Tricks vs Models

In “Getting Things Done” David Allen talks about how implementing a model is all about “tricks.” As he puts it:

If you’re not sure you’re committed to an all-out implementation of these methods, let me assure that much of the value people get from this material is good tricks. Someones just one good trick can make it worthwhile to range through this information: I’ve had people tell me, for example, that the best thing they got from our seminars was simply the two-minute rule.

This comes after David Allen outlines the model behind Getting Things Done. The model is the logical framework where the rest of the action fits. He then fills in the model with “tricks” — things you can try at every stage to implement the model.

This off-handed remark that Allen spends less than two pages on has been so valuable for me as I’ve reviewed other books! In every book I try to find the “model” and I try to find the “tricks” and I evaluate them separately. Some books have an interesting model and terrible tricks. Some books are all tricks with no model (which is mostly useless, in my opinion).

The best books explicitly outline a model, and then explicitly outline tricks to implementing the model. Many of the Toyota Way books do this (swap out “trick” with “countermeasure” and it’ll all make sense). Theory of Constraints books often (though not always) do this.

And The Culture Code does this. In fact, the entire book is built to demonstrate the model through early chapters in a section, then outline tricks (each section ends with an “Ideas for Action” chapter which could have simply been called “Tricks”). So let’s look at the model, and then let’s evaluate some tricks and see if this book is worth a read. But first, what even is culture?

What’s culture?

Think of the culture of your job. Maybe take a minute and write it down on a piece of paper or open up notepad on your computer or something. I guess I”m not too specific about where or how you write it down, just write it down somewhere.

There are two types of culture (Coyle talks about this briefly but it isn’t the main point of the book). There is deliberate culture, and there is organic culture.

Deliberate culture is the culture an organization says it has — it’s the values they intentionally try to instill in the team. Things like a company vision or mission or values will reveal the deliberate culture.

Organic culture is the culture that is created through the actions of the people who are part of the organization. Organic culture and deliberate culture can overlap (sometimes a lot!) but they can also diverge pretty wildly.

Look at what you’ve written for your workplaces culture. For each item, determine if it is organic culture or deliberate culture.

I once worked for a religious non-profit. All the funds came from donations, so a strong part of the culture was to be cost-conscious because the funds weren’t from commercial revenues, they were from people giving their money. This led to some good outcomes (people were careful with what their budget) and some not-so-good ones (basically everyone was way underpaid).

Because this was a religious culture there was also a sense that direction was fairly top-down. You don’t question the people above you. This led to people working with a singular focus on stuff management requested, but it led to a distinct lack in innovation.

Being budget conscious was part of the deliberate culture — they spoke about it often in meetings. The top-down nature of the organization was part of the organic culture — no one spoke about it much, but you saw everyone around you put their head down and work when requests came in, even if they didn’t always make sense.

To Coyle, deliberate culture can influence organic culture (and his book is basically “how to deliberatize your organic culture”), but organic culture IS culture. As he puts it:

Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.

If what you do defines culture then it makes sense to say that organic culture is the most important aspect of culture. The book, then addresses these two questions:

1. How do you help people buy-in to your culture?
2. How do you design your culture for success?
   • Or “deliberatize” as I said earlier and Coyle never said because it’s not a real word.

One of the key things revealed is the order he approaches these questions. You’d think you’d want to design a culture, then have people buy-in to said culture, but that’s not the case. First get everyone working together, then the team, as a whole, can design the culture (designing the culture together is one of the key things in maintaining that buy-in, actually). So how does he recommend we do this?

The Culture Code Model

In researching successful groups and their respective cultures, Coyle found that these groups have three important skills:

1. They Build Safety
2. They Share Vulnerbility
3. They Establish purpose

That’s … it! It’s not a big, multistep process that requires flowcharts and diagrams. It doesn’t require complex statistics or a degree in behavioral psychology. Successful cultures do these three things.

He wrote a book about it because those three things don’t come naturally to a lot of people. I’m not going to outline the whole book, but let’s, again, look at our current work environments.

Are you safe?

Coyle gives several examples of organizations the exemplify “safety.” By safety what he means is that people feel they belong there. They feel supported and welcome. They feel like they can make mistakes and they won’t get thrown out. He lists some characteristics you typically see from organizations where people feel safe:

• Close physical proximity, often in circles
• Profuse amounts of eye contact
• Physical touch (handshakes, fistbumps, hugs)
• Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches)
• High levels of mixing: everyone talks to everyone
• Few interruptions
• Lots of questions
• Intensive, active listening
• Humor, laughter
• Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.)

Think of your organization. How many of these characteristics do you see in your daily work? If you see most of them, odds are you feel safe.

One of the key things Coyle points out is that safety doesn’t come easily. As he says:

They key to creating psychological safety … is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build.

How do you build safety? In the chapter “Ideas for Action” (AKA tricks) he gives some ideas. For action.

I’m not going to go through all of them, but I’d like to talk about a couple that have really helped me —

(sidenote here: I originally read this book in 2018, around the time it first came out, and it’s funny as I read through it again for this — I marked a lot of different places (and a lot more than last time) and it’s also interesting to see which things I adopted and then forgot that I got the idea from this book. So thanks, Daniel Coyle! It’s been very helpful, apparently!)

• Over-communicate your listening — this is something I continue to work on through this day and have found the concept of “active listening” incredibly helpful in improving my skills as a listener. I still have a long way to go, but this has helped a lot.
• Spotlight your fallibility early on, especially if you’re a leader — somewhere in this book (although not here, ironically) he highlights how Steve Jobs would start pitches to team members with “Here’s a dopey idea” in order to open it up for other people to criticize the idea. I don’t say “dopey idea” because I don’t … say the word dopey? But I will often say “Hey, I’ve got this crazy idea” or “Maybe this is a dumb idea, but …” and I think this one little trick has helped me to get some critical feedback I would’ve missed otherwise

I had more, but deleted them because I don’t want to go too in depth here. Buy the book! I love the “tricks” chapter and the tricks themselves are very good.

