The Science of Team Synchrony: Why Most Teams Are Delusional About Performance

So what you're saying is when teams click and it's all of these neuromarkers and biomarkers coming together at once, that's synchrony. Synchrony is different than group flow. It's a predictor of precursor to— it's a different state. Hey everyone, how are you? Welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. I am joined by two really amazing people and good friends. Uh, you guys know Dr. Mannino. He is the Chief Science Officer at the Flow Research Collective and my longtime collaborator. Erwin Valencia is a first-time guest and a longtime friend as well. I'm really excited because ever since I met Erwin, I've wanted to work on projects with him, and today we're announcing one of those projects in a sense. But I want to start a little bit with Erwin's background because it's unusual. You were in Columbia University and you were somehow tucked between the business school and the neuroscience department. And how did that happen? I know your longtime interest is applied neuroscience, coaching performance. But talk about that nexus where your career sort of started.

Yeah. So, my career originally started in finance. I was working in sales and trading on Wall Street. I eventually transitioned out of that, went into other areas. But one of the areas that I've always been interested in was this area of human performance, creativity, both in sports, music, et cetera. And the program that I was in at Columbia sits in between the business school and the teacher's college. So, it combines really the best learnings from both areas around adult learning and business and managerial excellence. So the program is really around leadership, executive and organizational development in a coaching fashion. And so after I finished the program there, I worked with the program, Dr. Terry Malpia over at Columbia had asked that I come on and help integrate this neuroscience. So back then Columbia made about a billion-dollar investment in neuroscience. So they wanted to inculcate neuroscience in all the areas of their education. So the neuroscience of education, the neuroscience of math, the neuroscience of, etc., language, the neuroscience of business. So this really brought together a lot of the areas that I was interested in, and applied neuroscience has been something that's always been of great interest to me. Like, how do you take these ideas, these very advanced ideas, and really where does the rubber meet the road, and how do you apply them for what makes people tick and what makes organizations tick?

Has any other educational institution made that big of an investment in neuroscience? Really substantial in terms of trying to bring neuroscience into all their programs? Like, as I was listening to you talk, I know this is a little tangential, but it struck me as that was— that sounds like a real first.

It seems like a first, yeah. And they were— they've really put a lot of attention and effort into this, and a lot of, you know, they, they really put their chips down on the table and said, this is the bet that we believe is going to be the future of understanding how of human excellence, education, learning, et cetera. So I don't know. There's obviously a lot of— every large university is well deeply invested in neuroscience. I'm not certain whether another university—

But the applied aspect of it across their educational curriculum is what sort of caught my attention.

All right.

Tangent aside. Let's— you guys met, correct me if I'm wrong, at the very first Zero to Dangerous training that we did when I launched the Flow Research Collective. In Seattle. And if I remember correctly, I was having breakfast with Michael and Irwin came up to tell me that a security guard from Amazon had accidentally ended up at this seminar. You got to start with that story because it was so odd and so funny.

Like, in the spirit of possibility, of just making things possible within that setting of what was going on in Seattle there at the first at the first event. This gentleman just came in. We were at the Space Needle and he just wandered in, basically off the street. And we don't know, we don't make any assumptions about anybody coming into the place. Everybody has their own areas of expertise and excellence and he just fit into the place. And then as it turns out, he wasn't an actual participant. He didn't intend to be there. It was just accidental. He was in Seattle because he was working in security for Amazon. And He happened to come in there and that's—

No, he walked into the wrong seminar, right? Wasn't he going to an Amazon training seminar and he accidentally walked into ours? And then you told me and I think, and he stayed, right? He didn't go back to the Amazon. We left him stay for like 2 days. I remember that.

Okay.

How did you guys meet? We're here to sort of tell people about Synergy, which is your new company, which I just joined the board on, which we're really excited about because it's a it's an absolutely revolutionary team performance measurement technology, but I'm jumping way ahead of myself. How did you guys meet? Tell me the history of the company a little bit.

You want to go?

