This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube video titled "Threats in a Team | Andy Billings" (posted 2018-02-05) featuring Andy Billings giving a workshop-style talk about psychological and social threats within teams. Billings explains neuroscience findings showing social threat registers like physical pain, discusses how threat undermines creativity and performance, touches on gender imbalance in game-development teams, and leads an interactive exercise (worksheet and group discussion) with audience Q&A. The excerpt is a presentation/talk rather than a multi-person conversational transcript.
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We don't actually have too many physical threats running around like tigers, which is kind of where we all evolved for, was we were sensitive to kind of danger and to threat. And the human mind is incredibly well-tuned to sense a threat and to sense danger. And that's what's kept us alive. I don't know about you. It's kept me alive a few times already in my life. And it's certainly kept us alive in terms of our evolution. Our brains are very wired to sense or smell or feel or see or detect or hear threats. We carry that into our work with teams. It's not tigers anymore that are threatening us physically. It's concerns about our status, who we are. Are we going to be appreciated? Are we going to be recognized? Are we going to be engaged? Those are the kind of threats that we're faced today in teamwork. So it's a different kind of threat. But here's what's interesting. When you look at the— when you do magnetic MRIs, magnetic resonance imaging, and you look at the brain activity of humans and you show them things which you know they're frightened of, the patterns for physical threat and the patterns for psychological, emotional, social threat are exactly the same. And our physiological reactions in terms of start breathing faster, release adrenaline, Other kinds of hormones are released in our brain. Those are exactly alike. My point is, when you're in teams, you are sensing the same amount of threat and you're scanning at the same time as if there were dangerous physical threats around. It's one of the reasons that it's so incredibly hard to get a team to work effectively is because we're constantly scanning the team for threat. It's very easy for us to see threats. Even small ones or ones maybe even that we imagine sometimes, which make it incredibly hard to get that sense of safety. When that sense of safety goes, there goes the creativity out of your team. This kind of sense of, here we are in a VUCA world, we're working in a very civilized world. I mean, you guys all look friendly and pleasant, but when you get in your teams, you're constantly scanning your team members for threats. It doesn't mean they're necessarily going to jump out of their chairs and physically hurt you, but emotionally you're scanning for, are my ideas going to be appreciated? Is this a place where I can be myself? Is this a place where I can do my best work? Can I take a chance in this? If the answer to that comes back no or maybe, you're going to be careful and you're going to guard and you're going to hold back those ideas. Of course, you're The creativity and the performance of your group is going to absolutely plummet. Again, some of the things that are— if you categorize these things, there are things about our self-worth. Are we accepted? This is all around us as a social animal. Another little piece of neuroscience. When you study pain and social acceptance or social rejection, they come out exactly the same in the brain. So the pain that you would feel, like if you have your knee drilled, that kind of pain, and the pain that you would feel if I'm not feeling my ideas are accepted registers in the brain exactly the same way as pain, something incredibly uncomfortable. We're all trained to minimize pain and avoid pain. Naturally, when we get into groups, we're scanning for threats. We determine and we see some of these things. We get a sense of pain when those things happen.
OK.
All right. So here's one of the reasons that it's so incredibly hard to get a high-performing team is we're all tuned to threats. By the nature of the work that you're doing, you're offering ideas, you're disagreeing, you're offering different points of views. You inevitably bump into each other on a psychological basis. It's just part of the creative process. So inevitably you have threats going on in a in a team. Depending on how you want to handle those threats, either as a team or individually, you're going to make all the difference in the world. There's probably nothing you can do except to get really, really tuned to how sensitive people are to threats. When I was helping my son move into his new offices, the members of his organization were there helping. Guess what they were looking at? In those new offices? Where am I going to sit? Am I going to have an important place? Is this a good part of the office? Is that a good part of the office? Immediately people are just tuned to thinking about how's the social order going to work while I'm in this particular newer environment. There's nothing that happened necessarily objectively except people are tuned. Something new happened and people immediately start to scan for how am I going to stand in that particular In that group. So this is not to say that a creative team is a friendly, cozy, happy place. At Electronic Arts, our most creative teams fight a lot, they disagree a lot, they reconcile a lot, meaning they get together, they keep those social bonds a lot, but they're not friendly, cuddly, cozy, sleepy kinds of places. Please, yes.
What is the gender dividing on those teams? Mostly working on gaming, it's mostly guys that are in that situation.
Yeah, yeah, good point. The games business has a serious challenge on gender balance. So we're— and games is such a technology-oriented business that there are many fewer women going through technology tracks. Most of what's in a game company are technology people. There are a number of game designers and so forth, but kind of the backbone are technology. So most of these teams have— for us, if we have a team that has 20% or 25% women, we're pretty excited. There's a lot of data to show that companies which have a better gender balance and a better inclusion balance have better financial results. McKinsey's documented that, a number of people documented that. I mean, I think the controversy still raging is, does that mean that companies are financially successful, can afford to invest more women and minorities in doing those kinds of programs, or is there something intrinsically there? But we believe actually that a variety of people in terms of gender, ethnicity, but especially kind of your thinking style or your work style, all of those kinds of diversity Factors really help. Good question. All right. If it's okay with you guys, I thought we could take your own teams as the best place to think about these concepts. You'd be thinking about your own teams in terms of direction, in terms of Alignment in terms of commitment. And as I understand it, your teams are— you're still— there's a component where you contribute to the team, there's a component where you work as individuals. So maybe it's not exactly the same as belonging to a company team, but for our purposes, it's kind of a good experiment, I think, for you to be thinking about where is our team today on some of these dimensions. Where do we think our team is on this whole dimension of safety?
How—
comfortable are we sharing? How well do we use our variety? How well do we use our diversity? Out of that might come some ideas around, well, one, do you want to change your teams? That's kind of point one. My friends with the beautiful BMWs, they felt like they had most of the answers, so it was very hard to talk to them about trying to make their teams better, whereas the team The scrappy, underfunded team, they would take all the feedback in the world. So you kind of have to think about where your team is. How much does it want to change? How much does it need to change? And then a little conversation on, are there some dimensions on which you think your team might make some progress in a way that you guys as a team feel like would be useful? So the payoff would be 2 parts. One, just an opportunity to think about the concepts with people in a team that you've actually experienced. completely real to life. And then secondly, to the extent you identify a couple of areas that you would like to potentially move the team forward, maybe that actually makes your team a better place to be a member of. So you guys up for that?
Yeah.
Okay, good. Alright, so if you— if someone would help me distribute these out, these are just simply A worksheet and they've got the 3 dimensions and there are some questions at the bottom that dive in a little bit more to the safety dimension. So what I would suggest we do is just take maybe 4 or 5 minutes, fill out the sheet. Do you guys have pens or maybe there are pens around? OK. And then we'll get in groups and we'll have a conversation about this. So maybe just first work individually.
