The surprisingly simple reason teams fail - Tessa West

You're listening to ted talks daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, elise Hugh. I sometimes wonder if some of the world's greatest challenges and failures can actually be boiled down to one thing. Miscommunication psychology professor tessa west shares the invisible forces at play that can derail communication even among the smartest, most well intentioned teams. She unpacks why we Miss critical information even when it's right in front of us, and offers strategies for improving professional interactions so things don't go without saying.

欢迎收听TED每日演讲，我们每天为您带来激发好奇心的新想法。我是主持人埃莉斯·休。我有时会想，世界上一些最大的挑战和失败是否真的可以归结为一件事：沟通失误。心理学教授泰莎·韦斯特揭示了那些无形的力量，它们即使在最聪明、最善意的团队中也能破坏沟通。她剖析了我们为何会错过就在眼前的关键信息，并提供了改善专业互动的策略，这样事情就不会“不言自明”却又不被理解。

What happened on september23 rd1999 this is the day that the mars climate orbiter went on a mission to mars and actually failed considerably. This was this device that NASA sent over to mars. It was designed to measure the weather on mars and also to serve as this communication device for the mars Polar lander, which was supposed to arrive a couple months later. It just completely failed. It hit the atmosphere, burst into a million pieces, leaving the folks who worked at NASA befuddled, upset, pretty pissed off.

1999年9月23日发生了什么？这一天，火星气候轨道器踏上了火星之旅，却以巨大失败告终。这是NASA送往火星的设备，旨在测量火星天气，并作为预定几个月后抵达的火星极地着陆器的通信中继。然而它彻底失败了。它撞入大气层，化为无数碎片，让NASA的工作人员困惑、沮丧、异常恼火。

Now these things happen. Sending things into space is tricky business. And quite frankly, as a psychologist, who am I to judge a bunch of very smart engineers who work for NASA for failing and having a bad day at work? But what makes this story extra special and super fascinating? From my perspective is that the entire failure comes down to one thing. Failed communication between these team members and more specifically, the people working on this project were not talking to each other about the right stuff at the right time. It really is that simple.

这类事情确实会发生。太空任务本就棘手。坦白说，作为一名心理学家，我有什么资格去评判一群为NASA工作的非常聪明的工程师，仅仅因为一次失败或一个糟糕的工作日？但让这个故事格外特别和引人入胜的是什么呢？在我看来，整个失败可归因于一件事：团队成员间的沟通失败。更具体地说，参与这个项目的人没有在正确的时间就正确的事情进行交流。事情就是这么简单。

So I'm going to break this down for you. So it all started when they had to calculate the flight path. So anytime you send something into space you have to tell it where to go. And to do so you have to calculate the flight path. Now the folks working at NASA for the jet propulsion laboratory, they calculated the flight path using the metric system. And so they had the Newton as their unit of force, those working at Lockheed Martin and they were using the pound as their unit of force. When you're using these two different systems, the whole thing was off by a factor of about4~4 now at no point did the folks at NASA say, hey guys, you're using the Newton as a unit of force, right? No, no, no guys, no, no, we were using the pound. That conversation never actually happened. And so we have our first big communication mishap. Two sets of teams failed to communicate about basic information that seemed pretty obvious to everybody.

我来为大家剖析一下。这一切始于他们需要计算飞行路径的时候。任何时候，你向太空发射东西，都必须告诉它去向。为此你必须计算飞行路径。NASA喷气推进实验室的工作人员使用公制计算了飞行路径，所以用牛顿作为力的单位；而洛克希德·马丁公司的工作人员则用磅作为力的单位。使用这两种不同系统时，整个计算结果偏差了大约4到4倍。但NASA的人从未问过：“嘿，伙计们，你们用的是牛顿作为力的单位，对吧？”另一边也没有人说：“不，不，伙计们，我们用的是磅。”这段对话从未真正发生。于是我们有了第一次重大沟通失误：两组团队未能就这些对所有人都看似显而易见的基本信息进行沟通。