Okay, I'll start. Okay. So yeah, we met through you, through this event in Seattle, the first FRC event, live event. And Erwin, you can tell the peripheral story, but the sort of the central, you know, thing, history was we, we really bonded and Erwin, we left at the same time and he, he gave me a ride to the airport. I remember, which was great. And then, and then we left and then like 6 months later, I think he contacted me, Erwin contacted me and said, what are you doing? And we, we started like, you know, he started coaching me a little bit actually. I remember, I think that was it. Like my memory, like he started coaching me a little bit and then a few months after that, getting to know him and his work more in depth and vice versa, we realized that there was this really cool opportunity. And this is before the AI hype, before the AI, the latest generative AI boom. We started talking about collaboration, which is his expertise in team performance. And my expertise in my PhD research, I looked at synchrony In fact, one of our advisors also, Scott Kelso, who Stephen, we've collaborated with a great deal. Scott Kelso founded the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences where I did my work. And he's sort of the godfather of social neuroscience and coordination dynamics and discovered back in 2007, the first neuromarker when two people, two brains are in sync and cooperating and collaborating.

And that—

Let me back you up for a second. Is that the technical deficit? Why don't we define synchrony from a neurological point of view for your folks?

Okay. Okay. And then, Erwin, I was waiting to finish the story and give your half how we met, but as well, but because I'm sure you have a lot to add. Yeah. So that's the idea of synchrony, right? It's biological, it's neurobiological, it's physiological alignment between signals and biomarkers between humans. Whether that's their brainwaves or their heart rates or their respiratory rates or their galvanic skin response or anything, what happens is biologically those signals connect and align perfectly and get in sync. And then that turns out interpersonal synchrony is a very strong predictor of psychological safety, cooperation, human communication, collaboration, cooperation, and so on.

Okay, so let me pause here for a second to drill down a little bit. We use the term synchrony when how many different systems have to be aligned? So if, or do they all end up coming together automatically? Can we, is it brain entrainment? Is it our heart rates start syncopating? Is it our skin temperature gets to the same level or is it all at once?

Yeah, sure. I mean, it's a symphony of all those things together. If you remember, so around that time at that first event, it was right before the pandemic. So the context around which Michael and I started speaking about this, and really that we were, and you did a lot during that time, Steven, of really trying to bring people together online. But really what happened is the hundreds of thousands of years of development that humans have had of like getting in sync or getting connected with each other in person and face-to-face was suddenly thrown into whack because now we're all working remote, we're all isolated from each other. And that sort of set the tone around which Michael and I were talking. So the idea of which one of these things come into play is ideally all of them come into play. But part of the problem that we were trying to solve and that we were faced with at the time is how do you put those back in when now we're just speaking remotely in this sort of venue, you know, and how do teams work more better together.

So what you're saying is when teams click, when they really click, and that's sync— that's synchrony, and it's all of these neuromarkers coming— these neuromarkers and biomarkers coming together at once. It's clear and it's measurable. And your quest was, okay, this shows up normally when teams come together, but how do we do it remotely, right?

How do we not only do it remotely, how do we do it hybrid, and then how do we do it face-to-face? Because Previously, it was sort of like this alchemy. Even in sports, they say up to 40% of team performance at the highest level is just intangibles. So, they took all this synchrony, this synchrony alchemy, and put it into a bucket called intangibles. And maybe the best coaches in the world, the best leaders in the world could intuitively look at something and say, "Okay, let's make these changes." And you see that. That's why That's why these men and women that are able to do these things get the highest dollar to do those things because they're really highly skilled. Problem is it's expensive and it can't be scaled and it's very difficult to do at distance.

Yes.

In the world we're living in now, that, that's sort of the challenge. But yes, it's, it's, it is a symphony much like, you know, it's like an actual symphony. It is a symphony of things coming together to work and harmonize. And it really depends on the team. And it really depends on the context. Yeah. Be added.

And Stephen, you used the word click, teams click. We all have, we have language that we've all used, phrases, colloquial phrases. We have team chemistry. We're on the same wavelength. We're clicking. We're so in sync. It turns out that there's a real measurable, quantifiable biological response to that. And when you measure it, you can of course modify it and engineer it. But it's a felt subjective thing that we've all experienced. And of course, you know this with your work on group flow and so on.

