It’s my birthday eve today. I’m saying goodbye to 41 and hoping this next year reveals the answer to the ultimate question. Either way, I want to tell you THANK YOU for reading my work all these years.
Now—on to this week’s Snow Report! In it, I’m sharing my favorite chapter of Dream Teams, the one where a New Orleans pirate built a team that saved America.
Welcome to Pirateland
If any chapter of Dream Teams should be a movie, it’s this one.
If you missed the previous chapters, read them here:
Chapter 3: Chrysler, Wu Tang & The Subtle Art of Productive Conflict
Chapter 4: Depressurizing “Teams”—or—How Soccer Curbs Religious Hate
Chapter 5: When Is Different Too Different? (The Tale Of The Black Square)
P.S. Though my latest work revolves around adaptation and managing change, I still frequently keynote about Dream Teams at conferences and leadership offsites. If you know a group that could use this message, learn more here.
1.
General Andrew Jackson was fresh off his latest massacre when he received the order to lead an army of pirates, whores, Choctaws, and black guys to save America from destruction.
I was excited to write that sentence. But let’s back up.
It had been more than a decade since George Washington had stepped down as the first president of the United States. The new country was lurching forward, collecting immigrants and gobbling up land to the west. War wounds were healing. Factories were opening. A nation was taking shape.
Around this time, King George III of Britain and his son 4G decided to pay themselves back for some of their wartime losses over the years. Ships suddenly appeared off US coasts and began harassing American vessels. They seized cargos and conscripted sailors into the British navy by force.
To retaliate, President Thomas Jefferson decided to ban all imports and exports to and from the United States.
This immediately destroyed the economy. Northern states freaked out and threatened to secede. The Southern states’ cotton and tobacco rotted on their wharfs. People began to starve. Britain was fine.
As historian Winston Groom put it, this plan “would still rank near the very top of the ‘stupid and shortsighted legislation’ were such an analytic list ever kept.” To save money, Jefferson then shrank the military.
This proved to be a bad plan when the British started stirring up American Indians to wreak havoc on frontier towns and the British kept on hijacking boats.
Then James Madison became president, and Congress declared war on the British. This, too, backfired. King George invaded Washington, burned down the White House, and pillaged cities from Virginia to Maryland. Northern states panicked. Americans for and against the war began infighting. Democratic-Republicans torched Federalist newspapers. Et cetera.
And the British realized that all this chaos presented them with a unique opportunity. With their superior military, the British reckoned they could reclaim America as a colony.
With the East Coast in shambles, all the British had to do was head to the Caribbean, sail up the Mississippi, and in the words of one captain, “shove the Americans into the Atlantic Ocean.” Surrounded, America would either surrender or vote to rejoin Great Britain.
The only thing standing in the way of this plan was a raucous, booming port city in Louisiana called New Orleans.
Recently acquired from Napoleon as part of the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans was a gateway to the Mississippi and a haven for immigration and debauchery. It was home to a mix of Creoles (local-borns of Spanish or French descent), frontiersmen, free people of color, and newcomers from around the world.
While the rest of the country starved from the import ban, New Orleans was a nonstop party. This was due in large part to a couple of local heroes: the pirate brothers Jean and Pierre Laffite.
Jean was six foot, dark haired, and sexy. Far from the modern peg-leg-and-parrot caricature, he was a fancy dresser who spoke elegant Spanish, English, and Italian (with a très charmant French accent, of course). Jean resisted the term “pirate,” preferring “captain” or “privateer.” His older brother Pierre ran the New Orleans blacksmith shop that served as their smuggling front. Their older brother Dominique You sailed a fleet of ships around the Caribbean looking like a straight-up pirate—striped pantaloons and all. The Laffites raided foreign ships in the Gulf and trafficked in fine silks, lace, Moroccan rugs and leather, furniture, ornate silver and china, crystal, tapestries, whiskey, rum, wine, and more.
These were complicated fellows.