Now, before we get too judgey about this, it sounds pretty silly. We do this all the time. We walk into meetings, you know, if we get lucky, there's that annoying, overly conscientious person who says things like before we get started, everyone let's level set and talk about, you know, whether there's ink in the printer or at the newspaper. We work or you know, whatever obvious thing they want to get on the same page with. And we usually roll our eyes at this person and we tell them to stop talking because we want the meeting to end soon and we want to get on to the important stuff. And we say things like we've done this a million times and we really need to cover that kind of thing. And the answer is yes, we should have that22 ndconversation so that our probe does not explode when it hits the atmosphere, but we often do not do this.

在我们对此过于苛责之前，这听起来很傻，但我们却时常这样做。我们走进会议室，如果幸运的话，会遇到那个烦人、过分认真的人，在会议开始前说：“大家先统一一下认识，说说打印机还有没有墨”，或者“我们工作的那家报纸...”等等，任何他们想让大家达成共识的显而易见的事。我们通常会对这种人翻白眼，让他们别说了，因为我们想尽快结束会议，进入正题。我们会说“这种事我们做过一百万次了，我们真的需要讨论那个吗？”答案是：是的，我们需要进行那“第22次”对话，这样我们的探测器才不至于在撞入大气层时爆炸，但我们经常不做这件事。

Now, the good news is, this is NASA. There is no single point of failure. And so just because you miscalculate your flight path doesn't mean the whole mission is going to actually end in just a complete failure. And so people started noticing things were wrong. And the good news is you can actually recalculate a flight path. So people started bringing this up in various meetings and they even had a conference about it. But then there was a big mistake that happened. Communication mishap. Number two, the people holding that critical information were ignored for a very dumb reason that I'm pretty sure everyone in this room can recognize. He did not fill out the right form. Now all of us know that if you send an important message over slack and everybody was on email or over email and everybody was on slack, we just missed that critical information.

好消息是，这里是NASA，没有单一故障点。所以，仅仅因为算错了飞行路径，并不意味着整个任务注定会完全失败。于是人们开始注意到不对劲。好消息是，你实际上可以重新计算飞行路径。所以人们开始在各种会议上提出这个问题，甚至为此召开了一次专门会议。但接着又发生了一个重大错误：第二次沟通失误。持有关键信息的人被忽视了，原因非常愚蠢，我确信在座的各位都能理解：他没有填写正确的表格。我们都知道，如果你在Slack上发送重要信息而大家都在用邮件，或者你发邮件时大家都在用Slack，我们就会错过那条关键信息。

But we don't think that a failure to fill out the right form is going to be the difference between our mission to mars failing and succeeding. We think that critical information will eventually make its way to the important people at the top, but often this is not the case. We get very married to our processes and these can actually be our Achilles heel in really important group decision making contexts. Now, things didn't end here. There were actually some last ditch efforts to save this mission that didn't go so well. Someone got on the phone with another person. They sounded urgent about fixing it, but that person didn't actually recognize urgency. I think the quote was something around, like they didn't sound anxious enough and so they weren't taken seriously. So this miscommunication also worked around nonverbal behaviors, tone of voice and so on and so forth. So there's lots of ways in which this mission went awry.

但我们不认为填写正确表格与否，会是火星任务成败的关键区别。我们认为关键信息最终会传到高层重要人物那里，但往往事与愿违。我们过于依赖既定流程，而这些流程恰恰可能成为我们在重要集体决策中的致命弱点。事情并未就此结束。实际上，为了挽救这项任务，人们做了一些最后的努力，但效果不佳。有人给另一个人打了电话，语气听起来很急切地想解决问题，但对方并未感受到这种紧迫性。我记得大致意思是，他们听起来不够焦虑，因此没被认真对待。所以，这种沟通不畅也与非言语行为、语气语调等有关。这次任务出错的方式多种多样。

But I've been studying miscommunication for over20 years now, and I have to say that what actually happened at NASA is much more the norm than the exception, that even when people are making really critical decisions, they often fall flat on their faces, and often for these very simple reasons. And this is the case even when we give people every piece of information they need to make the right choice.

