we can guess that they may think different in some ways, too.

In other words, if you and I are a different age or race or gender, it’s highly likely that we have experienced life differently. People look at us differently. They speak to us differently. They invite us to do different things. They include us—or exclude us—at different times. And in some cases like height, age, or physical ability, we may literally see things differently. Sometimes those different experiences are subtle, and sometimes they’re more blatant. But they slowly form a mosaic of mental wiring. That mosaic shapes our perspective and beliefs—how we define and predict things—and helps us develop our heuristics and skills—how we approach and deal with things.

So, it turns out that demographic differences end up being pretty good predictors of differences on the inside:

Let’s use another hypothetical scenario to illustrate how proxies for cognitive diversity work in practice:

Pretend that it’s the year 2010, and you’re making a movie starring Tom Hanks. At the last minute before you start filming, Tom tells you he can’t do the movie anymore. Who do you replace him with?

This is a question that Dr. Page likes to ask his University of Michigan students. But I’m a geek, so I decided to ask several thousand American adults who they’d pick in this same scenario. I collected answers online and then sorted them by the responders’ races.

White people chose a wide variety of Hanks replacements: Josh Brolin, Harrison Ford, Hugh Grant, Brad Pitt, and (my favorite) Ryan Gosling were common. Robert Downey Jr. received a slight plurality of votes, and Tom Hanks’s son Colin gathered a high percentage, too.

Black people, however, picked the same person 52 percent of the time: Denzel Washington.

It turns out that, race aside, Hanks and Washington are two of the most similar actors in Hollywood. They’re about the same age and height. They have similar demeanors and are longtime family men. They’re versatile performers and winners of the same kinds of awards. Each has done funny movies but is not a comedian. Each has done both blockbusters and Oscar bait. They even get paid about the same.

In fact, Denzel Washington may just be the best fill-in for Tom Hanks in Hollywood at the time of this writing. As with our cake puzzle, this is obvious once you see it. But it’s easier to see it from the perspective of a black person than a white person.

To be clear, being black doesn’t mean you will pick Denzel. There’s just a much higher chance that you will pick him than a white person will. Once again, what makes the difference is the way you think, which has to do with all the little things you’ve lived through.

Our life experiences add up to what legendary leadership transformation coach Keith Yamashita of SYPartners calls “how we roll.” Basically, this is our operating style: the day-to-day application of our unique mental mosaics. Yamashita says that great teams take time to understand as much as possible about how their members roll: How do they learn best? Do they do their best original work in the morning or afternoon? How do they like to manage their time? What do they need in order to thrive? How do they argue? What are their biggest strengths, their superpowers?

Then, anytime we face a challenge, Yamashita suggests stepping back and doing two things: “First, Take a moment to frame the problem.” Is it a routine problem? Does it require breaking new ground? How high are the stakes? Routine problems don’t require much (or often, any) cognitive diversity, while novel problems benefit from it greatly. “Based on that,” Yamashita says, “do a casting session.” He uses the word “casting” deliberately. A movie director doesn’t just grab whoever’s around or whoever was in the last movie she made. The cast for every movie needs to make sense for the plot and script.

Understanding “how we roll” not only helps team members to appreciate each other’s differences, but it also becomes a pragmatic way to figure out who might best contribute their mental toolkit. “I might be a gay, Asian dad, which is true,” says Yamashita, but a more relevant difference in a particular situation might be, “I’m a morning person.” Or, “I’m very empathetic.”

When we start think about team building as casting, we start to think of our differences as gifts, rather than statistics and numbers. “It’s not a Noah’s Ark mentality,” Yamashita says. We don’t need every kind of person in every meeting. The casting director’s question is, “What group of people will give us the best shot at a breakthrough?”

The most exciting part of this puzzle is not simply putting different kinds of people on the mountain range together, though. It’s what happens to them next.

8.

In 2013, professors from four US universities got 186 Americans who identified themselves as Republicans and Democrats—two groups that tend to think differently about many thing—to read a murder mystery. Each person was told to prepare to come debate the answer to the mystery with someone who disagreed with them. Half of the people were told that they would be debating with a member of the other political party. Half were told they would debate with someone from their own party.

And then something interesting happened.

It turned out that Republicans who were told that a Democrat would be debating the case with them prepared more clever arguments. And Democrats who went up against Republicans did, too. Even though the topic had nothing to do with politics.

The study concluded that being put together to work on something with people with different viewpoints “jolts us into cognitive action” that we don’t get when we work with people who we assume share our perspective. “Simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort,” writes one of the study’s authors, Dr. Katherine W. Phillips, vice dean at Columbia Business School. “Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe that differences of perspective might exist among them and that belief makes people change their behavior.”

This is one reason why research studies from McKinsey & Company and Catalyst Group show that the more diverse thinkers in a company’s higher ranks, especially its boardroom, the more likely it is to come up with strategies that turn higher profits and avoid making stupid mistakes—like buying bad companies. It’s also a reason why cities with more immigrants from different parts of the world tend to produce more patents. People think more critically when when different people are around.

If you’ve got a group of people planning how to remodel a building, and a person in a wheelchair rolls in to join the planning session, everyone is suddenly going to think a little bit differently about the project.

Or, when, say, a masculine group of law enforcement agents brings in women as collaborators, the men will suddenly begin to think more critically about the challenges at hand.

And, it turns out, vice versa.

9.

When Kate Warne first walked into Allan Pinkerton’s office in Chicago for an interview in 1856, Pinkerton assumed she was there for a secretary position. To his surprise, Warne—who was around twenty-three at the time—declared that she was responding to his newspaper advertisement for detectives.

Widowed at a young age, Warne had learned how to fend for herself in the tough streets of Chicago. She knew she had unique skills the detective agency could use.

But, Pinkerton exclaimed, “It is not the custom to employ women detectives!”

Warne knew. What she lacked in brawn she would make up in cleverness, she insisted. Women, she said, had an eye for detail and were patient. Plus, Warne argued, she could be “most useful in worming out secrets in many places which would be impossible for a male detective.”

Pinkerton thought about it that night. Despite the objections of his associates, he hired Warne the next day.

He didn’t regret it. Warne proved to be one of his most capable agents. “She has never let me down,” Pinkerton later said. And she changed the dynamic of the entire agency.

We should take note that there were two areas of advantage that Warne’s gender brought to detective work. The first was external. As a woman, she could walk under a bad guy’s nose without suspicion—much like Chris Jung did at the mob wedding. But second and more important, Warne brought a different way of thinking to Pinkerton’s enterprise—just like Jung helped the FBI come up with cleverer plans because she thought differently. Warne’s skill at disguises and logistical maneuvering was instrumental in saving Lincoln.

Warne changed the way Pinkerton thought about detective work and helped him build the most successful private detective agency in history—an agency that would lay the groundwork for the Federal Secret Service. Because of Warne, Pinkerton made his company logo an eye with the words “We never sleep” underneath it—a nod to her having stayed up all night watching Lincoln. This trademark caught the public imagination and became the origin of the term “private eye.”

Together, Warne, Webster, and Pinkerton formed a Dream Team. The agency, and those three in particular, went on to shape the private detective industry as it’s known today.

Warne’s contribution to Pinkerton’s firm was so valuable (one newspaper called her the best detective in America “—maybe the world”) that Pinkerton had her build a department he called the Female Detective Bureau, whose job was to supply women agents to collaborate on various male agents’ cases. Pinkerton wanted a Dream Team working on every one of his cases. The women and men remained in segregated hierarchies within the agency—reflecting the backward social norms of the nineteenth century—but the mere inclusion of women in detective work was remarkably forward thinking for Pinkerton’s time. More important to Pinkerton, including female agents this way was brilliant for solving cases.

He had been convinced of the power of cognitive diversity.

Coincidentally, the most notable proponent of cognitive diversity at the time was, in fact, President Lincoln. How Lincoln convinced his biggest ideological rivals to work with him in the White House has been well chronicled in books and films. Lincoln knew that his team’s different ways of thinking gave him his best shot at winning the Civil War and keeping the nation intact.

If only more presidents after him had understood that.

So far, we’ve seen how people can do extraordinary things together by combining cognitive diversity. You’ll notice how each Dream Team member we’ve met so far brought a different tool kit to her or his respective collaboration. Warne and Webster contributed very different things to Pinkerton’s Dream Team of detectives. Though they played like they could read each other’s minds, our Soviet hockey players (from our previous chapter) each brought very different things to the rink with them, too. And it’s not a stretch to say that the Red Army reigned because of the combination of their coaches’ heuristics and perspectives—Tarasov’s radical creativity and Tikhonov’s ferocity. There is still much more to piece together in our quest to understand Dream Teams, but as we’ve seen, without different mental tool kits, we limit how high up the mountain we can go.

Notice how this runs counter to the advice that we tend to get in many of our organizations. Get more people like that on the bus! we say. Let’s double down on our strengths! we proclaim. Let’s not hire her; she’s not a culture fit! we advise.

Unless you’re recruiting an army of hammer swingers to break rocks on an assembly line, this kind of advice is profoundly stupid. What does “fit” get us but homogeneous thinking? What does collecting carbon copies of ourselves do but stick more people on the same mountain peak?

“If you see your job and your work as primarily known things or small increments . . . [cognitive diversity] is not that important,” says Yamashita. But, breaking new ground, he says, by nature “requires different angles, different ideas, different ways of doing it, different backgrounds, different sensitivities, different layers, different slices.”