So yeah, that's actually where I wanted to go next for a clarification point. Synchrony is different than group flow in a sense, and we'll talk about this later, I think, when we get to some of the work we've done. It's a predictor of, precursor to, and I'm using both those words with quotes around them because I'm not sure if we know which one, if it's a predictor of or a precursor to. I'm not sure we know that exactly, but it's a different state. Than group flow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a, yeah, it's a, it's an antecedent to group flow or team flow or collective flow. It's not the whole picture. And we could talk more about this later, but there's work from other folks out there like Jeff Vanden Hout, who has a model of team flow, like a phenomenological model, a psychological mental model, not necessarily like what's going on in the body and the brain. But that's also been researched too these past couple of years, just very recently. And it shows out that, yeah, there's a real measurable—

about that because you guys have been measuring— you guys are actually measuring what, like, real brain-to-brain and body-to-body dynamics inside real teams. What's the difference? Like, first of all, what's the most surprising stuff you've seen? And what— how big of a gap is there between, like, what teams tend to say and what the synchrony data actually tells you.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so let me jump in there. That's actually sort of funny. You know, when you survey teams and ask them their opinion, something like 75% or 80% of teams will say, "Oh, yeah, we're operating at a very high level." Mm-hmm. And in fact, if you look at the objective data, it's only about 20% of teams that are operating at a very high level. Something in the range of maybe 75 to 80% of teams are overestimating their skill and their ability to connect. We've put it into 3 buckets: brains, bodies, and behaviors. So people, when we're on this call, we're connecting cognitively, right? And that's measurable using— and in fact, we measure it just through the camera, right? We don't use any wearables. We— you measure physiological components like, say, HRV, respiration, heart rate, etc. Body pose estimation along the lines of like, are you leaning in? Are you nodding? These are, these are subtextual cues that people will show when they're actually in alignment. And in concert, they all work together. And, you know, maybe you can, you can certainly prescriptively say, oh, I'm going to nod, I'm going to lean in, do all these things. You know, humans are very sophisticated in the sense of like, you know, the, the physiological, biological smell test, so to speak. People can tell when it's, when you're connected, when you're not. So the, it's, I would say, impossible to make sure that all the cognitive signals are aligning, make sure that all the physiological signals are aligning, your heart rate variability is aligning. I mean, you can control that with your breath, but really, are you going to do that and have it in real time?

I mean, right.

So those are some of the things that we measure. And then on top of all that, we look at contextually what's going on. What is the team trying to accomplish? How are they trying to accomplish it? How well are they actually working with each other? What type of turns are they taking, et cetera? Like all these things that great teams do either intuitively or as part of their process, these are things that we look at and say, what does this particular team, what does this particular engagement need to try and accomplish its goal?

Okay, so if a team deploys Synergy in a sense, what it's providing is a new sense of situational awareness is what it sounds like to me. So if that happens, right, how does that actually like, by giving people their access to their data in real time, how is that changing situational awareness? And, um, and your measure, by the way, your semantic analysis, you're all— is blood flow out of the vein in the forehead, a couple other things that you guys are measuring along the way to track these things?

Yeah, there's a whole host of different tools that we're using without sort of like lifting up the black box of how we, we particularly do things, but Essentially, yes. And these are things that, you know, in person you get a sense. There's sort of this felt sense of how things are gelling or syncing with other people that here in this venue, it's much more difficult to do. On top of that, if you're a leader of an organization, whether it's Microsoft or a small startup, how do you do this at distance and then at scale? Like, you can do it on a 5-person or a 15-person team, for example, just the actual performers, right? The people on the court are performing at one time. There's an entire team behind it making sure that those performers can actually perform well. So, everybody has to literally be rowing in the same direction or have the same idea in mind. And then, so I guess operationally, what we're trying to do is we use a method developed out of Stanford called behavior design. And BJ Fogg is is the godfather of behavior design. And it's really about taking small behaviors and leveraging them across a team or then across an organization. And those can have very large impacts, especially when it's, you know, when it's done by the leaders and the stakeholders. It sends a very clear message to the team around psychological safety, trust, growth, et cetera.

Yeah. Like, can I just piggyback on that real quick? Like things to engender and modify and engineer a synchrony, like active listening, making more eye contact, Being more vulnerable and emotionally open, you know, group mindfulness and asking open-ended questions and matching your tone to the groups. All of those things obviously can be learned and practiced, but to change behaviors in that way is, as you know, quite difficult. So that's something that's, you know, it's a learning curve.

So you're nudging, basically. You guys are reading the physiologic, all the data in real time and nudging, essentially.

Yes, using artificial intelligence.