但我研究沟通失误已有20多年，我必须说，NASA实际发生的情况更多是常态而非例外。即使人们在做出极其关键的决定时，也常常会一败涂地，而且往往是由于这些非常简单的理由。即使在我们为人们提供了做出正确选择所需的全部信息时，情况也是如此。

So now I want to talk about a very classic experiment done in social science. So imagine that you're sitting in a room. With these people and your job is simple, it's to hire the best job candidate among a list of4 we give you all the information you need. Everyone is handed a piece of paper with a bunch of information about all of those job candidates. Information like applicant a is disorganized. Applicant b has strong leadership skills. Applicancy has won many cake baking awards. A lot of this information is what we're going to call overlapping information or shared information. Everybody has it. But here's the trick. One special member of this team has what's called unique information. Special information about applicants, see that only they have.

现在我想谈谈社会科学中的一个经典实验。想象一下，你和一群人坐在一个房间里。你的任务很简单：从我们提供的4人名单中雇用最佳人选。我们给了你们所有所需信息。每个人都会拿到一张纸，上面有关于所有求职者的一系列信息。比如，申请人A缺乏条理，申请人B有很强的领导能力，申请人C赢得了许多烘焙奖项。这些信息很多都是我们所说的重叠信息或共享信息。每个人都有。但关键在于，这个团队中有一位特殊成员拥有所谓的“独特信息”——关于申请人的特殊信息，只有他/她有。

And here's how this task goes. If this person does not share that unique information, applicant c will come across as the worst job candidate. If they do share this unique information, applicant c is going to come across is the best applicant. So just to be clear, the only thing that needs to happen for this team to make the right choice is that this special person shares the information about applicant c the team hears it incorporates into their decision making and they indeed pick the right person. No, much like the real world, people don't know exactly which pieces of information everyone else has. They just know some is overlapping and some is not. This is called the hidden profile task. It is a very tried and true task and researchers from the university of southern California did a huge analysis over40 years of this and found that most of the time. Teams make the wrong choice by and large. Small teams, big teams, you know, huge teams, tiny teams teams, online teams, in person, teams in which the person who is holding that unique information is an expert doesn't matter.

任务是这样的：如果这个人不分享那条独特信息，申请人C就会被视为最差的求职者；如果他们分享了，申请人C就会成为最佳人选。所以，明确地说，这个团队做出正确选择所需发生的唯一事情就是：这位特殊成员分享关于申请人C的信息，团队听到并将其纳入决策，最终选出正确人选。不，就像现实世界一样，人们并不确切知道别人拥有哪些信息，只知道有些信息是重叠的，有些则不是。这被称为“隐藏信息任务”。这是一个经过反复验证的任务。南加州大学的研究人员对40年来的相关研究进行了大规模分析，发现大多数情况下，团队大体上做出了错误的选择。小团队、大团队、超大型团队、微型团队、在线团队、面对面团队、独特信息持有者是专家的团队……这些都不重要。

And I've actually found in my own research of about370 teams,20% unanimously pick applicant seat. So the question is what's going on here? Well, the obvious explanation1 that we often see is that teams focus on that shared information the most. They kind of throw around the stuff that they all know. They focus very little on that critical information about applicantsancy that only one person knows. And so what we learned is these critical pieces of information are incredibly fragile. They're like little pieces of, you know, information in the wind that can kind of blow away. And because of this, we lose this information, but we can't actually tell that our interactions with one another aren't going as well as we think they are.

在我自己对约370个团队的研究中，我发现有20%的团队一致选择了申请人C。那么问题出在哪里呢？一个显而易见的解释是，团队最关注的是共享信息。他们会反复讨论大家都知道的事情，却极少关注只有一个人知道的关键信息。因此我们了解到，这些关键信息极其脆弱。它们就像风中微小的信息碎片，很容易被吹散。正因如此，我们丢失了这些信息，却无法察觉我们之间的互动并不像我们认为的那么顺利。

And critically, because in these interactions, everyone is motivated to make the right decision. No one person is trying to bulldoze or push their person through these team interactions actually feel good. And so we can be communicating terribly and not know it because the red flags that we usually look for, those interruptions and so on and so forth, simply aren't there, making this type of poor communication just really clever and underneath the surface of what's going on in these team interactions.