Indeed, breakthroughs happen when we break the mold.

We’ve learned that when it comes to making progress together, the differences that matter most are the ones inside our heads. And those differences are built by our experiences, which in turn are shaped by who we are.

Knowing this is good news for a couple of reasons. First, it gives us a concrete reason to collaborate with people who aren’t like us—a utilitarian excuse to be inclusive, which also happens to be a good moral choice.

It also helps us know what kinds of things to look for when building teams to solve problems together: different perspectives and heuristics, and the things that are proxy for them—experiences, identity, and biology. This gives us the foundation for the rest of our teamwork exploration.

But before we get to all of that—and to the other crucial factors that make regular teams into Dream Teams—we have something pressing to sort out.

If we’re going to conclude that our differences and the cognitive diversity that flows from them make us smarter together, then it turns out that we have a problem.

Why do differences almost always make groups worse?

Stay tuned for the next chapter of Dream Teams in a month!

Related / dig in further:

• Shane Snow’s primer on Cognitive Diversity

• The Art Of The Zag, Shane’s podcast with Joe Lazer on people who zag when the rest of the world zigs

• Shane Snow’s Dream Teams keynotes

Headline above from The Times of London

The Super Skill Of The AI Age

A couple years ago, my friend Joe Lazer (co-host of The Art Of The Zag) took a book proposal out to the big New York publishing houses. It was the sorta-early-days of ChatGPT, when I was busy freaking out about losing my writing career to the robots.

Apparently a bunch of big New York publishing houses were, too. Because they told Joe the entire premise of his book was wrong.

Joe’s premise: “Storytelling is going to be the ‘super skill’ of the AI age.”

The ability to draw from our own human experiences and connect with other humans through story, Joe argued, was going to become more and more valuable as AI got smarter and ate up all the technical jobs.

“BuT cHAt gpT CaN WRitE bLog pOSts noWWW!” everyone said. “Writing is nigh deceased. We shalt be looking for the exits.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

Cut to 2026, and the publisher who did say yes to Joe’s book—Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age—looks like a genius.

That’s because Joe is right about this super skill thing. Case in point: All the big AI companies have been hiring storytelling executives lately. Chief Story Officer. Head of Brand Storytelling. Etc. And they’re hiring them for massive salaries.

Turns out ChatGPT can’t shape its own company’s brand narrative in any kind of compelling way.

Anthropic’s job description for a $400k/year Creative Officer role overseeing company storytelling included this: “We care about craft, making things by hand…”

More interesting—to me—than the fact that the big publishers predicted this wrong and Joe predicted it right, is the question Why?

Why would human storytelling be such a big deal at a time when AI seems like the only deal the business world is talking about?

The answer actually starts with a book Joe and I wrote together 8 years ago. In The Storytelling Edge we explored the emerging neuroscience research of how great, relatable, novel human stories help us build relationships and make people care. And you know what kinds of stories don’t make us care? Generic, watered-down, machine-washed stories spat out by a chatbot. Our brains simply don’t light up without the novel and relatable human component.

Around that same time, Derek Thompson made a similar case in Hit Makers for how human relatability and novelty are responsible for hits in music, TV, and culture. Meanwhile, Allen Gannett laid out how to find the sweet spot of human relatability for creating art that people love in The Creative Curve. Science is quite clear that generic and un-scarce doesn’t get our brains going.

• Joe’s work since then has built on this science, and in his book, he lays out several compelling truths (and tactics) based on his storytelling work over the last 8 years—as well as his time embedded in inside the AI industry

• Ten years ago, the #1 business skill was coding. Today, AI can write perfect code, but it struggles to tell stories that connect with people. And behavioral psychology, the neuroscience of storytelling, and the way AI is trained tell us that’s likely to continue.

• An over-reliance on AI leads to cognitive atrophy, but there’s a flipside. If you use your brain first, and then use AI as a strategic amplifier of your abilities, you can gain an advantage over those sucked into the sycophantic black hole of ChatGPT.

• There’s a practical science to telling stories that make people remember you and trust you, which Joe lays out in 15 actionable principles.

AI can mimic a lot of things—and it will get better at writing at some point—but AI cannot have unique human experiences in the real world and then draw from them to connect with people at the emotional level that real humans can.

This has all sorts of implications for leadership and motivation, for sales (where human trust is perhaps the biggest asset salespeople can have right now), and for us all not getting freaking depressed by how smart AI keeps getting. Storytelling is part of what makes us human. It’s something we should lean into as the robots keep getting upgrades.

Basically what I’m saying is you should buy Joe Lazer’s book. Super Skill comes out today, and it’s fantastic. Here’s a link:

https://joelazer.com/superskill

In honor of the book launch, we’re doing a special live episode of The Art Of The Zag where I’m interviewing Joe about storytelling in the AI age in a livestream this Friday.

Sign up here:

https://luma.com/5mhy16rk

Make a great day!

Shane

“This is unprecedented in the history of science: the distance between our understanding of how these systems actually work and the real-world impacts that they are already having.”

-Dan Balsam, CTO of Goodfire

I recently learned something terrifying.

The people spending trillions to create artificial intelligence literally do not know how A.I. works.

I thought they were “building” A.I., but it turns out it’s more like they’re “growing” it.

A.I companies are sprinkling seeds into the digital ground and nurturing what comes out. But they don’t really understand how A.I. does what it does.

This absolutely scares me. Because if we don’t understand how these machines work, how are we going to prevent them from going off the rails?

Stock price growth won’t stop a runaway train.

That’s why I was excited to interview Dan Balsam, co-founder of a research company called Goodfire, about what he and a few determined geeks in the A.I. industry are doing about it.

Basically, they’re doing “brain scans and brain surgery” on A.I. models, so we can understand and tame them. And it’s a prime example of what Joe and my show The Art Of The Zag is all about: people taking counterintuitive approaches to solving problems in the world.

What Dan talks about in this interview is both fascinating and important for anyone who doesn’t want to have their head in the sand as the A.I. tidal wave heads toward the beach.

Have a listen, and let me know what you think!

• Listen/watch on Spotify »

• Listen on Apple Podcasts »

• Watch on Youtube »

Make a great day—

Shane

In the 1997 movie Wag The Dog it took Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman 11 days to make a series of fake videos to convince the public that the US was at war with Albania.

This was all cute and fun in a ‘90s movie, but it’s not that funny anymore in 2026 when an intern could create 1,000 fake videos about a fake war in an hour.

I don’t need to tell you that we live in a world that is changing quickly. But I do want to ask: Will we do anything differently?

Technology is the main culprit for the massive changes in society today. But the most important ripple effect is what this speed is doing to media and information.

Because of technology, fake and misleading information can be created faster than ever.

Because of technology, trends rise up faster than ever (and flame out faster than ever).

Because of technology, best practices now spread faster than ever (and become outdated faster than ever).

Because of all this, we need media literacy skills more than ever.

This is why the first episodes of my new podcast with Joe Lazer, The Art Of The Zag, are about thinking critically about media.

• Listen/subscribe on Spotify

• Listen/subscribe on Apple Podcasts

• Watch/subscribe on Youtube

In The Art Of The Zag, we’re examining people and companies who choose to do things differently amidst massive pressure to conform.

The sweet spot we’re looking for is the courage to go against the expected way of thinking, tempered by the wisdom to know when going a different direction ain’t right.

Because we believe that trust in media is one of the most fundamentally important topics for humanity right now, our first few episodes focus on people who are thinking differently about that.

For Episode 1 (out now!) we picked Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie to talk about what his company is doing to help people build trust and thinking skills amidst a sea of manipulative media—alongside insights that anyone listening can use to build innovative ideas and products in competitive industries outside of media, too.

Here’s a tease of what this interview teaches us about zagging that is worth paying attention to:

”An electric car looks the same as an internal combustion engine car, but its powertrain is completely different. And the results—not only in the performance of the vehicle, but its externalities—are different.”
-Hamish McKenzie, on how differences beneath the surface can matter more

In Substack’s case, Instead of aiming to create innovative technology or new formats, the company aimed to create an innovative business model with existing technology. Substack is playing a different game than other media-tech companies play.

“I’d much rather be a platform that is predicated on trust relationships than one that is predicated on an endless content feed where the relationships don’t matter.”
-Hamish McKenzie, on what media consumers need from technology

Instead of following the usual media playbook that rewards grabbing attention, getting you to spend as much time as possible through dopamine hits and design tricks, Substack has so far aligned its profit incentives with trust and sustainable relationships.

“[Kids today] need systems that are going to be tilted in favor of their best selves. And I am 100% optimistic that we’re going to get there, and partly because of the painful lessons of this era that we’ve had to grow up through, which is a transition era from pre-internet media to post-internet media.”
-Hamish McKenzie, on why he’s not giving up on the state of media.

As a father of a young child, I’m particularly encouraged by this mentality.

Since Hamish’s interview is the first episode, there’s about 8 minutes of Joe and my introduction to the show and 3 minutes of bad dad jokes. You can skip to 11:30 to get straight into Hamish’s interview.

And! Episode 2 is already out. In it, Joe and I break down my recent analysis of 3 Ways To Tell If You’re Being Manipulated By A Story, and we talk about how to think differently about the stories you’re consuming.

Have a listen to The Art Of The Zag, and let me know what you think!

