Matt Abrahams: Swift trust can help your communication and
your teams be more effective.
My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at
Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
Today, I look forward to speaking with Melissa Valentine.
Melissa is an associate professor in the Management Science and Engineering
Department at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for
Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Her research focuses on how emerging technologies, including artificial
intelligence and algorithms, are fundamentally transforming work,
organizational design, and team dynamics.
Melissa, along with her co-author Michael Bernstein, wrote the fascinating
book Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work.
Well, welcome, Melissa.
I'm really excited to have you join us.
Thank you.
Melissa Valentine: This show is so fun, and I love the guests you
have, so I'm delighted to be here.
Matt Abrahams: Well, thank you, and thanks for being one of them.
Shall we get started?
Melissa Valentine: Let's do it.
Matt Abrahams: Excellent.
I have to say, I really enjoyed your book, Flash Teams, very much.
Really, really interesting.
Can you define for all of us what a flash team is and explain what people,
processes, and infrastructure enable flash teams to get aligned and execute quickly?
Melissa Valentine: Yeah.
So my PhD is in organization science, basically.
So I got my PhD at a business school, and then my collaborator is a computer
science professor, and he was doing a lot of work on crowdsourcing.
So what's cool about crowdsourcing is the crowd is, like, millions of people
online, and you can get things done quickly 'cause you just put a task out,
and then there's millions of people who are available to come work on the task.
But what he was seeing at the time that he and I started working together
was crowdsourcing was stuck because they were doing, like, really,
they called them micro tasks, but just really, like, small tasks.
And then I had this toolkit, organization science, and my dissertation had been
about how you can use team scaffolds or lightweight team structures, and then you
populate the team structure with experts.
And the team structure and the role structure helps them
know how to work together.
So we sort of were able to combine the logic of both of these.
So you have these, like, lightweight structures that allow people who are,
like, relative strangers to come together and work together on really complex stuff.
So this system that we built with a great team of a PhD student, Daniela
Ratelny, she organized this great lab at the time we first did our flash teams.
So we built a platform that basically took all the logic of organization
science and team science, and then the speed and scale of crowdsourcing,
and then put them together.
So the way the system works, you have this platform where I'm somebody who
wants to get something done, so I go to the platform, I design the team,
and then the platform integrates with something like, we used Upwork.
So there's like 10 million freelancers who are on Upwork.
And then, so I'll say, "Here's the task that I need done. Here's the role I
need filled." And then the platform can integrate with Upwork, and then it's
open call to the 10 million freelancers.
Who's got the right expertise?
They join the team.
So you can just convene teams really fast.
And what we showed with this research is that you can get
things done really quickly.
You can pull teams together.
They build really complex stuff.
And it was really inspiring.
I mean, it's even faster now with GenAI.
Matt Abrahams: So you set a framework and expectations and then leverage a
tool that pulls people in, and then the flash team is really the focused,
concerted effort that it's all about.
One of the essential elements of any teaming or groups
coming together is trust.
What are some of the communication skills or other skills that people
can deploy to establish trust quickly?
I'm assuming part of what flash teams do, besides accomplish their work,
is they're able to coordinate action, perhaps through building trust.
Melissa Valentine: Yeah, trust in flash teams is essential and complex, right?
'Cause it is relative strangers.
You get together and you work together really intensely,
and then you disassemble.
So I think that there's this idea in the literature called swift trust, and there's
an assumption that you just assume trust.
You just meet somebody for the first time, you assume they're competent, you
assume that they know how to do their role, you assume you're both there for the
same reason, to work hard, get it done.
So that, yeah, the assumption of swift trust is really useful.
It doesn't always work out, but the sort of like offering
of swift trust is part of it.
And then paying attention to when it's not going right and being willing and
able to repair quickly is also important.
Matt Abrahams: I love this idea of swift trust.
So you approach from a place of trust, assuming that you are trustworthy,
and I will trust you, and you will do the same, can expedite things.
Because there's a lot of this testing that goes into trust and time, and if you start
from that place, and obviously it might fail or people could take advantage of it.