In the early nineteenth century, hijacking someone else’s boat was legal if your country was at war with their country. Cleverly, the Laffites sailed under letters of marque—a sort of mercenary license-to-kill—granted by the city-state of Cartagena, which conveniently happened to be at war with everybody. This way they could “legally” plunder the Spanish—and everyone else.
Importing and selling said plunder in the United States, however, was illegal—even before Jefferson’s import ban. So the Laffites had set up camp on a couple of swampy islands in Barataria Bay, south of New Orleans. There they would take in ships with plunder, load their goods on rowboats, and sneak them into the city through the bayous.
The city of New Orleans left Barataria alone. So long as it let the Laffites have their little Pirateland, the city would never run out of rum.
But Jean was stockpiling gunpowder and cannonballs anyway, just in case they ever came for him.
2.
We’ve spent much of this book building a case for what Hollywood likes to call “the ragtag group of misfits.” Though it may not always be visible on the surface, Dream Teams, we’ve seen, are reactors full of different kinds of particles crashing together. In this chapter we’re going to explore what it takes to collect the kinds of (potentially volatile) contributors a Dream Team needs. As I said earlier, major progress requires major numbers of people. And that often means putting together coalitions—teams of teams.
In the next several pages, we’ll discover how a few of our common ideas about team unity are backward. A close look at what unfolded between the United States and Britain after declaring war in 1812 will help us to see what’s wrong.
As the English navy started planning its invasion of New Orleans, British colonel Edward Nicholls made a secret trip to Barataria. He had parked an armada of ships off the coast of Jamaica. Still fresh from a signal victory over Napoleon, Nicholls & Co. came with 20,000 troops, plus another 2,700 sailing close behind.
But getting to New Orleans would take tricky navigation against the twisting current of the Mississippi. To get their slow-moving ships upstream to New Orleans, they would need to disable the city’s outer defenses via a ground invasion. And this meant finding a good way for tens of thousands of soldiers to get through a maze of swamps.
Nicholls offered Jean Laffite the modern-day equivalent of more than $2 million to guide them through the swamp.
Laffite agreed. He told them (likely while stroking the upturned curls of his mustache) that he would need two weeks to get his affairs in order. Pleased, Nicholls’s men returned to the fleet to make preparations.
And Laffite promptly went to the Louisiana government and told them of the Brits’ plan, the details of which he had learned after getting the British envoy drunk off smuggled rum.
Ironically, the state of Louisiana was currently trying to get rid of the pirate brothers. Since New Orleans hadn’t been doing anything to stop them, Governor Claiborne had recently offered a $500 reward for “the capture and delivery of Jean Laffite.”
Cocky (and sexy) as ever, Jean Laffite had countered by posting handbills across the city declaring an even larger reward for the capture and delivery of Governor Claiborne. The state retaliated by sending a schooner of war to clear out Barataria. At the same time Laffite was double-crossing the British, the pirates were busy hiding all their cannons and treasure in the swamp.
Why the pirates would help the government, their enemy, over the British, was a curious matter. But New Orleans was home, and Laffite loved America—if not its politicians.
Upon learning of Colonel Nicholls’s plan, the US government freaked out. America had never planned to defend the Mississippi, let alone with what few ill-equipped soldiers there were in the New Orleans area. Lacking a modern-day national military, the best President Madison could do was call up a lawyer-cum-militia commander from Tennessee who was known for waging war with native tribes—Andrew Jackson—and say, essentially, “Do what you can.”
Jackson was also a complicated character. He was known for his fiery temper, his stubbornness, and his unwillingness to compromise what he thought was right. These traits did not always square up.
For example, one time he nearly killed the Tennessee state governor in a duel over an insult. Another time he (a) got shot in the arm, after (b) trying to horsewhip some dude, who (c) had gotten mad when Jackson’s friend, (d) had shot that guy’s friend in the butt.
It was not long after this that Jackson received the panicky request from Washington that he go to New Orleans.