Coming up on The Art Of The Zag:

• An AI company that’s zagging in the face of Big Tech’s manipulative narratives and political pressure

• Management consultants that are challenging decades of Big Consulting tactics and creating opportunities for diverse voices to be heard and used

• A renowned psychologist who defined—and then redefined—how we think about trust in relationships and at work (and whose advice on things like location sharing will break your brain)

• And more!

Feel free to subscribe directly to the podcast, or keep an eye out for The Snow Report where I’ll mention new episodes alongside my usual newsletter.

Make a great day!

-Shane

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the collective nations known as the West competed over practically everything. Politics. Technology. Chess. Math. Going to space.

But there was one arena in which there was no competition. Hockey. The Soviets owned that one.

Between 1960 and 1990, the Soviet national hockey team won nearly every international match it played, and that’s the dullest way to put it. The Russians destroyed.

In the 1976 Olympics, for example, they trounced the United States 6–2, mopped up Finland 7–2, and beat Czechoslovakia in the finals for the Olympic gold medal.

Their fourth gold medal in a row.

The Soviet coach was a freak, a legend, a Zen master on ice. Anatoly Tarasov was his name. He made his young athletes study chess and dancing. They practiced jumping off walls. They learned to do ninja moves wearing skates. They sang songs with lyrics like “cowards don’t play hockey.”

Tarasov’s mashups of athletic and mental conditioning made his students see the world—the whole world—as relevant to hockey.

Another freaky coach followed: Viktor Tikhonov, a Soviet army general who was known for his dictatorial style, ruthless eleven month long practice regimens, and the hatred his players had for him.

Out of this ice-dojo arose a group of athletes that would go down in history as not just one of the world’s best hockey teams, but one of the best sports teams of all time.

They called them the Red Army. Here was their most famous starting lineup, known as the Russian Five:

• Viacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, defenseman. Natural-born leader and decorated hockey god. Both charming and terrifying, “like a bear.” Said to be one of the greatest players ever.

• Alexei Kasatonov, defenseman. Disciplined, patriotic, and unflinching. Fetisov’s best friend on and off the ice.

• Vladimir Krutov, forward. Known as the “Russian tank.” Standing five feet nine and weighing close to two hundred pounds, Krutov was a beer keg on skates and the reliable “soul” of the team.

• Igor Larionov, center. Called “The Professor,” Larionov was cerebral, a tactician. Skinny and deceptively tough, his specialty was misleading opposing players.

• Sergei Makarov, forward. Makarov was a sniper, feared by goalies everywhere. He could find the back of the net from anywhere on the rink.

They were backed up at the net by legendary goaltender Vladislav Tretiak, known for his stoicism and quick thinking. And this doesn’t include the dozen other talented players in the club at a given time, each with his own fearsome quirks and specialties, such as longtime team captain Valery Vasiliev, who was known for punishing opponents while hungover from partying all night and even once finishing a game after having a heart attack on the rink.

You get the idea. They were monsters.

But it wasn’t just a stack of great individual players that made the Soviet team dominate. North American teams were known to scout young hockey players from junior leagues and groom them for the pros from absurdly young ages. Canadian pro hockey players tended to be flawless skaters with big muscles. (And even bigger mullets.)

During much of the Red Army’s winning streak, Canada actually had players with better individual statistics on its national team, such as the legendary Wayne Gretzky.

No. It was their style, the Russians insisted, that made their team special. No matter who was on the ice, opponents claimed the Red Army could read minds. It could be Fetisov and Kasatonov defending the net as one. Or champion center Sergei Fedorov circling the defense, distracting them while a teammate sliced in for a shot. Or, in later years, it could be Vladimir “the Impaler” Konstantinov gliding through the enemy like a human spear, passing the puck between the enemy’s legs.

Regardless of the configuration, they were unstoppable.

After losing the Canada Cup to them, Wayne Gretzky would tell Sports Illustrated that the Russians simply “dismantled” him. US coaches would describe the Red Army as having “a sixth sense” and “eyes in the back of their head.”

While Western hockey teams played aggressively—smashing into opponents like it was rugby—the Soviets performed a deadly ballet. They took a sport synonymous with beer and brawling and turned it into an art form.

Here I have to pause. I have a confession to make: I’m not really into sports. Forgive me, Red Sox Nation. Put down your pitchforks, Cheeseheads. You can blame my dad. He was an engineer working in the sports-starved desert of southeast Idaho. I grew up thinking a wide receiver was something you plug into a radio. In my home, The Game was never “on.” To this day I rarely tune in to televised sports that don’t involve race cars.

Also: The old Soviet national hockey team footage is mesmerizing. Watching them play— sports fan or no— you just can’t look away. They were so good that when Team USA narrowly beat them at the 1980 Olympics, the moment was declared a “Miracle on Ice.”

It turns out that “Political Skulduggery on Ice” would have been a more accurate description. While the win was certainly cathartic for America, the Russians essentially blew the game because of politics. USA’s deciding goals happened after Coach Tikhonov pulled three Red Army players out of the game, including goaltender Tretiak, and replaced them with players from a KGB-sponsored hockey club in an attempt to score points with the Kremlin. And still the Soviets nearly won.

Galvanized by that defeat and vowing never to divide their team again, the Red Army reigned for the next ten years. They won the gold in 1984 and 1988. They placed first in just about every other international championship, winning hundreds of games by embarrassing margins. The crew would go back-to-back years without losing a single match.

And then the Cold War ended.

The Iron Curtain fell.

For years the Soviet players had been paid peanuts, but now they were free to play for Western teams with real salaries. One by one, the stars of the Soviet national team left Russia to play for their former enemy: North America’s very own National Hockey League.

Fetisov and Kasatonov went to the Devils. Krutov and Larionov went to the Canucks. Makarov went to the Flames. Each was heralded as a hero that would change the franchise.

And each sucked.

None of the Russian Five’s new teams won championships. Their stats tumbled. Many of the great Red Army players were older now—almost washed-up. They didn’t have the same chemistry with their new US and Canadian teammates—nothing like back home. Even when they ended up on teams stacked with hotshots, somehow they couldn’t seem to win. And on the rare occasion they got teamed up with a fellow player from the old days, it made little difference: they still couldn’t bring back that old magic. Tarasov’s choreography and Tikhonov’s discipline were no match for the ever larger and fiercer North American players.

The Russians could adapt, but they couldn’t compete like they used to.

Team owners lost patience. Kasatonov got traded to the Blues, then the Ducks, then the Bruins. Makarov was traded to the Sharks.

Fetisov went into a slump. In the old Soviet days he was one of the top scorers in the world, but in New Jersey he wasn’t even near the top of his own team.

Sports headlines, once jubilant about the Red Army coming to America, now sounded the alarm.

“Devils Hit A Drought In Scoring,” the New York Times lamented in 1992, noting that some saw a lack of teamwork at the root of the problem.

Those magic years as impossible champions lasted longer than Fetisov or any of his comrades would have dreamed when they started out as kids. But like most such stories, the magic finally fizzled out.

When Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviets as “monsters” during the run-up to the 1980 presidential election, he wasn’t talking about their hockey players. He was talking about the Soviet Union as a whole, as enemies whom the United States would make sure were “destroyed with nuclear weapons” if it came to it.

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev wasn’t talking about hockey either when he famously told Western diplomats, “We will bury you.” For decades, those words reverberated across the Northern Hemisphere.

So while Tarasov’s budding young stars sang songs about hockey together, their peers in public schools sang about how to duck and cover under a desk if and when The Bomb went off. When they traveled to America to slap around little rubber disks into little nets for crowds of beer guzzlers, their countries were busily manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.

Though all those kids really wanted to do was play, hockey— like chess and space and all the other competitions— became a proxy fight for two countries who hated each other and their ideas: a fight that by all accounts could escalate to nuclear war and the end of civilization.

Ironically, to develop the nuclear technology that their countries threatened each other with in the first place, scientists from Russia and America had to get along—and collaborate with women and men from Germany and France and Poland and Britain, and many other places. They built on each other’s work, shared research and laboratories, and discovered how smashing atoms together created heat, which could make steam to turn turbines, which could make electricity.

I was keen on this story growing up, because that engineering job my dad worked at in the Idaho desert happened to be a nuclear power plant. This is how the seed of science was planted in my little nerdy heart, leading me to pursue my career in science and technology journalism. I learned from a young age how the brilliant work of chemists and physicists and electric engineers and tinkerers of all kinds led us to figure out how to smash atoms together and harness the resulting heat to make electricity.

And I learned that this was how every other breakthrough in history happened, from the steam engine to stuffed-crust pizza: when humans put their heads together.

Physically speaking, we are built for collaboration. Our brains are equipped for empathy. Our tongue and larynx can produce a range of sounds that put a dolphin to shame. The whites of our eyes are three times larger than those of other primates, helping us track what the other is looking at when words aren’t possible. These features of body and brain raised us from a humble subtropical survivor to the global apex predator that built the pyramids, painted the Sistine Chapel, and filmed season 8 of Real Housewives of New Jersey.

And yet, as the Cold War and every other reminiscent conflict between humans remind us, there’s a depressing side to our nature when we come together.

Our brains are wired to collaborate but also to be suspicious of other tribes—to “bury” those who don’t look or think like us. And statistics show that working together is bound to be frustrating even when we start off liking each other.

As one famed organizational psychologist puts it, “Virtually all of the studies unambiguously reveal that individuals outperform teams in terms of both quantity and quality.”