But the second part, what you said, I think really is the helpful part,
is to have that meta-awareness and watching for it, and then being willing
to speak up and try to repair it.
So I think it's not only swift trust, being open to trust, but being
open to repair when it's not there.
I really like that idea of swift trust.
So much in my life I think would be better if we just approached
everything with this notion of like,
Melissa Valentine: Oh, swift trust.
Yeah.
I mean, there is a real difference 'cause I think of the person I wrote
the book with, Michael, he and I have worked together for 15 years
now, and that is a different kind of trust than like swift trust.
But swift trust is a tool that's useful.
Matt Abrahams: Right.
It's, and it's a way to at least initiate and then you can build
deeper, the trust and relationship.
That can only happen, I think, after repeated exposure and time.
You talk about discursive diversity, and I had to practice saying
that multiple times, by the way.
Can you share what you mean by discursive diversity, and how can
teams recognize when they need to shift their communication style from a more
open-ended brainstorming, ideating to a very highly coordinated approach?
Melissa Valentine: Yeah.
So that is from the dissertation of one of my really brilliant PhD students.
So her name is Katharina Lix, and she invented that measure.
So what she was able to do, she had all of the Slack transcripts of
different flash teams, and she was able to, she did this NLP processing.
Matt Abrahams: And NLP is natural language processing, I assume.
Melissa Valentine: Yeah, yeah.
Before it was cool, she learned how to do it, and she was able to
create this measure where she was looking at the similarity of the
language that people were using.
So you have all of the Slack interactions, and you can basically
compare people talking on the team and how similar are the words that they're
using, the sentence structure, right?
Are they using the same adverbs, like adjectives?
Sense of urgency gets encoded in all of that.
And what she was able to show is that the similarity of the language that people
are using or the difference, so this is where, let's see, discursive diversity.
Matt Abrahams: Discursive diversity.
Yeah.
Melissa Valentine: Yes.
Matt Abrahams: Different types of words and language.
Melissa Valentine: Exactly.
Yeah.
So that sort of would predict the team meeting a milestone in different ways.
So there were times when you really want the language to diverge.
So this is a moment of brainstorming, ideation, right?
You want a lot of creativity, you want a lot of divergence.
But then as you get closer to the deadline, you really, for the
team to meet the deadline, then the language needs to converge.
Like, people need to start sounding more like each other to hit the deadline.
Matt Abrahams: So one, it's a measure really.
So you can look at, you know, if I'm a manager or somebody looking back at doing
a postmortem or after the project is done, and I can look at the communication, be
it Slack, Jira, whatever the tool is, and I can actually see the, the language
might be a hint as to where we are.
And as you're trying to get closer to the decision, more similar language is a sign.
What I'd be curious, and I don't know if there's any research on this, is can you
actually use language to influence that?
So can I, as a manager, encourage more diverse language through
ideation, but want us to start moving towards a decision, encourage people
to start using similar language?
I wonder if you, if it's causal in that way.
Melissa Valentine: I think that's a great research question.
Matt Abrahams: Yeah.
I think that's really interesting.
So I encourage everybody listening to think about the language you're using
for the different tasks you have and start to notice what that looks like.
And maybe you can run your own experiment and play with that.
I want to keep on flash teams, and then I want to make a, have a broader question.
But when flash teams hit a snag, for example, like a miscommunication, what
is the most effective way to fix that so they don't fraction and deal with
too much friction in those situations?
Melissa Valentine: So I'm so glad you asked this question.
I have an unpublished paper.
So we ran three really complex flash teams one summer, and we had all of the DMs.
So we had all the Slack front stage and then all of the Slack DMs, the backstage.
And the thing that was really interesting in analyzing all of that data is a
lot of repairs happened backstage.
So something would happen in the public Slack channel, and then a dyad
would go to the back channel, and they'd be like, "What is this bug?"
And they would sort it out and then come front stage with the solution.
So it created a lot of smooth operations.
Like the flash teams, they all accomplished their goal.
There didn't seem to be a ton of conflict.