Jackson showed up in the city with a bad case of dysentery and his arm in a sling. Knowing what the British soldiers had done to villagers in Maryland, the people of New Orleans were understandably terrified. The city’s entire defense consisted of a makeshift battalion of 287 local lawyers and businessmen, two regiments of poorly equipped Louisiana State Militia, a feisty contingent of local whores who’d volunteered for sewing and ammo duty, and 107 cavalry. There was also a militia battalion of 210 freemen of color in the area. They had not been paid in a while, but Jackson persuaded them to join. To round out the army, Jackson brought with him a crew of 1,800 unshaven Tennessee volunteers with hatchets and hunting rifles whom they called “dirty shirts.”
This was the team that had to take on some 20,000 trained Britons. None of these motley volunteers had ever fought together, and few had ever seen a real battle. At stake: their lives, their city, and the future of the United States of America.
Jackson put New Orleans under martial law and gave a speech. He ordered the citizens to “cease all differences and divisions” and unite with him to defend the city. The townspeople cheered. The ragtag army began digging a moat and rampart in front of the city.
But this was insufficient, and Jackson knew it.
Two additional groups of fighters were available, he learned. One was a crew of sixty-two Choctaw braves. The other, to his dismay, was a gang of criminals who happened to own a lot of cannons: the Baratarians.
Jackson hated the French. He hated the Creoles. He hated criminals. As a slave owner and Creek War vet, Jackson was hardly on the right side of history when it came to black people or American Indians. And Jackson really, really hated pirates.
But he hated the British more.
Jean Laffite’s lawyer—a man named Edward Livingston—brokered a meeting between the general and his client. Jackson was charmed by the mustachioed privateer. In addition to cannons, Laffite had stockpiled flints, gunpowder, rifles, and pistols. Jackson made his case for setting aside differences to save the city, and Laffite joined up as the army’s co-strategist.
The Choctaws joined up as well, and the New Orleans defense force became the most diverse group of soldiers ever to fight together in the history of America. They were still outnumbered at least six to one.
The British ferried their army through the bayous and camped a few miles south of New Orleans, intending to attack Jackson’s ramparts by day. During the night, however, the Baratarians floated a ship downriver with the lights off and parked across from the British camp. The British noticed, hailed, fired some warning shots at it, then decided it must be a fisherman or something. Tired from rowing through the swamp all day, they went to bed.
Suddenly the gun ports snapped open, and the pirates opened fire on the camp.
This was not how wars were fought. The British were used to “civilized” warfare, where smartly dressed soldiers marched in tight formations, looked their enemies in the eyes, and won through strength and honor.
Pirates don’t believe in any of that crap. They bombarded the British camp all night. When they ran out of cannonballs, they put chains and kitchenware in the guns, dismembering everything in range.
The British hadn’t anticipated needing artillery in this battle. The winds wouldn’t allow them to bring their own ships upriver for weeks. It would take days to bring ground cannons through the swamps to counterattack the ship. So the army dug trenches, hid in the mud, and waited.
Meanwhile, the Choctaws started sneaking around the swamp and tomahawking British sentries. They picked off anyone who happened to walk into the woods to pee or whose tent was too far away from the main camp. At the same time, the Dirty Shirts used their hunting rifles to assassinate pickets from afar.
The British officers thought it terribly unchivalrous. This was how Indian skirmishes were fought, they said, not noble wars! Nicholls sent a messenger under a flag of truce to request that they stop this nonsense and fight like gentlemen. Jackson received the envoy and sent him back with a cordial request that that the invading colonel go fuck himself.
The British finally managed to drag their artillery through the swamp. They blew up the Baratarians’ boat. But by this time the pirates had brought an even bigger ship downriver—one with more range than the British artillery. The cannonade continued.
Jackson issued whiskey to all his soldiers and prepared for the all-out charge he knew was coming. The only way the British could avoid the pirates’ harassing fire was to go ahead and storm Jackson’s line with brute force.
By the time the British finally charged, Jackson had dug a giant moat and thrown up dirt ramparts several feet high. Following Laffite’s advice, he’d extended the rampart a half mile into the swamp, where it turns out the British were planning to focus their assault. Behind the wall he placed the Dirty Shirt riflemen and Baratarian cannoneers, led by Jean’s brother Dominique You.
