Are you trying to work with colleagues remotely today? Maybe their office is even in another country. And my consultancy Inventium literally every day involves remote or virtual collaboration. So how can you create that same working chemistry and vibe that's usually generator through face to face contact. Is it even possible? Organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant says that yes, it absolutely is. My name is doctor Amantha Imba.
I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, And this is how I work A show about how to help you do your best work. On today is my favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. In today's show, I've selected an extract from my chat with Adam Grant where we chat about remote collaboration, which, even before COVID hit, a
lot of Adam's work involved working with teams remotely. So let's find out some of the strategies that Adam uses to improve the success of virtual collaboration.
So Burstinus is a place to start. This is researched by Chris Reedal and Anito Wooley where they studied remote software teams, and they found that there are two kinds of communication patterns in remote collaboration. One is high frequency, relatively low intensity, like we talk every day or we have emails kind of going every hour. The other is the opposite. It's low frequency, high intensity. We don't talk for a week and then we have a two hour
jam session. And they wanted to know which model is more productive and more creative. And whenever I present this, this is something I've been telling a lot with founders and CEOs, whenever I present it, they say overwhelmingly, over eighty percent of the people I've asked have said, you want high frequency. You need to stay in touch, you need to be on the same page in order to
work effectively with people. And the data showed the exact opposite, that the more productive and creative remote collaborations are low frequency, high intensity. And what seems to be going on there is a couple of things. One, when people are communicating only intermittently, they actually have time to get their own individual work done and to move ideas forward. And two, when they do then come together to collaborate, they're working
with much better material and they're also more motivated. I thought that that meant, okay, they're going to be excited to build on each other's ideas. But the data tell a slightly different story, which is that it is energizing to know that other people are there waiting to respond to you. And the pattern of burstiness is the sense of the aberation is literally ursing with energy and ideas. And the way you get that you don't need to
be in the same physical space to get that. What helps, though, is being in the same temporal space right having your calendar synced so that there at least some hours here and there where you're online at the same time and you can actually work together in real time. And that's the part of the reason this resonated with me is it's how I've collaborated since gosh, at least fifteen years ago, when at a mentor Jane Dutton, who would work on papers with her former students. So Jane was at the
University of Michigan where I was in grad school. Her former students would graduate and go across the country or to another continent, and they would stay in touch or they'd have occasional phone calls and occasional emails, and then they would fly in and they would do a three day blitz where they just deep dive on a project and they sit side by side writing and they basically spend every waking hour together and then they go off and they interact that much for a month or two
and you're really getting the best of both worlds in that model of independent thinking and then collaborative contribution. And so that's a model for how I structure my remote collaboration.
Do we really need face to face collaboration to optimize problem solving and creative thinking? I mean, there's so many businesses here in Australia that are insisting that people go back to the office. We're not in lockdown here anymore. But do we need it? Like, is there something special that we get from face to face collaboration based on the research, that we just can't get from virtual collaboration.
I don't know.
That's not the answer I was looking for, Adam.
It's the only empirical answer I have right now. What I can tell you is this seems to be true in pairs and also in teams that trust builds faster and it also builds deeper when people are face to face. But what do we take away from that? I don't know. Does that mean we are evolutionarily wired to need to be in the same physical space as other people in order to trust them, that we need to be able
to potentially touch them. Is that just how we've always done it and so we're most comfortable trusting under those circumstances. Or is it the case that up until now, and maybe not until three years from now, the technology just hasn't been there, and so virtual has been just an awful proxy for face to face. And when we get to the point where we're kind of lifelike holograms, maybe face to face becomes irrelevant. And maybe for some people
touch is important and for others it's not. I don't know, But I don't think there's anything about human psychology that leaves me convinced that we have to be physically in the same room to trust each other and collaborate effectively. I think there are aspects of being physically co located that maybe grease the wheel of trust a little bit
and make it easier. But I think that gap is going to shrink as technology gets better, and also as we get more comfortable but really trusting people that we've never met face to face.
Yeah, I know that Jane Dutton was one of your mentors, and she's obviously very well known for writing and researching about high quality connections. I'm curious as to how you use her work when you're collaborating with new people in terms of I guess fast tracking human connection.
Well, Jane does a rapid high quality connection exercise where I've been using this in class for years, ever since she had me do it as a student. She says, just pair up with someone that you haven't met in class yet, or if you've met everyone, like somebody you don't know well, and then you each have a minute to try to build a high quality connection with the other person. And it's stunning to see how quick it happens.
People are often amazed by their their intuitive social intelligence comes to finding strategies to do it, and I think the strategies that seem to work are backed up by
decades of evidence in psychology. One is self disclosure, where you know where people make themselves vulnerable and what that actually That helps the person who's sharing as much or more than the person who's listening, Because when I tell you something personal about me, then I am signaling to myself, well, I must trust you otherwise, Why the hell did I just tell you that? What am I thinking? This is a dangerous decision here, I should probably rethink it. So
that happens a lot. There's a lot of people searching for uncommon commonalities, you know, things they share that are rare, and people bond in those ways. I think though, for me, the key ingredient there is that the exercise is set up so that you just erase uncertainty that the other person wants to connect and knowing that I'm going to talk to you for a minute and we share a goal of having a high quality in ournd action, it dramatically lowers anxiety. And it also it leads people to
do Oh. I guess the Gutmans would call them like their bids, right. I make an offer, a gesture to say, hey, I'm seeking your friendship or your trust, and I know you're going to reciprocate, and you're eager to do that, and then it kind of spirals from there. It's like when the beginning of a first date goes really well and you stop questioning whether the other person likes you.
So I guess this is all to say, I've tried to think about these principles in some of my new virtual collaborations to like, I've just tried to put it out there. Hey, we're going to be working together. It's important to me that we trust each other, and so I'm going to tell you something that I don't normally share.
That is it for today's show. If you are enjoying How I Work and this content, you might want to connect with me on the socials, where I share heaps more content. So find me on LinkedIn to search for Amantha Imba and just write me a note to say that you found me through the show, or find me on Twitter at Amantha or on Instagram where I'm starting to post a bit more content and you can find
me there at Amantha. How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound a whole lot. Better see you next time