Use it right. What— God, there's so many different ways I, I want to go here. Why don't we, why don't we actually talk a little bit about the, about the study we did? Because I want— what I want is I want to talk about the results and what we're actually seeing. And so we, we took, we, we took your technology into the Flow Research Collective, teamed up, um, with Guillaume Demas in Montreal and Jeff VanderHolt, who you just mentioned, who's sort of the godfather of Team Flow. Little history for those who don't know, Csikszentmihalyi posited the idea of group flow way back in the day but couldn't tell was it individuals in flow sort of working together, was it a distinct neurobiological state? Keith Sawyer was one of Csikszentmihalyi's students at the University of Chicago. He took that idea, spent 10 years working with Second City Television studying the improv comedy troupe, kind of doing real-time analysis and video analysis of their performances. And came up with Group Flow. And that has since branched into lots of different things. There's interpersonal flow, which is me and one other person lost in a group flow experience. There can be team flow or group flow. And Jeff focused specifically on team flow, which is very, very similar to what you guys are focusing on. So we brought together this great team and studied the technology and studied team performance. So why don't— like, what did we learn? What does it do?

Well, the first hypothesis that we tested was that team synchrony is correlated positively to team flow in virtual teams, like in virtual and specifically in that context. And we showed that that is the case. We had about 12 teams, like I think a total of 67 individuals. In the team. And we did show that that was the case. And a couple of the results were there was a 19% performance boost in teams that increased their cognitive alignment and their emotional synchrony. We showed that there was a 15%, um, team flow increase. So those scores, the team flow and the team synchrony scores, moved positively, uh, you know, hand in hand. And that was— that basically the idea was that objective psychophysiological synchrony that we're talking about here, tracked with subjective measurements of team flow. Because that's how we measure team flow. We use Jeff's well-validated assessment. Yeah, yeah, those, those are the big findings.

I, I, one of the things I was wondering when, as you were talking, and I don't know if we've did this, I don't, I don't think we did this, or I don't know if it's been measured. So that's a Those are substantial lifts, right? That's like a 20% team performance improvement, which is interesting. My question would be is not your technology, but when teams come together, do you think— basically, my question is, do we think synergy mimics real-world experience? Is that the gap it's closing? Hey, everybody. My next book, it is coming out in April 2026. It's called We Are as Gods. A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. Once again, I co-authored this one with my good friend, the amazing Peter Diamandis. The book is sort of a sequel to our award-winning work, Abundance, but it's a lot more. It's a look at what are the cognitive skills we need to thrive in an age of abundance. My goal is to get that message out as far and as wide as possible. Head to stephenkotler.com/gods. Thank you so much. We really appreciate the help. Basically, my question is, do we think synergy mimics real-world experience? Is that the gap it's closing?

So, you know, flying via instrumentation, sometimes you're flying blind. In a storm, you're flying blind. And here up to now, you've been sort of flying on instrumentation. Without instrumentation, rather. Now, this is just a way for you to say, okay, my felt sense is that this team is clicking, but subtextually what we're seeing is there's not enough cognitive alignment to really get towards great execution. And you see that in organizations all the time where, you know, up top it says, top-down, it says, we're aligned on this, and everybody nods and says, yes, we're aligned on that. Whereas some people on the execution side might feel Well, I still have some questions. We still have to figure this out. And that inability to close that gap. And because you don't know it's there, because you only have to go with what people tell you and show you. We're actually saying, okay, well, you feel, you say that, but there's this gap there that is, that says differently. And then what we want to do is just say, okay, well, there's a gap there. Try and address that gap. Try and address that gap by making sure you're surveying your entire team. Who's doing the execution? Ask them the questions. So it doesn't— we're not replicating the entire experience, but where we're trying to do is give you instrumentation to make whatever this experience is, because my guess is this is going to be the way we're doing business going forward, right? The, the biggest problems are gonna require the best people, and the best people might not be located in Seattle or in New York or in Los Angeles or in Idaho. You might have all those places, and that's just in the United States. Consider all what's going on all over the world. And so, to tap into that, we might want to have this ability to contextually go to tap into the best sources of information, the best intelligence to solve the biggest problems.

Yeah, Erwin, you used the phrase—

It's a— you guys—

S for team.

Well, Microsoft did that study, right, where they found that collaborative networks, right? When you take work remote, collaborative networks end up siloed and static, and the number is crazy, right? Like cross-team communication drops by 80%. That's a massive drop-off, right? So that's definitely the 20%, you're closing that gap. We know, I'm wondering sort of how far up you get to go. Let me back up for half a second because you mentioned something that I want to go deeper in, and whether it's your your work and, and the norm, the markers you guys are tracking, whether it's hyperscanning labs to kind of real-world performance environments, what are the conditions consistently that help synchrony?