The final attack came on Sunday morning, January 8, 1815. As the endless horde of British soldiers charged, the motley crew of American defenders opened fire. There was so much smoke that they had to periodically stop shooting and let the air clear so the Dirty Shirts could aim their sharpshooter guns. These long-barreled frontier rifles proved particularly effective in picking off British officers, who made crisp targets in their bright coats and tall hats. Again, this was not cool. But it worked. Meanwhile, a single shell from the pirate artillery could kill fifteen men at a time. The British watched their own cannons sink into the mud.
When the dust cleared, the British had suffered 3,750 casualties. The Americans had only 333.
This was going to be too hard, the British decided. They packed their things and made the sad trek back through the swamp, back to their boats.
The British ships went home. And New Orleans threw a party.
The Battle of New Orleans went down in history as one of the most brilliant feats of military strategy ever. The outcome was due in large part to overconfidence on the part of Colonel Nicholls and his fellows. Yet despicable as he often was, General Jackson deserves some applause as well. Working with people he typically despised, he turned a band of misfits into a Dream Team. In our friend Keith Yamashita’s parlance, Jackson “cast” the perfect team for the job.
As you’ll undoubtedly recognize by now, the real story of this victory is not about Jackson’s leadership. It’s the thing we’ve been talking about from the beginning. It was not raw intelligence or skill that won the battle. What ultimately saved the day was an array of disparate fighting heuristics, and diverse perspectives.
In other words, if not for the “misfit” part of Jackson’s band of misfits, the United States might today have the Queen on its fiver.
The Dirty Shirts’ hunting rifles could shoot farther and straighter than any British soldier’s could. They couldn’t load their guns nearly as fast, but given the logistics of the battle, the Tennesseans didn’t have to. The Choctaws destroyed the morale of the British troops (not to mention their scouting eyes and ears) with their nighttime assassinations. And without the Baratarians’ cannon work or Laffite’s strategic advice, Jackson was certain his line would have fallen to the enemy.
The legend of this battle propelled Jackson into national fame. He got into politics and became the seventh president of the United States. Edward Livingston became his secretary of state.
And Jean Laffite, no longer a wanted man, became a local celebrity. He started going to fancy parties, where he went from stealing boats to stealing something he liked even more: the hearts of New Orleans’ beautiful married ladies.
3.
We’ve talked a lot about the need for different heuristics and perspectives to make progress together. We’ve talked about how we need to make cognitive friction to make those differences matter. And we’ve discussed how Dream Teams depressurize tension, leverage provocation, and open themselves to wild card ideas to find solutions that others can’t.
Jackson and his misfit army are a classic example of a Dream Team that did all of this. But their story also points us to an important question we need answered: How do Dream Teams need to be united, not different?
Jackson and Laffite were nothing alike. Yet their heads combined to form a defense strategy that turned overwhelming odds into ten-to-one casualties in their favor. The Choctaws and the Tennesseans were outright enemies. Working together they were unstoppable. The battalion of free blacks built ramparts and shot rifles alongside slave owners who they had every right to hate. The Baratarians manned cannons with the very soldiers who’d been sent by the governor to break their colony up. And yet they formed an incredible coalition.
We see from this that we don’t need to be alike to be united. We don’t even need to like each other. We just need a good enough common cause we all want more than anything else—in this case a collective enemy and the collective mission of saving the city.
Psychologists call this a “Superordinate Goal.”
A superordinate goal isn’t just a common goal. It’s one that takes precedence over all others. You’d like for America to remain a free country more than you’d like $2 million, for example. These are the kinds of goals that get us to overcome our usual hang-ups about working together.
History shows time and time again that superordinate goals have the power to unite even the most different of people.
The United States and the Baratarians were enemies. Jackson was not a tolerant guy. The black soldiers had a limited sort of freedom amid a society that treated them as subhumans and property. The Choctaws had every reason to say, “You deserve it” were the British to beat up the Americans.
But as the old Sanskrit proverb summed it up more than two thousand years ago, these hostile parties realized that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Everyone’s desire to keep their home superseded their desire for British gold, or their desire to get revenge for fights and slights of the past. Their superordinate goal brought them together.