So this pattern of backstage repair was really interesting to discover.
I think any human behavior, it's got different sides to it.
So I think it did support smooth operation.
But what I saw in the analysis that I have not yet published is that the people
who are more involved in backstage repair ended up with more influence over time.
So these are the workers and the managers who were, like, really
helping make the decisions.
So it's something about access to where the real problems get solved was, like,
creating a lot of influence for people.
Now, I don't totally know what to do with that.
As someone who is interested in flash teams going well, I would maybe say you
need like a postmortem on a flash team.
What were the problems?
Who helped solve them?
What do we learn about this together?
Matt Abrahams: It's really intriguing that the people involved in that
repair or that dealing with those problems end up being more influential.
Melissa Valentine: Yeah.
'Cause it's like they had the realer story of what was going on.
And sometimes it was in the backstage repair that decisions were made
and then presented as if they were quite done, if that makes sense.
Matt Abrahams: That's really intriguing.
I'm putting on my manager hat and thinking if I were in the midst of any team, be
it a flash team or a regular team, how I could be aware that the folks who are
involved in helping fix, repair, dive deep into problems, what that means
for them in terms of their currency and how we interact on the public stage.
And I just think it's interesting that we now have these two channels and ways
of communicating that can be measured.
I know you think about storytelling and change.
How can everyday employees in an organization use storytelling to drive
broader systemic change and build coalitions to help achieve whatever
it is they're trying to achieve?
Melissa Valentine: Yeah.
So one of the studies that I did when I first got to Stanford was
actually of an academic cancer center.
I saw stories be really influential in this study.
So it feels a little different than what we've been talking about with AI and
algorithms and so forth, but it still to me is a study of organizational design,
which is what I'm really interested in.
What happened in this study, so I was studying as this cancer center
was trying to do a transformation.
They were trying to decrease the coordination burden on
patients and their families.
And during the study, there was a group of patient advocates or activists who really
wanted the cancer center to understand how much coordination they were having to do.
So the way that they made their case, this is why I'm thinking of it, is they had an
initiative they called Patient Stories.
And so they went to great effort to collect a lot of patient stories where
patients just talked about, like a family member had to quit their job to become
the full-time coordinator for the patient.
So they came up with dozens of patient stories.
And then in this paper that I have, I analyze how they basically use
the stories to make the case and to spread the movement, spread the
message across the cancer center.
And at the end of the study, they had convinced the cancer center to take
on some of the coordination work.
So it ends up being this end-to-end story of patient stories, patient
narratives actually changing the organizational design, which
is why I'm thinking about it.
It was like a very powerful thing that these patient activists did.
Matt Abrahams: Stories can really resonate and motivate people.
Was there anything specific to the stories that you think were really important?
Was it the fact that the stories accounted for all the specific coordination events,
or was it the emotionality, or was it the fact that these people just collected a
bunch of stories and the cancer center's like, "Wow, there are all these stories.
We should probably do something"?
Melissa Valentine: I think a lot of us interface with the healthcare system,
and we could just see ourselves.
So the patient stories were just like, "This is us. This is you
and me." And then it illustrated the problem really specifically.
So somebody's sitting in a wheelchair in a hallway 'cause they had been
dropped or something like that.
And so it's like, wait, like, I think the cancer center is so full of people
who care, and then hearing like the specific instance in a really relatable
story, they were just like, "Oh, that's a problem that I can help with."
Matt Abrahams: I think you hit on it.
It's relatable and real, and we can connect.
Thank you.
Can you take what you've learned about flash teams and give us any insight
that we can just apply to a normal team?
So I've got a team that's been around for a while, and we meet regularly.
Is there any insight from your work on flash teams that could perhaps
help my team be more efficient, feel more connected, ideate better?
Melissa Valentine: One thing that Michael and I used to say when we were writing the
book, we were trying to think of what's the mindset here that any manager would
find empowering, and the phrase we came up with is experts everywhere all the time.
So you've got your trusted team.
Great.