We pull a little less hard on the tug-of-war rope when we’re part of a crew than when we’re by ourselves. We shout only 74 percent as loud in a group of six as we do alone, even when we think we’re shouting our loudest. And we have repeatedly demonstrated that when we put people together to brainstorm, most groups will come up with fewer creative ideas—and fewer good ones—than the individual members of the group when they were allowed to brainstorm on their own.

But the hard things in work and life often can’t be done alone. We know that, too.

It takes two people to make a baby. It takes a dozen to make a pro hockey team. It takes the work of hundreds to develop a scientific breakthrough like nuclear power, and thousands to operate a Fortune 500 company. It takes a gosh-darn village to raise a child.

Major progress requires major numbers of people working together.

When we put our heads together, we hope we’ll become better, not just bigger. But the reality is, we almost always don’t. We have to fight against the inherent drag that comes with group work. And we end up fighting each other. Farm becomes fief. Polity becomes caste. We beat our plowshares into swords and turn nuclear energy into a bomb.

And so, Team USSR and Team USA played hockey in the shadow of two giants with intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at each other.

Humans need to work together to accomplish anything big. But—in our teams, our nations, our companies and families—our collaborative efforts seem to move with all the thrilling speed of a glacier, and often end in an avalanche of our own creation.

And yet! Occasionally we experience an opposite phenomenon.

Every once in a while, we encounter—or sometimes are lucky enough to be part of—a magical moment when a group of people somehow becomes more than the sum of its parts.

This is how breakthrough progress happens, from having a baby to harnessing the atom. On those rare occasions it happens to us, we feel limitless. Like the Soviet National Hockey Team felt during that brief and beautiful stretch of history before it all fell apart.

In 1994, after the hockey players from the Soviet national team had aged over the hill or fallen out of the spotlight in the NHL, Scotty Bowman, the head coach of the Detroit Red Wings, began quietly gathering up the old Soviet national team players to his club.

He recruited Fetisov, who was pushing Old Man Status in sports terms at that point.

He got Larionov in 1995.

He picked up the young Soviet forward Vyacheslav Kozlov, and snatched up comrade Konstantinov (“The Impaler”), along with Fedorov, whom the Red Wings had drafted a few years before.

And rather than forcing a playbook on them, he stepped back. “I just let them do what they wanted to do,” he said.

In their first year, this reborn Russian Five won more games than any other team in the NHL.

Larionov went from scoring two points the season before with the San Jose Sharks to seventy-one for the Red Wings. Fetisov tripled his total as well. Fedorov won a trophy.

Suddenly they were unstoppable again.

The following year the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup. And they won it again the next year.

When documentarians asked Fetisov to describe what happened, he said, “Together again on the same team, it was like a fish put back in the water.”

This is a book about Dream Teams, about groups of people that make breakthroughs together.

Like Fetisov and his fellow hockey players, they do the incredible against all probability. In the chapters ahead, we’re going to meet one Dream Team after another: creative agencies, rap groups, software companies, urban planners, social movements, and ragtag armies that pulled off amazing things together. We’re going to uncover the secrets of individuals who make outstanding collaborators, and look at what separates groups that simply get by together from groups that get better. And in examining the hidden psychology of great teams, I will argue that there’s something wrong with the common wisdom about human collaboration—and a way for us to harness our collective potential better than before.

Our greatest moments in history—not just in sports, but in business and art and science and society—happened when humans defied the odds by coming together and becoming more than the sum of their parts. When they linked arms, stood on the metaphorical shoulders of the giants who came before them, and saw further together. Those old Soviet hockey players were that rare kind of team that turns the depressing truth about human chemistry on its head. Though they were each excellent players, the synergy that made them the best even after years apart— and with a new American coach—is not explained by skill or talent or practice time. Opposing teams had better player statistics.

Other hockey players had practiced together as many years as the Russians had. But somehow, what Tarasov’s kids had between them was special.

There’s science behind this kind of magic. Dream Teams are not just random. They’re the result of subtle interactions, and ones that are not obvious.

In recent years, we’ve made new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience that can help us unlock the magic that vaulted the Russian Five to greatness. And that science can help us work better together in any field.

So what is that special sauce? What are those eleven secret herbs and spices that make some people more amazing together than apart? And conversely, what makes the teams of the most skilled and talented people on paper so often fail to exceed the sum of their parts in real life?

What makes our society, full of brilliant and hardworking and passionate people, so capable of destroying itself, when we have more resources and knowledge and technology and beauty between us than ever before?

As we’ll discover in the coming chapters, the answers are often counterintuitive. The kinds of teams that change the course of history—that transform industries, break cycles of oppression or stagnation, or win hockey championships for decades in a row—are not the usual suspects.

What makes them different lies beneath the surface.

But once we understand how it works, the science of Dream Teams is something that we can apply to everything. From our personal relationships, to our everyday work, to our businesses and causes, to our communities, and to a world itself that desperately needs us to stop breaking down because of each other, and start breaking through together.

This book is about how that magic happens.

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You just read Chapter One of Dream Teams. Each month this year, I’m sharing another chapter of the book. Or you can get a free signed copy of the whole book now by becoming a paid Snow Report subscriber.

Make a great day!

–Shane

I’m writing this newsletter while working from Mexico City, where 50 years ago something tragic happened.

In June 1971, 120 university students who were protesting in the streets, along with a 14-year-old boy, were killed.

The killers: a government trained pseudo-military group called Los Halcones.

The Halcones were made up in large part by young adult men who’d been recruited with promises of nice pay in order to serve their country rooting out invasive people and ideas.

On June 10, 1971, the Halcones were sent in by the government to disrupt a student protest. They were directly instructed to bring bamboo poles to beat up journalists and smash cameras—specifically targeting anyone who could document the fact that the protest was peaceful. Things got out of hand (to put it mildly), and Halcones eventually pulled out pistols and rifles and shot students to death.

The most chilling part? After the massacre, Mexican newspaper headlines said things like this:

“Scuffle of Students”

“Student March Halted By Riot Police”

“Shots And Blows: Divergent Factions Responsible”

The major newspapers at the time were influenced (or directly controlled) by the Mexican government. Immediately after the massacre, a coordinated information campaign from the administration painted the killings as anything but. Protesters were called “agitators” and blamed for starting a riot that resulted in their own deaths.

The President of Mexico, Luis Echeverria, specifically said that “left wing agitators” had caused it.

Fortunately, a few journalists and photographers survived the massacre with their cameras intact. Photos eventually came out, showing what really happened.

Once the photos came out, Mexico’s President still cast himself as a victim, claiming that both “left wing and right wing” extremists had done this, despite his own desire for peace. Even though it was his own government who created and directed the Halcones.

A few people in the Mexican government got ceremoniously sacked after the photos came out, but history shows us what really happened, and that the administration itself was complicit despite its campaign to manipulate the media.

This is a 50-year-old story.

But does it sound more current?

I normally focus on business here. I wish today’s post could be about the uplifting storytelling this weekend in our new musical Jo in London. But in light of current events in my home country, I’m hoping to do my part to help folks think a little differently about the stories we’re fed. This post is specifically about tragic killings in Mexico and Minneapolis, but the takeaways here can help us out in our everyday lives as well—both in our relationships with media and other people.

Story manipulation is a playbook that repeats itself.

I’m 2,000 miles from Minneapolis right now, but I’ve wanted to throw up all week.

Watching the video of federal agents shooting ICU nurse Alex Pretti to death in broad daylight has given me insomnia. But having spent years studying media manipulation in history (from communist propaganda to modern Russian state media to the CIA’s pioneering of fake news in Latin America), watching the media manipulation of Alex’s killing has put a rock in my stomach.

(Here is video of a meticulous reconstruction of what happened. Warning: it’s graphic.)

We’re experiencing a moment where—right now—not pushing back when we’re being manipulated may very well lead to 1984. We regular people (and our institutions) have power; it’s our choice whether we give that power up.

“But how do we know who’s telling the truth?” This is a common refrain I hear from friends and family back home who get their news entirely from Facebook. I will text people about something bad that’s been reported in the news, and they’ll say, “Are you sure?” or repeat an intellectually dishonest talk radio line that starts with, “Well what about…”

To avoid falling into the manipulation trap when consuming media, I like to remind myself of the first two tenets of journalism ethics:

1. Seek the truth as fully as possible

2. Seek to minimize harm

Anyone who isn’t doing these things isn’t performing ethical journalism.

More practically, when someone tells you a story, look for an attempt to fulfill these two elements—seeking the truth as fully as possible, and seeking to minimize harm. If you don’t see it, you should be skeptical of what you’re being fed. And you should use it as a trigger to employ extra critical thinking.

There are lots of ways to manipulate people with storytelling. But there are three big ones right now in mainstream news and social media that, once you start noticing them, you’ll have more power to see when you’re being manipulated—and hopefully, help others see too.

Manipulation Tactic 1: Telling you the story before they know the story.

Something happens. People react. And then what?

We all make up stories in our heads. The more information we have—ideally, objective observations—the more accurate the story. But with limited information, our brains fill in the story with our best guesses. Or with wishful thinking. This is human nature.

But when someone tells you what the story is before they have all the information, they’re manipulating you.

The day after 120 students were beaten and shot to death in Mexico City, the Mexican government declared it was the students’ own fault. There was no time for a proper investigation. These were the days when it took hours to develop a photo. Twelve hours later when the headlines came out, there were few journalists at the scene who were alive or unhospitalized to reconstruct a murder scene.

And yet the conclusion of what happened and whose fault it was had already be “reached” by the government.