Sure, you know, they're the same conditions that help teams emerge. Great teams do well. Like, I think Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are happy in a similar way, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. So the idea that functional teams have certain things that clear communication, skill matching, feedback loops, same, very much the same thing that on the far end of performance you see flow, clear goals. You're, you're, you're putting the team goals ahead of your individual goals, the right skills in the situation, the right communication, a North Star that everybody's working towards, and everybody understands. And I guess the other thing is autonomy, you know, an authority to make the decisions that that you're able to make and to do the work that you need to do. So when those things are there and present, you tend to get better work out of, out of a team. When any number of those things are off, and that's just, it's human nature, that's, you know, organizations are a reflection of the people that work there. And it's just a reflection of some of the things that are going on wrongly or rightly. Everybody has blind spots, organizational blind spots, individual blind spots. So did that—

can I jump in as well?

Of course, please.

That's now like, so there's different levels of that measuring. So I think like, so what I was just going to say is physiologically, like the urban you mentioned earlier, we're measuring brain, body, and behavior. So when everybody's parasympathetic system is upregulated, that is, we're all calm. And our nervous systems are tracking and trending in a similar way, we have similar stress responses. There's more psychological safety. There's more trust. When we're using similar semantic components in language, that's indicative of shared mental models, shared cognitive synchrony. And so, and even just like fostering eye contact, which of course is difficult to do in virtual scenarios, but that can be inferred, you can actually show that your mental states start to align, your autonomic nervous systems start to respond in the same way. So different aspects of physiology and neurobiology show that you people have the same sort of mental models. All of these things that Irvin is talking about exist at the level of the body and the brain, and there are indicators of that.

I also gotta emphasize it's been in development for a while, right? Wrote about you guys and wrote about the work before I even joined the board. I wrote about it in my— in the new book I'm working on with Peter Diamandis. There's a chapter sort of where we, among other things, we track the evolution of neurotech. Um, and mainly because the big point that Peter and I are making is that cooperation at scale is the killer app of the 21st century, certainly the best way we can possibly go after kind of the grand challenges of our time, which are global challenges, and we need to cooperate across the globe. So one of the things I'm so excited about is there's not only is this technology You know, it's just so many things coming together. You guys brought so much different expertise together in this, in this one project, but it really paves the way, as far as I can tell, towards a future we really need to get to. That's like, it's very exciting to me in the present because there's a whole lot of firsts here. Talk a little about that, but also talk about where you see it going because the future with this is really amazing as well.

So we have been working on it for a long time. You know, these are We, for the first few years that we were actually talking about this, it was really about does the science jibe? Does it, is there a there there? You know, are we just, we're putting together these ideas and then where's the proof? And luckily along that time, there were a lot of other independent university studies, independent researchers that were putting together these pieces. So if you think about, remember that cartoon where there's a train going and there's a person putting the railing down, the railroad track right in front of it, it almost felt like that in many ways. Yes, there were a lot of firsts in there. So some of the firsts is that we were able to objectively measure some of these components around brain-body behavior, the interpersonal and behavioral synchrony that has developed over hundreds of thousands of years. We've been able to do that. We've actually connected sort of the applied science— well, the, the science and the applied science to it and really tried to make connections as to this is what's happening in the real world. Like, people talk a lot about sports, and one of our favorite things internally is like We talk about the New Zealand All Blacks, right? And they're, you know, they're, they're among the winningest teams in all of sports. But some of the things that they do culturally is, you know, they do a haka before every game. The crowd is really invested in this. And I think that internally what they're doing is they're getting in synchrony. And as a team that's from a small nation that's probably smaller than the size of Manhattan in number of people, They're perennially, consistently among the best teams in the world doing this particular thing. And they're all so super aligned. So, back to the idea of firsts where we are doing all those things together. We're using— we're combining these different ideas: behavior design, neuroscience, applied neuroscience, executive and organizational development and coaching, and putting all those things together in such a way that it's more accessible and more scalable. And then I guess the other thing is now you can scale it. Now you can do it at distance and at scale. And I can see how my team in New York City is doing while I'm in Los Angeles, or how somebody in Seattle can look at their team in, in Europe and understand how that's working. And I guess the other thing is it understands contextually. In New York City, it might not work well. In the Midwest, and there's a different way of communicating, and there's different norms that different teams will have. And what our platform is able to do is recognize what those norms are, not just, oh yeah, it's okay, you can, you can say those things, but really at a biological level, a cognitive level, behavioral level, how do you really feel about those things? And, and how well, rather, how does, how well does the team feel about it? And is that an acceptable norm? And then sort of nudge teams in changing those behaviors towards getting better outcomes.