It looks like the answer to our question about becoming a united group is simple. No matter how different we are, if we develop a superordinate goal, then we can work together without falling apart.
Except for one little problem. It’s what happened to Jean Laffite after the Battle of New Orleans was over.
4.
On February 6, 1815, President James Madison pardoned the Laffites and their men for any crimes they may have committed before the war. The Baratarians had donated their weapons to the cause of saving America, and they had fought bravely.
But the Louisiana government had in the meantime decided to seize the Baratarians’ stuff. All the silks and rum and furniture and fine goods that they’d spent years stockpiling—and which Madison had essentially promised not to ask where it came from—it all ended up locked in Governor Claiborne’s warehouses.
Jean Laffite sued. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Laffite insisted that he had never actually engaged in piracy. He was technically a Cartagenan privateer, which made his plundering in international waters legal as far as US courts were concerned. Ironically, the governor taking Laffite’s goods amounted to a more clear-cut theft.
But the state of Louisiana turned on Laffite. Now that the existential threat was over and American shipping was back in business, they didn’t need the Baratarians. Claiborne kept Jean Laffite’s stuff and made him a wanted man again.
So the Laffites took their boats and sailed to Galveston, an island off the coast of Texas, where they set up a new Pirateland.
After the battle, Jackson’s loyalties dissolved as well. He began quarreling with the government almost immediately. Jackson had imprisoned a meddlesome federal judge when he put New Orleans under martial law. Now that the civilian government was back in control, the judge was suing Jackson for wrongful imprisonment.
Furthermore, days after the battle, Jackson publicly executed six volunteer civilian soldiers who had asked to go home. Until the official peace treaty was signed, Jackson was still in command under martial law. These men’s three-month contract was up, but Jackson commanded them to stay. When they tried to go home anyway, he had them shot in front of everyone in the city to make a point. One of them was a Baptist preacher with nine children at home. He begged for mercy, and Jackson gave him none.
In his official reports, Jackson left out the part where the pirates supplied the gunpowder, flints, and cannons that made victory possible. He gave Jean Laffite a brief commendation but downplayed his strategic role in saving the city. Jackson’s personal code prohibited him from giving criminals like them credit even when it was due.
Laffite never forgave Jackson for that. The Baratarians had different ideas around fairness and equality than Jackson did.
It turns out that superordinate goals, for all their rallying power, can be fleeting. Once the goal is met or changes, parties have little reason to help each other. Thus, a relationship built on a mutual enemy often only lasts as long as the enemy does. We often go right back to fighting each other afterward.
In the Battle of New Orleans, the intentions of a whole bunch of different people aligned for a period of time. But when the goal was achieved, there was no glue to hold them together.
A hundred and thirty years after the Battle of New Orleans, a common enemy brought Americans and Britons together in a similar way. The superordinate goal of stopping Adolf Hitler brought them, along with Communist Russia, together. After they defeated the Nazis, the United States and Russia went back to mistrusting each other. But something interesting happened between America and Britain. They solidified a long-term alliance. The two countries had been growing more friendly over the years, and coming together to beat the Nazis cinched the relationship.
This was not because they shared a language and ethnicity (Brits were oft dismissive of American speech, and more Americans were of non-British descent than otherwise). Many historians argue that it was because the two countries had something in common that they didn’t with Russia: a strong set of shared values.
America and Britain for the most part believed in similar principles of government, theology, and ethics. When the superordinate goal of stopping Hitler forced the United States and England to work together, they realized that they had a lot in common, and stuck together.
We see this happen in business all the time. Researchers Jim Collins and Jerry Porras point out that successful companies often have “cultlike” values. Their employees must abide the values or find someplace else to work. “Such cult-like atmospheres are highly productive and filled with enthusiasm,” writes Dr. Nemeth, whom we met earlier. Companies who talk about shared values a lot will tend to unify their people quickly and effectively. Research shows that they tend to have low turnover and relatively stable businesses.