Mere moments after Alex Pretti was executed in the street in Minneapolis, the US government did a similar thing:

Border commander Greg Bovino gave this statement before he knew the story. Before any investigation. Before a review of video footage of the event.

This is classic media manipulation. And it can work on us when we don’t get any further information.

Fortunately for the truth’s sake, we have video showing what happened.

Video doesn’t show us who Alex was. Video doesn’t let us read his mind. But it helps us understand that we’re being lied to in this case. Just as photos showing the Halcones murdering students in Mexico eventually turned the public eye to the truth in 1971.

We shouldn’t have to say this, but: Before you tell the story… you need the information.

The same thing happened with the killing a few weeks ago of Renee Good. Immediately after the killing, and before an investigation, Homeland Security labeled the slain woman a “terrorist.”

Renee Good was not someone on a watch list. This was someone Homeland Security had never heard of. How did they possibly know the story yet?

As more information has come out about who Alex Pretti was—including irrefutable video showing what happened—it’s impossible to believe that the White House’s pre-emptive story is true.

But we shouldn’t even need the video to be able to say, “Wait, they haven’t investigated yet, and yet they’re telling us what the story is… are we being manipulated?”

As an aside: It will be tempting for some folks reading this to say, “You’re writing this article before we know the whole story!” But here’s the thing: I’m not saying don’t tell the part of the story that we have evidence for already. I’m saying don’t make the leap into the part of the story we don’t know yet. There is a big difference. Whereas we should always keep the door open to updating our conclusions in light of new information, we also shouldn’t decline to talk about things just because we only know the first part of the story. We have video and a coroner’s report. We should talk about it.

Upshot: When someone tells you a story before the facts have come out, be skeptical and seek more information.

Manipulation Tactic 2: Telling you the story of what’s in someone’s heart or mind.

This one is where the real tricky human psychology happens.

Something happens. It makes someone look bad. Perhaps it’s morally indefensible. (Like shoving a man onto the ground, taking his legal, holstered weapon away from him, then shooting him in the back 10 times.)

A manipulator will often seek to defend the indefensible position by telling you a story that gets you to not trust the victim.

Specifically, the thing to watch for is when they tell you what is in that person’s heart. They are a bad person inside. They have bad intentions. This way, no matter whether what happened is legal or wrong, it’s ok because this person is bad on the inside.

Hours after Pretti’s shooting, and before any investigation, a powerful figure said this:

White House advisor Stephen Miller said this before we knew anything about Alex Pretti. But instead of defending his agency’s executing a man without a trial, he climbs into the victim’s head to claim he was “an assassin” who “wanted to do maximum damage.”

Because Stephen Miller can read minds.

As I’ve written here and here, psychology shows that when humans decide to trust one another, we subconsciously look for evidence of benevolence above all else. Consciously, we try to suss out ability and integrity, but if we believe someone is not benevolent, we’ll never trust them. We recoil.

If we believe someone is benevolent, we’ll forgive their shortcomings.

Note what Miller and his colleagues don’t bring up: the fact that Pretti was an ICU nurse. At a hospital for military veterans. If they shared that information, you might believe that this man was a benevolent person.

But that would undermine the manipulative story.

So if you want people to believe that someone “deserved it”, or that your actions were actually morally okay despite being legally wrong, paint that person as having bad intentions.

Hence Stephen Miller claiming he somehow knows that Alex was a violent terrorist planning to do ill to good people.

Similarly, when you see things like this…

… you’re also seeing this classic manipulation tactic: Get people to believe that a whole group of people have evil in their hearts, so you can justify doing bad things to them.

(As an aside, I chose to use Stephen Miller’s own words as examples for this one because he specifically tells people what he thinks about all this. So we don’t have to read his mind.)

Here’s another, more subtle example:

You can see that Fox News, the one outlet in the list that’s avoiding the issue, uses its headline to paint protestors as “agitators.” This is exactly the same tactic the Mexican government used in 1971.

You can’t ask a dead man what’s in their heart. This is exactly why dictators like Fidel Castro can turn people like Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara into martyrs (after sending them to their death) to use in self-serving media campaigns. And it’s how people in power in America right now are trying to get away with murder: declare that the dead person was evil inside.

The good news: By leading with the story about Alex Pretti’s “bad intentions” before they knew anything about him, Homeland Security/ICE/WH actually created a major backfire. Similar to Echeverria’s government getting murdery egg on their face after photos of the Halcones killing students came to light, as soon as people saw the video of Pretti’s killing and learned that his job is literally to save lives, they gained trust in Pretti’s benevolence and lost trust in the manipulative story about him.

Upshot: Whenever a story paints someone’s intentions as bad, assume you’re being manipulated into not trusting someone—and possibly that you’re being distracted from facts. When you see this, seek more information.

Manipulation Tactic 3: Amping up the story with big adjectives.

As much as it can be infuriating to see news outlets report things neutrally, such as the New York Times headline “Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting”—when video clearly shows an unarmed man being shot in the back (why not come out and say “executed”?)—what you can take away from this kind of reporting is the newsroom is trying to stay away from manipulation.

We can talk later about journalistic responsibility that comes from having great power, and how some newsrooms are neutering their reach in the battle against sensationalist headlines. But for the purposes of this essay, the takeaway is when you see this kind of story you can assume that the author wants you to come to your own conclusion.

But when you hear stories with amped up adjectives, you can assume that the author is trying to manipulate your thinking (by manipulating your emotions). By painting such an extreme picture, the manipulative authors also set an anchor that makes it difficult to bring things back to reality.

You can see good examples of this in a typical press conference with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

• On the mayor of LA: “Mayor Bass embarked on one of the most outrageous campaigns of lies this country has ever seen…” (The most outrageous the country has ever seen?)

• On the governor or Minnesota: “Tim Walz does NOT believe in law and order… Under the incompetent leadership of Tim Walz, Minnesota oversaw massive fraud schemes…” (Also note the mind-reading and painting of lack of benevolence.)

From my pal, Claude: here’s a quick analysis of some of Leavitt’s favorite words when answering difficult accusations:

Anytime you hear these, you can assume that someone is trying to emphasize a strong point—and that you should seek more information to uncover the substance behind the exaggeration.

This is once again not anything new. When you look at the manipulative stories Echeverria’s government fed the 1971 Mexican people, you see these kinds of adjectives all over.

Now, I want to make clear what I’m NOT saying: I’m not saying, “adjectives mean something is false.” We need adjectives to communicate. And some true events are best described with strong adjectives. What I am saying is when you see strong adjectives, look closer before you believe it all.

Upshot: When a headline or quote is filled with strong adjectives, say to yourself, “Doth they protest too much?” and seek more information.

In summary:

Ask yourself these 3 questions to cut through story manipulation:

Preventing ourselves from being manipulated by others’ stories is an ongoing battle. But a good starting point is to ask yourself these:

1. “Does the story being told make any leaps that we don’t yet have observations about?”

2. “Can this storyteller read minds?”

3. “Does this storyteller’s adjectives protest too much?”

If the answer to any of the above is, “yes,” that should be a trigger to dig deeper and find more information.

We all contribute to the teams and communities we’re part of by peeling back our stories and aligning on facts.

Let’s use our power to do more of that.

I hope you’ll make a great day—despite the chaos swirling around us.

–Shane

P.S. For anyone reading this who says, “But you’re a Democrat…” I want to stop you right there. First of all, I’m an Independent. Second of all, please read the points above carefully (making up a story, reading my mind, painting my intentions). Same thing goes for anyone who skims the subheads and gets excited to comment about how this post does the things it says not to do. :) I’m sure this will have more unsubscribes than usual. So on your way out the door: thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll think extra hard about the stories you’re fed from here on.

Further reading:

• Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible (a very good book on modern state media manipulation in Putin’s Russia)

• The Literally Unbelievable Story of the Original Fake News Network (a crazy true story)

• On a lighter note, this post on boiling down of observations vs stories is a great habit to use at work and in decision-making in general.

This week’s Snow Report is a video about one of my favorite, most delightfully anticlimatic stories in history. It’s a story that’s helped me countless times when I’ve been stuck on an important decision.

I hope you enjoy it.

Subscribe now

Watch the video above, or check it out here on Youtube »

To dig in more on rethinking best practices, check these out:

• My original essay on The Trouble With Best Practices

• The Power Of “Sideways Practices”

• Lateral Thinking: A Primer

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Make a great day!

–Shane

The pattern is called The Garbage Cycle. And it starts with a story about Edison.

In the 1890s, Thomas Edison invented a new gizmo called the kinetoscope. This technology enabled an exciting new medium of expression: motion pictures.

Being something of a proto-Steve (Jobs) type, Edison would often debut his new technology (for which in proto-Steve fashion, he’d not done the inventing part himself but would receive the credit) on a stage in dramatic fashion. He would then, as they used to say back then, promote the shit out of it.

He set up a Kinetoscope Parlour on Broadway in Manhattan, near Madison Square park. He hired workers to produce short films, and put those films on stage in between vaudeville acts at famous theatres around New York. Announcements with sensational descriptions went out. And thousands of people put on their finery and showed up to the theatres to see these films.

Early on during this new motion picture craze, Edison showed an audience of fancypants theatregoers this video:

(Video courtesy of the US Library of Congress)

It was a two-minute film called “New York City Dumping Wharf.”

It is what it sounds like: two minutes of men shoveling garbage on a barge on the Hudson River.