Once you feel safe you can progress to the next step that helps open up people even more:

Can you be vulnerable?

According to Coyle, the key way to detect vulnerability is through the presence of the “vulnerability loop … a shared exchange of openness.” This process has four steps:

1. Person A sends a signal of vulnerability
2. Person B detects this signal.
3. Person B responds by signaling their own vulnerability
4. Person A detects this signal
5. A norm is established; closeness and trust increase

Ask yourself this question: have I experienced vulnerability loops at work? Are there people I feel comfortable being vulnerable with? Are people okay being vulnerable with me? I work in IT, and there’s a simple question you can ask to know if vulnerability is OK:

Is it OK to not know the answer?

I’ve always been pretty open about when I don’t know something (which is frequently). With some managers they acknowledge that and help me through my difficulties. But other managers you can tell are making a note that you didn’t know the answer that one time — that you got something wrong.

You never feel comfortable around that second type of manager because you’re always worried you’ll say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing. You don’t feel safe — you feel judged.

Ask yourself this question about your current work: is it OK to not know the answer? Is it OK in general? Is it OK with some people and not with others? This will tell you a lot about the amount of vulnerability that is accepted at your organization.

Again, Coyle has his “Ideas for Action” (AKA Tricks) chapter that has some great ideas to implement. Here’s a couple that I’ve found really helpful:

• Make sure the leader is vulnerable first and often — this is especially helpful in one on ones for me. Every conversation is a give and take, where someone offers up some vulnerability, and the other person reciprocates (hey, it’s that vulnerability loop!). What I’ve found is that a leader should be willing to offer up vulnerability over and over again, and eventually people will feel comfortable being vulnerable themselves. The leader is already in a position of power — they don’t need to worry about their place on the totem pole, so they can be vulnerable in a way someone else simply can’t — at least, not without an invitation. Sometimes I worry I overshare, but I’d rather err on the side of too-vulnerable than not vulnerable enough.
• In conversation, resist the temptation to reflexively add value — this one is underlined, boxed and starred in my copy of the book because it’s something I have a hard time with. I’m a problem solver! Someone comes to me, or even discusses a problem in a meeting, and I am itching to jump in and tell them how I’d fix it. But I must bite my tongue because giving those suggestions about them, even THINKING about what suggestions I would give as they talk, reduces my ability to listen and, ultimately, understand. Plus, most of the time people can work through their own problems and all I’m there for is to be the idea bouncer. Bounce-off-er. You get the idea.

Do you know your organization’s purpose?

When you have a culture that people have bought in to — they feel safe, they’re allowed to be vulnerable and bring their whole selves — what comes next?

Obviously the question now is “What are we doing here?” If you create a healthy culture but it doesn’t have a clear direction what you get is a bunch of motivated people who aren’t sure what to do.

Coyle outlines two different ways you can help people find purpose. You can lead for proficiency (which is doing something you know how to do well) or creativity (solving problems in unique ways) — but these are distinct skills and a group that is good at one might not be great at the other.

Coyle calls an organization with a clearly defined purpose a “high-purpose environment” and defines it thus:

High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal. They provide two simple locators that every navigation process requires: Here is where we are and Here is where we want to go.”

Are you in a “high-purpose environment?” This may be the easiest one to answer because it is based on what you yourself know. As yourself “What is it that we do? Why do we do it? What would it look like if we did it perfectly?” If you can quickly and easily answer these questions with no ambiguity because your organization has made the answers clear repeatedly, then you’re probably in a high-purpose environment.

On the other hand, if you can’t answer them, or if you answer with what you personally believe — not something backed up repeatedly by the organization — then you probably aren’t.

Coyle again outlines ideas for action. A couple I liked are:

• Name and rank your priorities — this is much harder than it looks, but I’ve found it useful to make a team or department charter or strategy document that outlines the priorities you want everyone to focus on.
• Measure what really matters — I worked in a call centers where they were constantly introducing some new metric people would be judged on. Then people would learn how to game the metric, then they’d choose a different one. This pattern repeated for my entire time there. It is really hard to find the “right” measurement, but when you find it you’ll discover you actually only have to measure a few things. When I ran an IT department I cycled through a few measurements, but eventually landed on just three important ones: how many outages did we do post mortems for, are we under 10 tickets in the queue, and what is the business leader’s satisfaction with our performance (measured in quarterly surveys given to these leaders). These few measurements required us to do a lot more and made a much bigger difference than if I’d measured 100 more granular items.

If you want the rest, get the book!

So what did I think of the culture code?

Like I said, this is my second time reading through the book and it’s so interesting to see what things I internalized the first time around, and which things I’m still learning. I think it influenced the way I lead pretty heavily, but there are still some things that I can improve on.

That said, it still isn’t a perfect book. Like almost every book of this genre, the vast majority of examples are extreme (they call out Seal Team 6 and a band of robbers on the back cover) — I would love more “normal people” stories that talk about how these things happen. This wasn’t as bad as some books which EXCLUSIVELY use examples that are outliers, but it could still have more every-day examples.

The book also fills out a relatively quick and easy to grasp model with lots and lots of example, which can get tiresome. That’s just another product of this type of book, though. And some people might appreciate that, but I’m not one of them.

I don’t know if you can tell, though, but I’m nitpicking. Overall this book has been incredibly influential on my thinking and behavior and anyone who wants to be a leader (or even just a good team member) would benefit from reading it. Definitely recommended.