Over the summer, I got to hear Andy Walsh, who's the head of— it was the head of high performance at Red Bull forever. And I've known Andy forever. I think you guys know him as well. And he was talking— he really works in high-speed teams as well. And he was telling you about how the high-speed teams of the 21st century, because the AIs sort of equalize expertise, come together in slightly different ways. And all the I'm not going to go too far down that rabbit hole. What I want to— the point I wanted to make, which I thought of as you were talking, was it seems like for these reasons, the teams of tomorrow, today, maybe moving into tomorrow, are going to come together very, very quickly. There's not going to be a lot of time. Like, if you look at the list, you look at the list as sort of group flow triggers. For example, closed listing, you can bring that into sort of every environment. That's something you carry. But like familiarity with language, Familiar terminology, those sorts of things are things that teams develop over time and we're going to be lacking them. So it strikes me that having technology to nudge us might actually fill that gap.

So we're entering this age where AI can allow us to do all these different things. We need to move faster because obviously AI and technology move fast. But our approach has always been, you know, AI is certainly going to make things faster. Like, you know, you can ask ask LLMs these different questions. But at the end of the day, these— all these problems that we're trying to solve now are going to be done, I think, person to person or within human teams or human and AI-augmented teams. The ability for— at the end of the day, the core technology is designed to help people work better together and to sort of leverage the AI to do that and accelerate that process and deepen that process. So Absolutely. We have to, we are gonna have to move faster, but I think that, and our approach has always been, how can we use this technology to help humans do the human jobs better and augment it with, with AI and machine learning, et cetera.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You said it better than I did.

That was good.

That was perfect.

Well done. Michael, let me ask you the next question, which is where do things break down? What kills synchrony inside of teams?

When, when there's not open communication, Right? When these are— there's flow blockers, as we know, right? Self-sabotage and distraction and things like that. And then there's team flow blockers as well, or team synchrony blockers, if you will. When there's not open communication, when there's not a good amount of psychological safety and trust, when the skills of the different team members don't really align or integrate well. So when there's not a collective ambition, all of those, like, synchrony is a precursor, as we talked about earlier, a predictor, I would say, better, of all of those things. So when those things break down, you know, the alignment of our physiological and neurobiological markers also goes away. And that then makes it harder to, to bring those things back. So that's where I would say team synchrony breaks down.

Can I ask a follow-up on that also as you were talking to Rhonda and me? So much of our safety and security is socially based, right? It's hardwired. We're a social species. So, when team performance breaks down, it's probably got an extra emotional weight than just an individual performance breakdown because it's wired so deep into safety and security.

Yeah, absolutely right.

I mean, the fear of public speaking is the number one fear in the world, right? Because exile was a capital crime. So if you screwed up socially 300 years ago, they kicked you out of the tribe, you were going to die. You couldn't live on your own. And that had been since the beginning of time. So, you know, we, we process social fear in the same brain structures we process emotional fear. You guys know this. So I'm listening to you talk, and what is dawning on me is I've never actually thought about this. But I would assume that if you're a member of a team and it breaks down in the way that Michael was just laying out, there's actually extra stress. Like, it's extra sort of disastrous because of that, because of the safety and security component. Does that sound crazy to you?

It's absolutely on point. You know, I mean, fear is the mind killer, right? And if you—

so that's a Dune quote for people in the cheap seats, folks, just saying.

Deep seats.

So Google's Project Aristotle showed that actually psychological safety was a huge lever in team performance. You know, when you're talking about teams that have the highest amount of resources, the highest amount of skills, it's again, these intangibles, the idea of psychological safety is really sort of a lever that is going to indicate how well, or a predictor of how well teams do. Yeah, absolutely. I'd say that that is a component. And when you think about that, psychological safety is one of those intangibles that, that can kill, or one of those things that can kill, uh, team safety right off the bat.

Yeah, yeah.

Let me ask you another question. Oh wait, Michael, you go ahead and then I'll, then I'll follow up.