And this film took people’s breath away. Stories go that people literally gasped as they saw these moving pictures. As the famous quote goes, this new technology was indistinguishable from magic.

But not to put too fine a point on it… it’s a video of garbage.

People put on three-piece suits to go see it. They cinched up corsets and stood in line in the cold. They talked about it for hours at brunch the next morning.

And it was literally garbage.

This is not the only time this has happened. In fact, throughout history, every time technology has enabled a new medium for expression, this has happened. Anything—literally anything—that gets created in a new medium is interesting to people. Because it’s novel.

Even garbage.

This is wired into our pesky human brains. Novelty lights us up. Neurons fire, senses focus, memories encode. It’s part of our survival schematic; when a new thing shows up we need to figure out real fast if we can eat it or if it can eat us. So we pay attention. We get jacked up on emotion: excitement, anxiety, delight. And we interpret all of that as meaning, “This thing is important.”

But the thing about garbage is it’s only interesting when it’s novel. And it’s usually not important.

Hence: The Garbage Cycle.

It’s happened dozens of times before and since Edison, and we’re in the middle of it right now with gen-AI. Here’s how it goes:

Phase 1: Technology enables a novel form of expression. No matter what gets made with it gets attention. (Even garbage.)

Phase 2: Creators make lots of garbage. (Anything gets attention, so lots of “anything” gets made.)

Phase 3: Audiences get sick of the garbage. (Novelty fades. Attention dips.)

Phase 4: Good storytellers figure out how to use the medium in high quality ways, and this becomes the only stuff that gets attention anymore. (Audiences become choosy, algorithms filter out garbage, etc.)

The medium may continue to evolve, and its technology may improve, but by Phase 4 the medium itself is established as a “real thing”, and garbage creators move on to the next novel thing.

After Edison debuted the kinetoscope, he put hundreds of garbage films into theatres. And soon enough people stopped going to see moving pictures just for the sake of it. Videos of horses walking down the streets of New York were only exciting for so long. (And this was the kind of thing that most of these films were.) The medium only became established as something here-to-stay when artists like Charlie Chaplin came along and told great stories with it.

We saw this same pattern with newspaper printing technology:

And with websites and SEO:

And with social media:

The Garbage Cycle also happens when people figure out how to use existing technology to create a new twist on a format within a medium. We might call this, The Subgarbage Cycle. For example, memes:

Even within each medium, the Garbage Cycle repeats itself every time a new technology has come out and “leveled up” the form. In film, it happened with the advent of fancy camera lenses, rear projection, and special effects. And again with digital cameras. And smartphone cameras. And of course Youtube:

In general, the cheaper and more consumer-friendly media technologies get, the more garbage gets created. In today’s Creator Economy, more people than ever can pursue the profit (or attention) incentive of creating content. And they can do this regardless of the Garbage Phase we’re in, because the cost of creation is so low.

Youtube is the perfect example of this: there is still a lot of garbage going up on Youtube. Millions of people still treat the medium as if it’s 2005 and anything you upload could go viral. But Youtube is on Phase 4 of The Garbage Cycle. The only thing that gets attention is quality content that people actually want to see for some other reason than novelty. (And yes, stupid funny videos can still count as quality; though often it’s simply novelty that’s working for them.)

Which brings us to generative AI.

Remember when this came out and we lost our minds?

But this stuff ain’t interesting anymore. When these early AI videos came out, we mistook novelty for usefulness (and I think we overestimated how quickly the capabilities would improve).

When Sora came out, it gave me existential panic as a producer.

And now I see the videos on Sora and I’m bored.

The incredible hype around the novelty of gen-AI led to massive adoption, faster than any technology in history. The massive adoption has led to more hype. That hype has led umpteen startup companies to take billions of VC dollars to make tools to help people generate with AI. That hype convinced OpenAI it was a good idea to make Sora into a Youtube-like social network community… thing.

But we the people are no longer interested in garbage.

In other words, Generative AI is at Phase 3 of the The Garbage Cycle. We’re literally calling it “slop.”

But there is a difference this time.

Generative AI is so cheap (to the end user, who is at arm’s length from the true cost that the planet and our electric bills are bearing) that people are going to continue to create lots of garbage with it. More than is even still happening with Youtube.

But history tells us that all that garbage isn’t going to matter to anyone.

Soon enough we’ll get to Phase 4, where thoughtful storytellers use these tools to make things that people actually want to consume. Phase 4 is where we get The Welles, the Kubricks, the Spielbergs, the Humans of New Yorks, the Heather Cox Richardsons, the Mr. Beasts.

And with gen-AI tools this powerful, that Phase 4 storytelling is going to have to be really good. Content that feels like anyone could create it instantaneously is only going to be interesting while it’s still novel.

Shane Snow is author of Dream Teams, Smartcuts, and The Storytelling Edge.

Post Script: An interesting twist on the pattern, to me, is Substack. By designing its platform from the beginning to reward content people are willing to directly pay for, Substack has largely skipped Phases 2 and 3 of The Garbage Cycle. Attention means very little if it doesn’t convert to loyalty. (Versus platforms where ad impressions matter more than if your content is garbage or not.) Though I have seen people fall for garbage as the Notes feature caught on—people creating garbage in the hope that it will convert novelty-based attention into paid subs—the audience behavior with Notes maps to the Garbage Cycle well, and the mechanics of the Substack platform itself have largely led Notes through Phases 2 and 3 quickly. People aren’t willing to pay for garbage.

But first…

If you’re a regular reader of this Substack, you’ll notice that I often sign off with some variation of “Make a great day” instead of “Have a great day.”

I picked up this habit from an old colleague who had contagiously good energy. It’s an example of the subtle but awesome power of linguistic priming. In non-science speak: the words we say to ourselves can change our behavior, whether we realize it or not.

Whether we “have a great day” may very well come down to external factors. Things that happen to us or around us. Waking up a few days ago to the news that my country had once again overthrown one of our Latin American neighbors was an event that I had no control over, but which weighed on me all day.

Externalities often affect the “day” we “have.” But within this complicated world of surprises and troubles, we still have agency to make the best of what’s in front of us.

That’s why I like wishing people, “make a great day.”

And that’s why Aaron’s words in the Foreword to Dream Teams still touch me years later.

After all, what is the point of becoming teams that exceed the sum of our parts if we don’t use that power to “make” the world, rather than “have” the world that’s handed to us?

I hope you enjoy. (And make a great start to 2026!)

–Shane

FOREWORD

by Aaron Walton

Activist, model, and Founding Partner of Walton Isaacson

When I was in third and fourth grade, my grandfather used to ask me, “What will you do today to make the world a better place?” Every morning when I saw him, I knew that’s what he was going to ask me.

Growing up as a gay black kid in Massachusetts in the 1960 and 70s was not the easiest. I was in Roxbury, a rough part of Boston.

But every single time I saw him, Pops asked me the exact, same thing.

Not: “What will you do today to make your life better?”

But: “What will you do today to make the world better?”

And I’ve got to tell you, I remember thinking, “That’s part of my job.”

On my journey, I became very aware of the massive power that working as a team has to make something something bigger and better than just myself. Because of how I grew up, I have always felt the need to be a leader and to help move things along, but I also realized that progress is not a solo journey.

That philosophy has been how I’ve approached everything.

For example, when I started my latest company, my partner Cory and I sat down with an ambitious mission: “What if we wanted to create the planet’s most interesting agency?” we said.

When we sat down and mapped it out, the first thing that we worked on was not what clients we would go after, or what creative work we would do. Those are the typical things agencies start with.

Instead, the question we asked ourselves was, “What team of people will be able to reach this vision?”

We decided that if we got the right kinds of different people in the room—and we tapped into their unique points of view—that would be what got us there.

We believed that ideas could be pushed forward in a more productive and innovative way if you have a team of people with diverse backgrounds. And not just culturally diverse, but also by discipline. I knew the research that shows that teams like these can be more successful because different people have to work harder to get their points across. When we’re with people who aren’t like us, we have to marshal more resources, brain power to help convince other people of why a different direction might be the right direction. And this helps us break through.

Over the years, we put this into practice. And we’ve built a team that is truly different, and truly does some of the planet’s most interesting work, furthering social causes while building businesses at the same time. When we’ve pitched and won a Super Bowl campaign, for example, the success of why we won was not just the idea. When we made a viral video showcasing Hispanic Americans taking pride in their work and heritage, it didn’t go viral just because of the concept itself. There are a billion great ideas. It was how our team worked together that made these things happen. It was about how we brought that great idea to life by tapping into the zeitgeist of the people in our group.

Real innovation comes from our differences. Ideas get better when we challenge each other.

But here’s the thing.

It’s not comfortable. It’s messy. It’s like a Pollock painting—it looks like chaos. As humans we want to avoid conflict. The tension points between us makes us better. But getting it to work right is hard.

That’s why I’m excited about this book: Dream Teams.

I think we’re much stronger collectively than we are individually. If you think about every great breakthrough that’s ever happened in the world, it’s genuinely been when people have been working as a team, when we have been thinking about, “What can we do that’s going to make life better for someone else?”

Am I naïve to think that that’s the way the world should work?

We’re all trying to get to our mountain top. And once we get to it, we’re looking for another mountain to climb. To make that journey we need each other.

The answer to my grandfather’s question will be different every day for each of us. The fact that we will need to do it together will not.

And when we win, we’ll all win.