Keep working together, taking good care of each other, working hard,
but really recognize that your organization, the world, the internet,
the world is just full of experts who can help, and people like helping and
bringing their expertise to something.
So it's just having a mindset of recognizing how much collaboration
is available, how much expertise is available, and maybe it,
like, invites you to think of the boundaries of the team a little more.
Matt Abrahams: That's funny you said that 'cause that was exactly the word I
was thinking is porous, is that it can be very easy to insulate a team and say,
"This is the team," but being a little more open and pulling in expertise.
When I was managing a team, I ran a learning and development
group, and we had this very tricky thing we had to train people on.
And it turned out that somebody in the company who was an admin was using our
tool, and they actually knew how to do things that we were trying to figure
out how to train people on better.
That person was an expert, and by just dumb luck, we figured that out
and incorporated them into the team.
And I like that idea.
Melissa Valentine: I think that there are a lot of tools that can
be very helpful to managers in terms of how the team works together,
coordinates, and stuff like that.
The other thing we said in the book is AI-driven team design, so just making
use of the tools to be very thoughtful in how you're structuring your team.
Matt Abrahams: So AI can help us structure the team and maybe even
identify who some of the experts are that, that we might know.
I love that.
Melissa, this has been great.
Before we end, you know I like to ask three questions one I make up just for
you and two I've been asking everybody.
Are you up for that?
Melissa Valentine: Yeah, let's do it.
Matt Abrahams: Beyond the academic research you do, you're also a creator,
and you study the algorithms that serve up information on social media.
What advice do you have for others who are creators?
Melissa Valentine: Okay, so I love Instagram and TikTok.
I don't, like, I have, I think it's people have complicated
relationships with social media.
So the attention stuff is real.
My attention span is shot, but I have learned so much from content creators.
I am such a fan.
My advice is keep going.
If you're an expert, put it out in the world, like, people will find it.
Different life transitions I've gone through, different, like, health
stuff, different fitness stuff, different hobbies, like, I have
learned so much from the internet.
So thank you, content creators.
Matt Abrahams: You know, as a creator myself, and it took me a while to
identify as a creator, but I think many of us are motivated to help
people, and it's that motivation that actually helps us get through.
It's hard to put out the content, and the algorithm can sometimes
help you and sometimes not.
So it's that passion, desire to learn and to help, I think, that really motivate.
And I can hear that in your voice, and I see it in the
things that you post and create.
Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?
Melissa Valentine: So I'm at a moment where I'm thinking a lot about
communication, where we really take each other in in a really deep way.
So I have a friend who is a therapist and a Buddhist.
She has a quality of listening and expression that it, that allows
for, like, true communication.
So I would say I'm gonna, I'm gonna nominate her.
It's, like, a fascinating thing about being very aware of yourself that
allows you to be very aware of others and just, yeah, like, it is a lot of
presence, as you're saying, like, a lot of kind of presence and connection.
Matt Abrahams: Yeah, I like that, self-awareness and other awareness.
Thank you.
And final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into
a successful communication recipe?
Melissa Valentine: Something that I've come to appreciate is how useful, like, a
deep awareness of your own experience is, 'cause then you're even more able to take
in another's in all of its complexity.
So yeah, self-awareness, other awareness, and then working from there, I think
what's possible between you is, like, new.
It's like something that neither of you would have done
without that kind of connection.
Matt Abrahams: I sort of bristle at the word synergy, but in this case
that's exactly what you're talking about, is it's the power of the two
is greater than either individually.
But that comes, as you said, from a self-awareness and then other awareness.
Thank you for the three ingredients, and thank you for the conversation.
Your work to me is really intriguing because it focuses both on technology,
but the human aspect of people coming together, and the fact that there are
structures that we can rely on to help expedite and make things more efficient.
Melissa, this has been fantastic.
Thank you, and thank you for the work you do.
Melissa Valentine: Totally.
Really fun for me too.
Thank you.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think
Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
To learn more about groups, listen in to our episode 241 with Colin Fisher.
And to learn more about social media algorithms, please check out
episode 268 with Angèle Christin.
This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams.
Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.
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