No, no, I was just going to say that, that like you're— it creates more stress, it creates more anxiety, fear of what other people think, uh, of you in that sense, um, which we can get into another one of our colleagues discusses quite a bit.

Like Therese's book, right? So I question, because this also I'll bet has been an issue along the way. Synchronicity was, and brain entrainment. I think this is like, blame all the like binaural beats crap on this. Like, this is who I blame for this, right? And don't get me started on binaural beats because it's a rabbit hole we'll go down for a really long time. My point is synchronicity for a while had this really woo-woo reputation that it was right out of the New Age. And you still, you know, you, you still hear it a lot in that, in that context. And it's interesting, it took us so long to sort of wrestle flow back from the New Age, right? And like, and finally put it on a hard neurobiological footing. You almost have to do the same thing with like brain entrainment and things like that.

Yeah, yeah. Can I jump in real quick on that one? So number one, it's been measured, right? Just like flow has been measured in the brain, now team flow has been measured at the level of the brain. So that is the most objective evidence. So that's number one, right?

Our colleague found a distinct neural marker for it.

There's a distinct neural marker neuromarker for brains being in team flow. Not only that, but it turns out Csikszentmihalyi was right that team flow or team synchrony is a collective state. That is, it does not exist in any one particular brain. It's a whole is greater than the sum of the parts nonlinear signal, which is really cool. It's not just a bunch of individuals us in flow, and that's team flow. It's a greater thing, which is very interesting. Again, back to what we were saying in the earlier conversation, subjectively, we all have this feeling of when we're clicking with one another, and there's all of this evidence now, just language, brain, body behaviors that we've talked about that shows that. We have language phrases that are indicative of it. It's a feeling that we all know. And then another quick thing is a lot of people mistake the word synchrony for synchronicity.

And Stephen, we're working on synchronicity, though.

We are working on a paper and about to submit a paper for peer review on the phenomenon, the neurobiology of synchronicity, which is very interesting, but it's not the same as totally different.

Totally, totally, totally, totally different. Yeah.

So I just wanted to highlight that. So the language use also plays a role here in it being a little, you know, same with flow, right?

What do you, what have you seen as the biggest difference in teams on the backend of kind of training this way? Let me pause and ask the framing for the question. In my mind is I was thinking about, I'm blanking the, oh God, I forgot his name. He was at Cal State Fullerton. He's the researcher who proved that group flow is our favorite experience on Earth. I'm blanking his name for a second, it'll come back to me. I wrote about him in Rise of Superman. But, uh, group flow is our favorite experience on Earth, right? And people will take it over drugs and over sex and over, like, even over, like, all this really sticky addictive stuff. And what's interesting to me about that is, well, with that signal showed up in 2020, or when you were talking about how the reason, as you were doing the research, it showed up. So since like 2022 till now, it's been steamrolling. And what's interesting to me is we're getting closer and closer and closer to the point where— I always hate this phrase, but we're about to be able to have access to basically our favorite experience on Earth. On demand might be a little strong there, but a hell of a lot more easily than, than ever before, right? Which is really interesting to me. And I think that actually has sort of profound impact on a society. So that's my frame for the question of what have you seen in teams, right? You put, I mean, I don't know, a bunch of different teams through the study group and there were a bunch of, even before we did that study, you piloted this with a bunch of teams and tested with a bunch of teams. So what have you seen reliably on the backend? Do the changes stick? Does it actually lead to behavioral change that endures over time?

Yeah. Generally, what gets measured gets managed, and what gets measured gets improved. So a team having the ability to see how well they do these things— so again, small incremental changes leveraged over the team can have very big results. So as the team habituates these things over time— and so we saw these changes in as little as 6 weeks. So as teams are able to habituate these things— and again, it depends on the organization, depends on the team, depends on what they're willing to habituate. But as they habituate these things over time, they tend to become team culture, how we treat each other, how, what gets accepted within the organization. So those things can endure inasmuch as they, they help the team perform better.

And when you say over 6 weeks, that was how many training sessions with the tech, with the technology? It was 2 per week, if I remember correctly.

So at minimum, they would do 1 a week, right, Michael? At minimum, they would do 1 hour, they would record record and deliver 1 hour of meetings. And then our platform would take a look at what the changes are week over week. And then we would make suggestions as to what they can change week over week. And then the goal is you, you just take one small thing, ask an open-ended question.

Yeah.