–Aaron Walton (follow him here)

The rest of DREAM TEAMS 2nd EDITION will be posted one chapter per month throughout this year. Join The Snow Report to keep up.

Tech is getting smarter. The world is moving faster. We need human skills in business more than ever.

That’s the pitch for Snow Academy, our interactive platform for future-proof business skills training, and Manage HR’s Top Leadership Development Training Company of 2023.

Thousands of students from major companies, startups, and government organizations have used these courses to become better leaders, better storytellers, better at managing up, and better at working together.

I think these skills are going to be more important than ever in the coming years.

As AI continues to rise up, we will need more humans to be more human.

This is the reason I’ve decided to open up our four most popular courses for free for all paid subscribers of this Substack. This is $2,500 in value for the cost of a cup of coffee per month. (If you’re already a paid subscriber, you should have gotten an email from Snow Academy this morning inviting you in!)

Here are the courses that paid Substack subscribers get free access to:

• Storytelling For Leaders: Motivate, inspire, and get people on board with change.

• Breakthrough Teamwork: Build bridges, master the art of productive debate, and become indispensable to your teams.

• Building Inclusion & Empathy: Improve your EQ, intellectual humility, and communication skills.

• Presentations & Public Speaking: Supercharge your presentation skills through powerful storytelling and counterintuitive speaking techniques.

Paid subscribers also get a free signed copy of Dream Teams sent to anyone they like.

After you upgrade your Snow Report Substack subscription, you’ll receive a welcome email with instructions on how to get your free book and access the courses. (FYI it may take up to 24 hours for your course access to activate.)

Subscribe now

Next week we’ll be back to the regularly scheduled Snow Report newsletter.

Make a great year!

-Shane

I don’t know about you, but I’m pleased to be moving on from 2025. Like Bruno, we just won’t talk about it.

That said, no matter how tough a year has been, at the end of each one I like to journal about the bright spots. There are always highlights to consider. Friendships, moments, learnings, gratitudes. My kid turning 2 and learning to speak Spanish better than I do. Lando Norris beating Max Verstappen. (Eat it!)

To invoke Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy’s “The Gap And The Gain”, instead of focusing entirely on the gap between where I am and where I want to be, year’s end reminds me to take time to recollect the gain from where I once was to where I am now.

One of the things I gained in 2025 is a novel that is now one of my all-time favorites. If you, too, are a fan of stories about storytelling, you’ll enjoy kicking off 2026 with this one:

About the hidden stories that shape our world:

The novel is called The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, and it’s one of the only books that I finished and then immediately started reading again in the same sitting. I want to make a TV series out of it. (If you’re reading this, Erin’s agent, hit me up!)

If you’re intrigued by the idea of a secret underground world where guardians and acolytes protect Stories, where Fate and Time fall in love, and where the son of a fortune teller finds himself caught up in the collapse of it all—treat yourself to this one. In between the lines of this story about love and sacrifice and adventure is a meta story about how storytelling keeps our memories and lost ones alive.

I literally got a tattoo this year of a depiction of the character Time from this story. Check the book out here.

Now if urban fantasy is not your thing, or you’re more into the practical aspects of storytelling, I recommend kicking off 2026 with these two nonfiction books:

About the stories that make us human and how to wield them in business:

As artificial intelligence gobbles up more of the world we once knew, storytelling is a meta skill that will be ever more important for us to do the things we still need humanity for: Leadership, perspective, wisdom, and more.

Super Skill is by Joe Lazer, my co-author of The Storytelling Edge, and it comes out in February. Pre-order it here!

About the stories we tell ourselves and how to change our work and lives with them:

If you’ve read my last couple of newsletters, you’ve seen me talk about Nir Eyal’s new book Beyond Belief, with Julie Li. There’s a lot of great stuff, but my favorite parts revolve around the science of how our brains and bodies respond to the stories we tell ourselves. These stories literally shape what we see—what we notice or miss. They literally affect how we feel—our anticipation, our subjective experiences of pain and anxiety—and more.

Beyond Belief comes out in March. But you can pre-order the book here in the meantime!

And if you are intrigued by the science of storytelling but books are not for you…

…IDK cuz you’re a Zillennial or something? Whatever’s the case, here are some videos on the science of storytelling that I posted this year that you’ll enjoy:

• Why 90% Don’t Know Their Boss’s Birthday (Neurons That Fire Together…)

• How Baby Yoda Encapsulates The 4 Elements Of Great Storytelling

• Storytelling As Connection - A repost of my classic talk in New Zealand about how to use storytelling to make a difference when selling products

BTW, later in 2026 I’ll be posting the two Storytelling chapters of Dream Teams for free in this newsletter. These chapters deal with how storytelling helps us build movements and change people’s hearts about groups of people they don’t understand.

I’m posting the whole book for free in 2026, one chapter a month, but if you’d like a signed hardcover copy right away, upgrading to a paid supporter of this newsletter gets you one. (Shipping to US & Canada only.)

Subscribe now

I hope your 2025 had lots of bright spots, and that you’ll focus on the “gain” you’re grateful for at least as much as the “gap” to where you want to get to in 2026.

Cheers to being so fortunate in our lives already (if we’re spending time reading and writing Substacks, that means life already is much better than it could be!). And cheers to getting better together in 2026, too.

Make a great year!

–Shane

If you liked this post, consider subscribing, sharing, or checking out my keynote speaking videos here.

Here’s why:

In 2014, I met an entrepreneur named Jane Chen with an ambitious mission to save the lives of 1,000,000 premature babies. Specifically, babies born pre-term in countries with poor healthcare and literacy rates. (Where most premature babies are born.)

In the Radical Simplicity chapter of Smartcuts I documented how Jane and her team of designers at Embrace Innovations set this million-baby goal in the face of an impossible problem: They needed to design an infant incubator for 100x less money than the current incubator cost. That’s how much it needed to cost in order to serve the places with the most pre-term births.

They figured out the solution through a clever bit of lateral thinking.

I am thrilled to report that a decade later, Jane just told me that they have now saved over 1,000,000 babies’ lives.

It’s incredible. A million human beings who get a chance at life. And all of those parents who get to see their child grow up.

In this video, I tell the story of how Jane and the Embrace team did it. It’s a story that carries particular meaning for me, as you’ll see toward the end of the video when I choked up.

And I want to share this with you today for three reasons:

1. The Embrace team was presented with an impossible problem. Make the incubator 100x cheaper. Their breakthrough came from re-framing the question itself. And this is a problem-solving tactic you can incorporate into your own work and life.

2. At this particular time of year, when you think about the things you want to accomplish next year, I hope you’ll think about how the questions you ask and the wisdom you use can contribute to the world that these million babies will grow up in.

3. Finally, Jane Chen just came out with a a national bestselling book called Like A Wave We Break, which if you’re looking for a book to gift someone last minute (or to gift for yourself for some New Year’s reading), it is a wonderful memoir about taking trauma and disappointment and turning it into post-traumatic growth. Check the book out here »

This video is from a speech about a year ago as part of some of my new work on decision-making and adaptation. If you like it and its message, please share it along!

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Happy holidays,

–Shane

P.S. Paid subscribers of this newsletter get a free signed copy of my bestselling book Dream Teams: Groups That Exceed The Sum Of Their Parts. Subscribe and get yours!

Subscribe now

When does “one plus one” equal more than two?

It actually happens all the time in nature.

When elements combine into molecules, like hydrogen and oxygen forming water.

Whenever water and sunlight combine to make a tree grow.

When that tree combines with other plant and animal life to form a thriving ecosystem.

Anytime a baby is born, one plus one equals three.

This is the concept of “synergy,” a term popularized by the inventor-philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s and elaborated on by Steven R. Covey in 1989 in The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People. The theory goes that the right ingredients and circumstances can make things add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Now consider the opposite.

How many times in school did you get a group assignment and groan? (If you’re reading this essay, I’m guessing you were the kid in class who pulled more than their share of weight!)

As grown ups, the group-work experience is only marginally better.

How often do we gather a team of capable, accomplished people into a meeting only to have communication and decision-making go so much slower than if there were fewer of us?

How often do we feel like we have the right players on the team, but we have to fight inertia anyway?

As the saying goes, the bigger the ship, the harder it is to turn.

Reality is that when it comes to human beings, “synergy” is more elusive than not. We usually don’t add up to more than the sum of our parts.

More people means more human-power, but typically less efficiency.

And yet—we’ve all seen the movies where the underdog team wins the impossible game. We’ve read the stories of the ragtag armies that defeated their better-armed oppressors. And most of us have experienced that magical moment in our lives when a group of people we’re part of links arms and really does add up to more together.

What makes the difference between groups that exceed the sum of their parts… and those that don’t?

This question is the premise of a decade of research that led to my book Dream Teams in 2018. In the book, I explored the art and science of groups of people that achieve this elusive synergy. We start with detective partnerships, then graduate to rap groups, soccer teams, newspapers, ad agencies, armies, and social movements that changed the world.

I also wrote about a guy in Vermont who tried to build a geodesic dome over his town to save on heating costs. (Inspired by the very same Buckminster Fuller I just talked about…)

Seven years later, I’m happy to report that Dream Teams has just sold out its latest print run. And with that, I have acquired the rights back so I could release a 2nd Edition.

This means that I can now give Dream Teams away for free.

So here’s what I’m doing:

Once a month throughout 2026, I’m going to send a chapter of Dream Teams (2nd Edition) out in this newsletter. By the end of the year, you’ll have gotten the whole book for free.