As we’ve seen, shared goals help us come together. But what keeps us from falling apart after the existential threat is over? It’s not our shared goals. It’s our shared beliefs.
Except, it turns out that this, too, isn’t quite right. In fact, it can be a huge problem.
One of the saddest parts of the Battle of New Orleans is what happened to the British 93rd Regiment. This group of 1,100 proud Scotsmen were required to each be over six feet tall. They looked awesome. They wore plaid tartan trousers and marched precisely to the tune of bagpipes.
They were practically boys. They’d been told by their king that if they served the crown well, they would be rewarded handsomely.
The British army was the most disciplined in the world. It had a strong culture of shared values: unflinching bravery, unquestioning loyalty, and impeccable obedience. When you received an order, you never questioned and never deviated.
The Scotsmen were among the best at adhering to these values. Until it killed them.
During the battle’s final assault, the 93rd’s commander was shot right after he gave an order to halt. The troops halted. And then they waited obediently for their next order, standing like statues directly in front of Jackson’s rampart. They were determined to do nothing but “halt” until told otherwise.
Jackson’s men blasted them to pieces. Over and over they shot their cannons at these sitting ducks, taking out six hundred men before someone finally shouted, “Retreat!”
Dr. Nemeth’s research shows that strong shared cultural values in an organization, despite the stability they bring, have one big flaw. They backfire. The stricter the values, the more potential for catastrophic outcomes. “In fact,” writes Dr. Nemeth, “there is evidence that the atmosphere most likely to induce creativity is one diametrically opposed to the ‘cult like.’”
Shared values, she says, make us more likely to think the same, to not question the way the group thinks. They shift different perspectives toward the same perspective. This is good for keeping peace, but not for problem solving. It sucks the group out of The Zone.
Some organizations try to combat this by making “creativity” and “taking risks” values themselves. However, data show that doesn’t really work. Groups that have a lot of cultural similarity stop searching for better solutions once they have solutions that work. They think they are creative because it’s a value. But, Nemeth points out, “Good intentions and great effort do not necessarily result in creativity.”
And like we learn from the devastating story of those poor Scots, strong shared values often do not result in good problem solving.
Seven out of ten American business employees in companies with strong values hush up when their opinions are at odds with those of their superiors, according to research by University of Southern California professor Warren Bennis. Requiring adherence to strong values, in other words, promotes organizational silence.
As we’ve learned throughout this book, Dream Teams need to have, seriously consider, and combine different perspectives. And having different perspectives often go hand in hand with having different values. And yet, coalitions that lack shared values, like that of Jackson and Laffite, often don’t seem to last.
Are we to conclude that Dream Teams are doomed to be fleeting?
Fortunately, the answer is no. There’s just a little more to the equation than simply “shared goals” or simply “shared values.”
To unpack it, we’re going to look at some other pirates. These ones just happen to be twelve years old.
5.
In 1954, Muzafer Sherif, one of the early pioneers of social psychology, conducted a devious experiment.
He and some colleagues set up a three-week summer camp for a bunch of twelve-year-old boys from Oklahoma. The location was Robbers Cave, a famous old woodland hideout of Jesse James. Sherif put the boys into two groups of eleven. For a week, neither group knew about the other as it went about cooking and hiking and playing games in the woods. They formed their own leadership and named themselves the Rattlers and the Eagles.
Gradually, the scientists made the boys aware of each other. This immediately solidified each group against the other. When the Rattlers, for example, heard the Eagles playing baseball, they groaned and complained. They called them “bums” and “communists.” The Eagles in turn referred to the Rattlers as “stinkers.”
The camp counselors stoked the animosity by making the groups play tug-of-war and football against each other. Soon the groups were pilfering from each other’s cabins and throwing garbage at one another.
Sherif was one of the first scientists to note that group dynamics like this create what’s called “perceptual distortion.” He observed that just learning of the existence of a distinct group was all that was needed to foster bias. His research was the beginning of what we understand today of in-group and out-group psychology.