关键还在于，在这些互动中，每个人都是有动机想做出正确决定的。没有人在试图强行推进或推销自己的人选，这些团队互动感觉良好。因此，我们的沟通可能非常糟糕而不自知，因为我们通常寻找的危险信号——比如被打断等——根本不存在，使得这种糟糕的沟通非常“巧妙”地潜藏在团队互动的表面之下。

Now, in this study, people are all speaking the same language, quite literally, but also social scientists are very good about holding things constant that could potentially explain this effect, use of jargon, use of, you know, different types of cultural languages and so on and so forth. But in the real world that is not how we talk. We show up to these interactions using all kinds of different languages and I don't mean that literally. I mean the local languages that we often develop in our communities, in our friend groups, in our workplaces, acronyms, synonyms, turns of phrases that we use all the time and we don't even realizing it. And we often call these things hidden languages and they are everywhere.

在这项研究中，人们使用的是同一种语言（字面意思），而且社会科学家非常善于控制那些可能解释这种效应的变量，比如行话的使用、不同类型的文化语言的使用等等。但在现实世界中，我们并不是这样交流的。我们使用各种不同的“语言”参与这些互动，这不是字面意思。我指的是我们在社区、朋友圈、工作场所中逐渐形成的“本地语言”——我们一直使用缩略语、同义词、特定短语，甚至自己都没有意识到。我们常称之为“隐藏语言”，它们无处不在。

Now imagine that we now have someone from another team. Come join. Seniors team a is working well together and someone from team b joins that team. What happens? Do they learn their hidden languages? Do they start over? They actually get really irritated with each other pretty quickly for not understanding one another. Team a says it's wall fern, you know the wall fern and team b says something like stop saying wall fern. Half of them have wall ferns tell me if there's a tidy vibe. So we do not actually realize that these hidden languages are dominating our conversations and they ended up taking so long to do this. Most of them actually didn't finish the task at all.

现在想象一下，来自另一个团队的人加入进来。A团队的前辈们合作得很好，这时B团队的人加入进来。会发生什么？他们会学习对方的隐藏语言吗？会重新开始吗？实际上，他们会因为不理解对方而很快变得非常恼火。A团队说“是墙蕨，你知道那墙蕨”，而B团队会说“别再说墙蕨了”。他们一半的人都有墙蕨，谁能告诉我这里有没有“整洁的氛围”？我们并未意识到这些隐藏语言正主导着我们的对话，结果他们花了太长时间来做这件事，大多数人实际上根本没完成任务。

Now, there's this huge theme here in this talk that we don't know what others don't know. We don't know if they're on the same page with ostensibly obvious pieces of information, like whether we're using the Newton or the pound as our unit of force. We don't know what the hidden languages are that they're using and we don't know if they are sharing critical information in the ways that we think they are. So the question is what are we supposed to do with all of this? Mess if we want to make smarter team decisions.

本次演讲的一个核心主题是：我们不知道别人不知道什么。我们不知道他们是否在那些表面明显的信息上与我们一致，比如我们用的是牛顿还是磅作为力的单位。我们不知道他们使用的是什么样的隐藏语言，也不知道他们是否在以我们以为的方式分享关键信息。那么问题来了：面对这一团乱麻，我们该怎么办？如果我们想做出更明智的团队决策。

So I think the first thing that we should do is be that annoying person in the room who says things like let's level set, which by the way is also a hidden language state. The obvious, it is a good idea to start those meetings, to start those conversations, even if it makes people roll their eyes that22 ndconversations about the obvious thing that should be going on in that meeting should happen. And it's okay to be the one to do it. It's okay to be the one to make that the norm in the meeting.