Now if you don’t want to drag things out that long, I’m also launching an offer:

Become a Paid Subscriber to this Substack, and I will send you a signed hardcover copy of Dream Teams (2nd Edition) for free. (US & Canada shipping only.)

Technically, this means you could hack my system and get the book for $5 (if you subscribe for a month and then cancel). ;) But I’m hoping that you’ll consider remaining a subscriber and supporting my work here as I embark on more research and more writing for The Snow Report and my next book.

(I’ll be launching a bunch more paid-only content in 2026 as well—stay tuned!)

If you haven’t read Dream Teams yet, here’s what folks have said about it:

“A mesmerizing read for anyone looking to up-level their team skills.”
–Kathryn Minshew, CEO of The Muse

“A force of nature—and an important message.”
–Jane Chen, TED Fellow and Founder of Embrace Innovations

“An adventure that examines the very human science of making breakthroughs together — and why, so often, we break down on our own.”
–Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize Winner and author of The Power of Habit

“Truly amazing. The writing and storytelling is phenomenal.”
–Tom Rath, bestselling author of StrengthsFinder 2.0

If you have read Dream Teams already… consider writing a review on Amazon! (The 2nd Edition doesn’t inherit the reviews of the first, lol.) More importantly, consider taking me up on the free book offer and having me send the signed copy to a friend of colleague.

Here’s how to get Dream Teams:

1. Click the button below to become a paid subscriber.

2. You’ll get a welcome email with a button that says “Get Your Free Book.”

3. Enter the address you want the book sent to, and who you want me to sign it for.

Or just open up your Snow Report emails next year and you’ll get the book old school newspaper style, one chapter at a time.

I’ve got a lot of good stuff cooking for next year, so thanks for subscribing even if it’s for free. This is my life’s work, and I appreciate you.

–Shane

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P.S. Can’t get enough of these free book deals? Get my friend Nir Eyal’s upcoming book for free as well here:

Win a Copy of Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal:

Why do you give up on goals even when you know what to do? Nir Eyal (author of Hooked and Indistractable) spent 5 years answering that question. His new book Beyond Belief reveals that the #1 reason people fail isn’t lack of strategy or discipline. It’s that they quit too soon. The book teaches you a science-backed way to leverage your beliefs to persist when most people give up.

I read an early copy and absolutely LOVED it. It completely rewired how I think about performance, pain, and perception. In fact, I like the book so much that I’m sponsoring 30 copies to give to you all. To stand a chance to win:

Take 30 Seconds & Enter Here

(Available to US residents only for the moment. Deadline 13 December 2025)

Hello friend—

Shane Snow here. (Along with Sir Remy Bear, pictured above, but currently sitting on my lap as I type this.)

You’re getting this email because you signed up to be a paid supporter of my substack, The Snow Report, some time ago.

As you may have noticed, a couple years back I paused paid subscriptions because I was taking a break from writing.

…

Read more

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You’re Probably Making This Thinking Error Right Now (And It’s Costing You):

Take a look at the following picture of “Snuffalufagus”—the woolly character from the kids show Sesame Street. Tell me what you observe about this scene:

I have a confession. You’re the millionth person I’ve shown this photo to. For about a year, I’ve been putting this up on the big screen at conferences and leadership workshops, and quizzing audiences about it. (Sesame Street quizzes are a dicey move to give to Fortune 500 CEOs, I know, but bear with me!)

Very often, when I ask “What do you observe about this scene?” the first commenter in an audience will say something like,

“Snuffalufagus is about to eat a giant spaghetti with meatballs.”

Other common answers:

“Suffalufagus is hungry,”

or

“Snuffalufagus likes spaghetti.”

Now here’s the point—both of the audience exercise and of this post:

Each of those answers reveal a common mistake in the way human beings naturally approach decision-making.

It’s a mistake that affects companies every day, in every department.

It’s a mistake that affects the tiny decisions in your life just as much as the big ones.

And it’s a mistake that once you start noticing it, you’ll see it everywhere.

Separating Observations From Stories

Did you notice the wording I used to frame the Sesame Street question? I deliberately chose the word “observe”—as in what do you observe about the photo?

Talking about Snuffy being hungry, or liking spaghetti isn’t an observation. It’s a conclusion. It’s a story that you’re telling yourself, based on what you observe.

Saying that Snuffy is about to eat the spaghetti isn’t an observation, either. It’s a prediction. It’s telling the future.

An observation, in this case, is much more boring.

Snuffalufagus is standing in front of a plate of spaghetti. He’s wearing sunglasses. He’s by himself. The spaghetti has a single meatball.

We don’t actually know if he’s going to eat it. We don’t know if he loves it. We don’t know if he’s hungry. We just know what we observe: he is there, and so is the spaghetti.

From a psychology standpoint, the boringness of these observations is part of the problem. Our brains work so quickly, and want to draw meaning from what we observe. So we skip straight from what we observe to what we think without realizing it.

Now, around this time, I usually ask a second question: “What’s an alternative story you could tell about this scene, based on the observation that Snuffy is standing there wearing sunglasses, and that there is spaghetti in front of him?”

One story could be that Snuffy just had laser eye surgery, and he can’t even see the spaghetti. Based on the photo alone, that story is just as likely to be true as the story that Snuffy is about to eat the spaghetti.

Of course, with more information, we might be able to predict which of these stories is more likely (say, if you have seen a lot of Sesame Street and know the character). But we would be making a mistake to definitively conclude either story without more information.

Putting Our “Stories” In Terms Of Science

Over the centuries, scientists have developed an effective method for avoiding jumping to conclusions. As a refresher, it goes like this:

1. Make Observations

2. Ask Questions (based on those observations)

3. Form Hypotheses (based on the first two steps)

4. Run Tests (to disprove the hypotheses, til you end up with something you can’t disprove)

Most of us aren’t scientists. But our brains instinctively run through a crude version of the scientific method all the time.

The thing is, because our brains are fast and take shortcuts, we naturally skip from Observation to Hypothesis. We observe something, then we make up a STORY in our heads about it.

And then we convince ourselves that our story—the hypothesis we instantly make up to make sense of things—is an observation. We see Snuffy and the plate of spaghetti and skip to “he’s going to eat it.”

I have observed hundreds of Fortune 500 executives confuse their hypotheses with observations over the last year—starting with the Snuffalufagus Test, and escalating to more serious business scenarios. Smart and successful people are especially good at convincing themselves that their story is the same as an observation.

Speaking of convincing ourselves…

A quick break for an exciting offer for my readers!

Win a Copy of Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal:

Why do you give up on goals even when you know what to do? Nir Eyal (author of Hooked and Indistractable) spent 5 years answering that question. His new book Beyond Belief reveals that the #1 reason people fail isn’t lack of strategy or discipline. It’s that they quit too soon. The book teaches you a science-backed way to leverage your beliefs to persist when most people give up.

I read an early copy and absolutely LOVED it. It completely rewired how I think about performance, pain, and perception. In fact, I like the book so much that I’m sponsoring 30 copies to give to you all. To stand a chance to win:

Take 30 Seconds & Enter Here

(Available to US residents only for the moment. Deadline 13 December 2025)

Humans make the Snuffalufagus mistake all the time. Especially at work.

I once had a colleague who noticed that the direct deposit for his paycheck didn’t come on the usual day of the week. He sent an email to a handful of company executives saying that he wasn’t aware that we were firing him, that he was upset to find out this way, and shame on us.

It turned out that our payroll company was processing everyone’s direct deposit later than usual because of a US bank holiday… a holiday that they don’t have in the country this worker was from.

No one could blame him for not knowing this. Unfortunately, he skipped from his Observation (no paycheck on the usual day) to his Hypothesis (we were passive-aggressively firing him) and sent a mass email that embarrassed him. Sadly, the way he handled this decreased the whole leadership team’s trust in him.

Had the employee taken the Snuffalufagus Test before, he might have noticed the late paycheck, felt a jolt of anxiety, and then said to himself, “But before I make a decision on what to do, what are the Observations here?”

The core, unembellished observations would be that (a) paychecks historically deposited on Monday, and (b) no paycheck had been deposited on Monday.

Given those observations, several possible stories could be true.

Articulating our observations helps our brains to create space to process logic. E.g. “there was no deposit on the usual day” does not itself mean “you’re fired.” By the same leap in logic, one could as easily conclude “instead of direct deposit, everyone now gets paid in suitcases of cash at the end of the week.”

(Which is how I want to get paid from now on.)

Snuffalufagus Test failures sometimes don’t matter much. Who cares what’s going on in the spaghetti photo? But when we have impactful decisions to make—say, when something has gone differently than expected—failure to separate observations from Hypotheses leads us to confuse made-up stories with reality. And once we have a story in our head,it is often hard to shake it, good or bad.

Overreactions to leaps in logic can range from embarrassing to catastrophic, but a simple habit can help us prevent them:

Whenever something goes differently than you expected, step back and ask yourself, “What do you observe?”

Then separate that out from, “What do you believe?”, “What do you think?”, or “What do you conclude?”

Then, instead of making accusations or, ask neutral questions based on the observation (“I observed X. What does that mean?”).

I’d dare say that Snuffalufagus—who if you know a thing about him, it’s that he tends to take curveballs in life slow and steady—would approve.

Make a great day!

—Shane

An award-winning business journalist and Tony-winning producer, Shane Snow is a bestselling author and renowned speaker on leadership, innovative thinking, and storytelling.

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