When perceptual distortion happens, the differences between members of the same group get minimized and even ignored. “Members of the same category seem to be more similar than they actually are and more similar than they were before they were categorized together,” write psychologists Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio. And the differences of the out-group get exaggerated and overgeneralized. “Positive behaviors and successful outcomes are more likely to be attributed to internal, stable characteristics (the personality) of in-group than out-group members,” they write. “Whereas negative outcomes are more likely to be ascribed to the personalities of out-group members than of in-group members.”
Sounds like a description of racism, sexism, or any other -ism, doesn’t it? It is.
So it went with the Eagles and the Rattlers. Before long, the boys were walking around camp with sticks, bats, and socks filled with rocks. Fistfights and food fights broke out.
Then the camp counselors sabotaged the water supply. Nobody had anything to drink. The counselors said they suspected a leak or a clog somewhere along the pipe between camp and the water tank above it. They would need each boy’s help to find it.
The boys split up along their in-group lines to go search for the kink. As the counselors planned, everyone ended up at the water tank at the top of the hill where it turned out the problem lay.
It took several boys from both groups to unclog it. Afterward, everyone was so pleased that nobody fought over who got to drink first. They still walked back to camp separately, though.
So far so good, the experimenters must have thought, stroking their mustaches like modern Jean Laffites.
Next, the counselors informed the group that they were going to rent the film Treasure Island for all the boys to watch. But they were fifteen dollars short. Even though a couple of Eagles had gone home and the groups were now uneven, the boys agreed to pony up an equal amount per group to get the movie for everyone. They were learning to cooperate around superordinate goals.
Then, during an expedition to the lake, the camp truck that was supposed to get the food “wouldn’t start.” They boys were all hungry. So they decided to use their tug-of-war rope together to pull the truck to “jump-start” it. The counselor faked the engine failure and jump start. As the truck roared to life, the boys cheered, “We won the tug-of-war against the truck!” They patted each other on the back and didn’t segregate themselves in the queue for food when it arrived.
This was a turning point. The boys were starting to use the term “we” to refer to everyone instead of just their own group.
The experimenters called this “decategorization and recategorization.” As the boys worked together on the shared goals, they began to get to know each other as individuals. This started breaking down their category stereotypes. The Rattlers weren’t so bad, it turned out! Nor were the Eagles!
And this opened the door for the boys to start seeing both groups as part of something more important. A superordinate group.
With this, something crucial happened. Inside the superordinate group, the boys did what the researchers called “mutual differentiation.” They began to recognize the strengths that individuals had—such as one boy who was good at cutting meat—and that each group had—such as different fun camp songs that they could teach each other.
This led to a “more respectful appreciation of differences between the groups.” Instead of seeing their differences as problems, they saw them as potential assets for the group. With this, the boys didn’t just find common goals and unique strengths, they developed respect.
By the end of the camp, the boys still defined themselves as Eagles or Rattlers, but they begin to think of both groups as subgroups of a bigger group that they all belonged to. “During breakfast and lunch on the last day of camp, the seating was without regard to earlier group membership as it was on the bus ride home to Oklahoma City,” the researchers noted. “The boys crowded close together toward the front of the bus as a single group singing ‘Oklahoma.’”
With the Robbers Cave kids, we once again see how superordinate goals can get different people to work together. We see a little of what we learned in chapter 3, that play and humor can depressurize groups that have too much tension between them.
And we also learn from this study the importance of developing a mutual respect for our differences. We learn that to succeed, we need to break down the walls between human categories and see ourselves as part of a superordinate group.
The boys in the camp shared some values, like the idea of taking turns and fairness, but they didn’t see eye to eye on everything. That didn’t matter by the end. They learned to respect each other and see themselves as both Rattlers and Eagles and something bigger.
Andrew Jackson did not respect Jean Laffite and the Baratarians or the Choctaws or the free blacks. He didn’t think of them as Americans but as outsiders, useful for his goals but not people to include in his in-group. So after the battle was over, they parted ways.
6.
There’s a scene in the movie The Rocketeer that I loved when I was a kid. Toward the finale, the police get in a gunfight with mobsters who have been colluding with the movie’s villain, Timothy Dalton. Dalton is secretly an evil Nazi. While his goons shoot at the police, he begins his escape in an enormous blimp.
