Mindshare and high-performance teams

Some researchers claim that nonverbal communication accounts for the majority of the information transmitted during in-person interactions. Followers of this theory use supporting evidence invoking the complexity of our facial expressions, hand movement, and body posture. Thinking about the distinction between verbal and nonverbal communication gave me a thought.

Underlying each communication channel- verbal and nonverbal- there must exist a common foundation that all parties share. In the absence of this framework (eg: English language) communication would be impossible. While the necessity to be proficient in a language is a self-evident pre-requisite, the building blocks for nonverbal exchange seem more elusive. The latter contract is partly written in our DNA, in the form of instincts, and complemented with learned cultural patterns. In essence, people who speak different languages or learned different customs will struggle to communicate. Thus, the speed in which a group can communicate, and consequently collaborate, is proportional to the shared mass of knowledge or “mindshare.”

A measure of communication throughput

Imagine the scene of a jury trial. Because courts need to keep detailed records of trials, there will be a court reporter in the room describing the scene. The ideal court reporter would work hard to describe everything that happens in words, including speech, body language, facial expressions, in perfect detail as they happen. “The judge smashed the gavel, the plaintiff had a nervous look on his face, the jury were uneasy after sitting for three hours, [….]”. If such a perfect account existed, then the number of words used to describe this interaction is equivalent to the amount of information transmitted between the parties. In this scenario, we could easily calculate the ratio of verbal to nonverbal communication. This measure exists in the fields of physics and communications engineering. It’s called entropy, and it represents the minimum amount of bits needed to encode some information. The amount of information a channel can handle per unit of time is called bandwidth.

Transmission vs Interpretation

Consider the amount of information being transferred when your brain gets a hold of the word “fire”. In the Latin alphabet we can easily encode f.i.r.e. with 10.8 bits– not a huge amount of information. And yet the interpretation is ambiguous. It could signal the casual act of lighting a candle or a life-and-death situation. This is why we need some sort of “prior agreement” to define the various interpretations of a message based on context. I argue that among teams, bandwidth is neither dominated by verbal or nonverbal channels, but by the degree of mindshare.

Mindsharing and Teamwork

Visualize a situation involving specialized knowledge: a group of programmers that have built a complex piece of software (millions of lines of code). Also assume that everyone on the team has a perfect understanding of the inner workings of the program. When a function or class name is mentioned, each member of this team will immediately recall the purpose and structure of this function, and how it interacts with the rest of the system. Similarly, when a change to the system is proposed, everyone on the team is able to simulate this change in their minds and anticipate its consequences. When this team gathers around a whiteboard to discuss a potential new feature or architectural change, a few sentences or a couple simple drawings, might cause their brains to project massive amounts of mindshared knowledge into their consciousness. What would otherwise be a few bits of English words to a stranger, conveys far more complexity to insiders.

Small teams are able to move faster and have fewer misunderstandings because our brains have physical limitations in the amount of shared knowledge we can easily store/retrieve. This implies an optimal team size that maximizes mindsharing. The amount of information being implicitly interpreted is larger and more consistent among peers. This allows parties to make implicit assumptions and skip many details that would be necessary to an outsider. As the team grows and the “implicit entropy” begins to decay, communication must progressively become more explicit, which reduces effective bandwidth.

In closing

The fact that smaller teams are more productive shouldn’t be a surprise, but this framework provides an additional lever besides keeping teams small and decoupled. For a given team size, we can increase communication bandwidth by growing their mindshare. One way to accomplish this is for teams to spend a lot of time together, in and out of the office, or even cohabitate. I remain skeptical that remote teams can reach the same level of mental cohesion, and suspect that companies suddenly operating remotely in 2020 will see internal alignment and productivity eventually decay (mindshare might have multi-month or year half life). This factor is likely more relevant in the context of innovation and might be a non-issue in transactional situations.