Take turns. Mainly small things that people's teams and should, should be doing generally. But if you sort of put it at top of mind, like, okay, this week we're gonna think about asking open-ended questions. What does that do? That actually opens up a world of possibility of how teams think about things. Turn-taking, make sure everybody has an opportunity to add their intelligence and their expertise into the conversation versus, "Erwin, you talk too much." Like, we get that a lot. You know, how do we make sure everybody has the ability to share? And so, in short, in as much as teams are willing to habituate and make these things norms, they become durable. You don't have to continue once a team or an organization has a habit or a culture of the way they treat each other, that can endure. You don't have to continue to pay subscription fees. So for example, somebody wants to work with Synergy for X amount of time. After that X amount of time, whatever you habituate becomes yours. You don't have to pay us a fee for how you're treating each other. Right.

And then we failed them. So this is on me. The way the platform works, You record your Zoom meetings, your team meetings, you send them in, you guys analyze them and send back detailed reports and behavioral change.

We have a platform that people can log onto and, you know, we're building, we're gonna be building ways to sort of automatically send your Zooms, send your Teams, send your Google Meets, et cetera, into the platform. But right now we're having teams self-select which meetings they wanna send in. And which meetings they want to have analyzed.

Can it be done in real time?

Yeah, actually, that's a great question. We did it in real time first. So we did it in real time before we do it in the way that we're doing it now. Part of the reason that we've moved into sort of a postdoc information gathering and information delivery is that imagine we're on this call right now and I had a little jewel saying, oh, Erwin, you're in sync, you're not in sync. I'm no longer in this conversation. Like thinking about flow. When you think about flow—

Yeah, you tried it.

Yeah. So it's this process of training sort of the audience to be able to utilize this information, deliver it in a way that isn't distracting. And that's going to take some time. But in the meantime, what we want to do is address teams the way they usually work is we get information, we get feedback, we make changes, and then that happens. And then we have this arc of technology delivery where eventually we'll have something where we'll have a little jewel that says, or maybe the background becomes more red or becomes more green, and then you can see how well you are in sync, for example. But we have different delivery methods of how we might see doing that. But that's really going to depend on how the clients, the users, et cetera, the universe looks at the process and what they need. But we have different ways of delivering that. So short answer, yes, we can do it in real time. It's probably a little bit too much information right now to deliver this way for it, I think, to be useful and absorbable.

The only reason I ask is I think that I would find the information— it would freak me out in real time. But I have found I like to go almost into every meeting I have with one bit of advice for myself because meetings are— it's really easy for me to screw up meetings. And usually it's because I talk too much. So like, you know, I've got a, you know, a sign that says, you know, don't speak, listen, blah, blah, blah, to remind myself of this thing that I'm really particularly bad at.

Right. So we have this— we have a delivery mechanism that we can send. We can align with your calendar, for example, and say, oh, you're about to go into this meeting. Remember this one thing. And then it becomes habituated. The platform will no longer say, oh, you know, Erwin, you interrupt too much, you talk too much, you're not giving enough turns. It will go to the next thing. So in other words, as you skill up and as you accumulate this skill, we just bring you the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And then now imagine that organizationally, one person has one thing to work on, one team has another thing to work on, and they work towards this sort of like North Star in team performance organizationally at scale and at the pace that the team works in a way that reflects what their skill acquisition.

All right, as a final question, and it's two parts so people can go in either direction. One, if they want to check out the platform, where do they go? And two, if they don't want to check out the platform, there's no sensors, no data sports, just behaviors. There's one thing any executive listening could do tomorrow to increase synchrony on their team. So So how do they find you? And if they don't want to find you, where do they start?

You can go to synergy.com. Now, the synergy is not spelled the way we all spell synergy right now. It's S-Y-N-E-U-R-G-Y. And there's that neuro in there because— and props to Michael because he came up with this. And it's the idea of putting sort of the neurobiological, the neuroscience in the middle of Synergy. So that's where you can find us, synergy.com. I don't know if I said this when I started, guys.

In 30-some years of doing this, I have partnered with 2 companies. I partnered with Hyperwear, who made a weight vest that I liked when I was working on Our Country. And you guys are the second company I've literally partnered with because I'm so skeptical. And I just— but I love, I love, I love this work. I love where it's going. I love the technology. I think it's a real bonus for team performance kind of in the modern world. So congratulations. I'm really excited to help you launch it and promote it and tell the world about it. And thank you both very much for your time today. I appreciate you.