As the blimp takes off, it reveals a giant Nazi flag.
When the head mobster, Eddie Valentine, sees the flag, he is caught by surprise. He looks at the cops he’s been shooting at . . . then turns his Tommy Gun toward the Nazis. “I may not make an honest buck,” he declares. “But I’m 100 percent American. I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi.” The mobsters and the police suddenly start working together.
The mobsters and the cops had different values. They had different goals. But at the crucial moment, a shared identity united them. And Valentine’s superordinate goal, the success of his American in-group, became more important than the job Nazi Dalton was paying him to do.
Like we talked about earlier, the psychological purpose of in-groups is to help human beings know when they can trust each other’s intentions. This helps us feel safe enough to take the risks we need to make progress. Once the mobsters and the police in The Rocketeer reframed their situation around the shared identity of being all-American, they were willing to turn their backs to each other’s weapons without fear.
When it comes to Dream Teams, there’s an important point of distinction about this kind of superordinate group trust that’s worth emphasizing. Trusting in a person’s ability is one thing. We don’t need to be in the same group to do this. But trusting someone’s intentions—as the best teams do—is quite powerful. When we trust someone’s intentions, it’s suddenly all right if they are different—if they believe different things, have different goals from time to time, or even if they make mistakes. With that kind of respect, we are able to have cognitive friction without things becoming personal and blowing up. We can be free to dissent or disagree or correct each other, because we start from a place of, “I know you don’t mean any harm to me.”
On the face of it, this chapter presents us with a paradox. Strong shared values help keep groups together, but research shows that they also promote detrimental groupthink. At the same time, in this chapter we’ve learned that the value of respect is paramount for disparate groups to come together as one superordinate group.
And actually, if we think back on everything we’ve discussed so far, we realize that each chapter of this book so far has made the case for values that Dream Teams need to share. In our buddy cops chapter we learned why we need to value differences. With Wu-Tang we proved the value of engaging with each other openly and candidly. Carol Vallone taught us how play can help us do that better. Nellie Bly showed us the value of inviting provocation and dissent. Mark Tigan and Malevich helped us understand the need for boundless curiosity. And this chapter has shown us why every great team has to have mutual respect.
Laying all this out makes the answer to our paradox actually pretty obvious: It’s that not all values are created equal. Values that help us include different kinds of people and ideas are the kinds of values we want our teams to share. Values that don’t have to do with inclusion are values we don’t really need to have in common—and in fact, if we have too many of those other kinds of values in common, it’s a sign we need to expand our circle.
Besides, when organizations talk about their “values,” they’re often conflating values with practices. “The customer is always right,” “simplify,” and “find balance” are policies and behaviors, not values. And policies and behaviors like these may be great most of the time, but when taken literally and without room for dissent, they can result in the building burning down. They may rally people together, but they restrict progress up the mountain.
We might say, in other words, that a Dream Team is like a family. Family members may not always see eye to eye. Some may not end up choosing to hold onto all the same values as they grow up. There may be a black sheep or two. But in a good family, a bond supersedes these differences. Members can come together for family rituals that bring them closer, while maintaining their individuality. And this helps develop what sports writer Bill Simmons calls “an unselfish culture.” Like the Red Army hockey players, a family member who can simultaneously belong and contribute meaningfully is liable to choose the team’s success over his or her personal success.
This is the kind of team that can regroup and do what needs to be done whenever a new challenge arises. Like the Russian Five. Or Wu-Tang. Or Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.
There’s one final value that makes the whole Dream Team thing work. It’s a virtue that we’ve hinted at throughout the book, and one that the individual members of great teams need to have in order to fully harness their potential energy. And it’s what we’re going to spend the last two chapters of this book exploring.
Stay tuned for the next free chapter of Dream Teams next month!
Make a great day—
Shane
P.S. If you’re enjoying Dream Teams, get a free signed copy of the book by upgrading to a paid membership to The Snow Report. Or check out my keynote speaking here.