What if you could build the perfect team? How would you do that?
Google asked itself the same question. They launched Project Aristotle and studied 180 teams to figure out how to engineer the perfect team. Their assumptions going in seemed pretty reasonable — the best teams must have the smartest people, the right mix of personalities, maybe friends who socialized outside work.
They expected to find a pattern between the right combination of personalities, skill sets, and the right mix of introverts and extroverts.
But no matter how they cut the data, nothing correlated.
What they finally found: the best teams weren't the ones with the smartest people. They were the ones where people felt safe enough to speak up, ask a dumb question, or admit they were stuck.
See, what they learned is that all teams have unwritten rules.
Nobody votes on them. They just form.
- The person who talks most gets taken most seriously.
- Nobody tells the boss bad news.
- Asking questions means you don't know what you're doing.
- Slack messages will come in on nights and weekends.
- Admitting you're overwhelmed is a weakness.
- Meetings are where decisions get announced, not made.
Nobody says any of this out loud, but everyone knows how it works.
And over time, those rules don't just shape how people act. They shape who people become at work along with the culture and psychological safety of the team.
Itching to play D&D? We run public games for all experience levels, from one-shots to full campaigns. Come see what games are available and join us!
I've seen it firsthand:
- The woman who hides her pregnancy for months because she fears she'll be sidelined.
- The person going through divorce who doesn't dare say anything, for fear he's seen as being too busy to work on the best projects.
- The man who is battling Stage 3 Cancer, trying to go in for a day of chemo on the weekends, or worse yet, working from the chemo floor, so he doesn't get behind.
Google landed on two specific behaviors that all the high performing teams shared:
First, everyone spoke in roughly equal amounts. No one person dominated. It didn't matter if it happened all at once or shifted around — by the end, every voice had been heard.
Second, teammates could read each other. They picked up on tone, body language, when someone was uncomfortable or checked out. People were paying attention to each other as humans, not just colleagues.
Neither of these activities can occur if the team culture doesn't support new unwritten rules that prioritize people feeling safe to drop the poker face and sharing the spotlight.
The other thing worth knowing is that you can't just mandate it. Google struggled with that. You can tell people to take turns and listen more but that doesn't make a team feel safe.
It has to be created through experience and actually being in a room together and having something happen that changes how you see each other.
That's where Once Upon a Roll comes in.
Unlike trust falls and other dreaded team building activities, what happens at our table builds new neural pathways. New behaviors. New ways of showing up for each other.
As one of our clients put it after we ran a game day:
'If just 30 people met two people new to them and saw them more three dimensionally, that's 60 stitches in the fabric of the company. That's a big deal.'
And underneath all of it, people are building skills they didn't even know they were practicing. How to listen, collaborate under pressure, and trust someone enough to take a risk together.
Itching to play D&D? We run public games for all experience levels, from one-shots to full campaigns. Come see what games are available and join us!
