Synchronicity

One of my favorite albums growing up was Synchronicity, the fifth and final studio album released by the English rock band The Police in 1983.  The album's title (and the two songs on the album with the same name, "Synchronicity I" and "Synchronicity II") were inspired by Arthur Koestler's book The Roots of Coincidence.  Apparently, Sting, the band's lead singer and bass player was an avid fan of Koestler, and he even named an earlier album after yet another book by Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine.  The album's original cover artwork included a photograph of Sting reading the psychologist Carl Jung's book Synchronicity.  Jung's theory has to do with the simultaneous occurrence of events both in one's mind and the outside world that may be completely unrelated to each other, yet have some other unknown connection.  It was all a bit too cerebral for me then (still is!), but I just really liked the music.

And yet, I continue to be fascinated by the concept of synchronicity.  I am talking less about Jung's theory here, and more about the concept that two seemingly unrelated events can occur simultaneously through some as yet unidentified but powerful connection.  Have you ever been in an audience watching a concert or play?  When someone starts clapping their hands, everyone else in the audience starts clapping too, and somehow their clapping is perfectly synchronized!  I realize it's still March right now, but have you ever noticed the fireflies on a summer night?  Even if they are far apart, they somehow time their lights perfectly (here's a video from National Geographic).  The American mathematician and chaos theorist Steven Strogatz wrote a really interesting book on the science of synchronicity, called Sync: How order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life.

My mind works in mysterious ways, because whenever I start reading about something having to do with synchronicity, I think about all of these things.  It's a fascinating area of science, and it probably has a lot more to do with leadership than you realize.  For example, how do you motivate individuals from several different backgrounds, all with different interests, different skills, and different goals to achieve a common goal?  We often use the cliché "rowing in the same direction" when talking about teamwork, which comes from the fact that when you are rowing a boat, you have to synchronize your movements near perfectly with the others on the boat in order to keep the boat moving in the same direction.  If everyone's timing is off, the boat not only doesn't move forward, but chances are that the boat tips over.  It's chaos!

When working in a group, the successful coordination of efforts requires cooperation and collaboration.  In other words, cooperation and collaboration lead to synchronicity, and synchronicity leads to success.  But is the reverse also true?  Can synchronous behavior lead to cooperation and collaboration?  Ponder on this for a second.  Why does the military continue to train new recruits to march and drill?  They even train their physicians to march (see my post on my experiences during Officer Indoctrination School during medical school).  The days of marching in step as a combat tactic are long gone.  And yet, the military continues to emphasize marching in time - synchronous movement - during recruit training.

The historian William H. McNeill suggests in his book, Keeping Together in Time that throughout history, armies, churches, and communities have all used synchronicity as a way to build collaboration, cooperation, and cohesion in groups.  Have you ever watched a sporting event at a bar (or even in person at the event itself) when all the fans start chanting in unison?  It feels pretty good, doesn't it?  Why?  The act of doing something together, all at once, builds comradery, doesn't it?

It is exactly this question ("Does synchronous behavior improve cooperation?") that the Stanford psychologists Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath studied in their 2009 research report, "Synchrony and Cooperation".  Wiltermuth and Heath conducted three experiments, all of which tested their hypothesis that synchrony improved cooperation, even when such cooperation was costly to the individual (see my post on "free riding" behavior).  They used a technique called the "Weak Link Coordination Exercise", in which all the participants in a group choose a number between 1 and 7 without communicating.  The individual pay-offs depend upon the numbers selected - they increase as a function of the smallest number chosen  and decrease with the distance between the individual's choice of number and the smallest number chosen in the group.  Every participant receives the highest pay-off if all the group members choose 7, but of course if they are worried that another participant will choose a lower number, they may rationally choose a lower number.

In the first two studies, Wiltermuth and Heath used two different methods of synchronous behavior.  Participants in the first study marched together in unison across campus, while another group of participants walked haphazardly.  Participants in the second study waved a cup back-and-forth and sang the Canadian national anthem, "O Canada" in unison, while another group sang haphazardly.  In both studies, synchronicity actually produced greater cooperation in the "Weak Link Coordination Exercise" in that individuals in the synchronous groups received a higher pay-off (and rated their level of cooperation higher).  

In the third study, Wiltermuth and Heath used the "O Canada" synchronous exercise to improve cooperation in a public goods game.  Participants worked together in groups of three.  Each participant had 10 tokens that they could place in a public kitty or keep in their own private kitty during five rounds of play.  At the end of the game, participants received $0.25 for each token in the public kitty versus $0.50 for each token in the private kitty.  The dominant strategy in this particular game is to behave selfishly and place tokens in the private kitty (recall my posts on the "Prisoner's Dilemma" or "The Tragedy of the Commons").  Similar to the results of the first two studies, participants in the synchrony conditions placed more tokens in the public kitty and actually ended up receiving a higher pay-off!  Wiltermuth and Heath concluded that "acting in synchrony with others can lead people to cooperate with group members."

So what does all of this mean?  As I mentioned above, great teams work together through collaboration, cooperation, and coordination.  In other words, great teamwork depends upon synchronicity.  However, just as important, synchronicity itself leads to better collaboration, cooperation, and coordination.  My take-home message here is that great teamwork creates a virtuous cycle of mutually reinforcing synchronous behavior!  Being part of a team that is "rowing in the same boat" and "firing on all cylinders" is an incredible experience that leads to even closer collaboration, cooperation, and coordination of efforts.  Teamwork, as they say, makes the dream work.