所以我认为，我们应该做的第一件事，就是成为房间里那个“烦人”的人，说出“我们来统一一下认识”这样的话——顺便说一句，这本身也是一种隐藏语言。很明显，在会议或对话开始时这样做是个好主意，即使这会让人们对那个会议上本该发生的、关于显而易见之事的“第22次”对话翻白眼。由你来这么做没关系。由你来在会议上树立这种规范也没关系。

Realized that not all critical information appears as such or is obvious to everyone. So in the research I talked about, they quite literally handed people all the information they needed to make the right hiring decision. But that is not the real world. We walk into rooms. We might not know if our information is critical, we might think it is, but there's a norm against sharing it. So imagine, for instance, that you are making some really important decision at work and your boss is in the room and that boss is arguing to give her direct report. Tom, a raise. But you just saw Tom come out of her hotel room three times that weekend retreat you guys got back from. Should you share that information? It feels critical to you, but it could also just be seen as a nasty little nugget of gossip that's shared to the wrong person. So we often don't know there are norms that we could be violating by sharing critical information. We might be sitting on something important, and we have no idea, because we are new in the workplace. Don't assume people are always sharing it. People are actually more likely to withhold. Hold something if they're afraid that they're violating a norm or if they're afraid it's not going to go down as well as they think it might.

要认识到，并非所有关键信息都显得那么“关键”或对每个人来说都是显而易见的。在我提到的研究中，他们确实把做出正确招聘决定所需的所有信息都交给了人们。但这不是现实世界。我们走进会议室，可能不知道自己的信息是否关键，或许认为是，但又存在反对分享它的规范。举个例子，想象一下你正在工作中做一个非常重要的决定，你的老板也在场，她正在为她的直接下属汤姆争取加薪。但就在你们刚结束的那个周末度假中，你看到汤姆从她的酒店房间出来了三次。你应该分享这个信息吗？你觉得这很关键，但也可能被视为一条分享给了错误对象的恶意小八卦。因此，我们常常不知道，分享关键信息可能会违反某些规范。我们可能手握重要信息却浑然不知，因为我们初入职场。不要假设人们总是会分享信息。实际上，如果人们担心违反规范或担心分享的效果不如预期，他们更可能选择隐瞒。

It's okay to restate information. In fact, you should. A few times we learned that people often assume that critical information is shared, and that's a false assumption. Make sure that information sticks. Say it in the way you wanted it to say in the way you wanted to be heard. Restate it and do it a couple times and do it at the end of that interaction. So that you can make sure that your message actually goes out as intended, it doesn't get restated even by a well meaning member of your team.

重申信息是可以的，事实上你应该这样做。我们多次了解到，人们常常假设关键信息已经共享，这是个错误的假设。要确保信息被记住。用你想要的方式、以你希望被听到的方式说出来。重申它，重复几次，并在互动结束时再做一次。这样你才能确保你的信息按你的意图传达出去，甚至不会被团队中好心的成员曲解重述。

And make it comfortable for people to ask, what did you mean by that? I think most of us know what it feels like to be sitting on the other end of a conversation, which a lot of jargon is thrown around, a lot of acronyms and we feel silly asking, but make it a norm to just say, what did you mean by that? What were those letters? What did that phrase mean? We will be much less likely to be annoyed with one another when those kinds of conversations are happening. No matter what you do, don't say wall fern, thank you.

要营造一个让人可以安心提问“你这么说是什么意思？”的环境。我想我们大多数人都知道，当对话中充斥着大量行话和缩略语时，坐在另一端的感受如何。我们觉得问出口很傻，但要形成一种规范，直接问：“你这么说是什么意思？那些字母代表什么？那个短语是什么意思？”当这种对话发生时，我们互相恼火的可能性就会小得多。无论你做什么，别说“墙蕨”。谢谢。

That was tessa west at ted X catawba in2025.

以上是泰莎·韦斯特在2025年TEDx卡特巴大会上的演讲。