Why great teams rely on community, relationship and group flow to thrive
Daniel Coyle returns to reflect on what has changed since we last spoke. He’s moved attention to an examination of what contributes to us getting a fulfilling experience from work – and life.
We talk attention, community and the way that great teams demonstrate ‘group flow’. We also delve into some research by Nick Epley that I’ve covered on the newsletter, that suggests we’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy.
If you like this check out the previous episodes with Daniel:
Dan Coyle can fix your broken culture
Summary
- Forget corporate machines: Great workplaces are living communities rather than predictable systems, and trying to “information our way to success” is less effective than relationship-building.
- Stop looking outside for answers: Real transformation happens when teams turn toward each other, asking open questions to spark curiosity and collective leadership.
- Unlock group flow: By setting clear horizons and safe guardrails, leaders can design spaces where individuals get agency, connect deeply and thrive together.
Transcript
Bruce Daisley: Dan, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could just introduce who you are and what you do.
Daniel Coyle: Yeah. Daniel Coyle. I am a writer. I was raised in Alaska. I have four daughters and my life has been kind of writing about the machinery beneath the magic. Like in individuals that look sort of magical, super talented, what is really going on there? Groups that are super talented, great culture—what is the machinery there? And now I have been with this latest book, turning my lens to kind of a bigger topic, which is sort of what communities, what great communities do, what is the power, what is happening in groups that are creating this thriving growth, joy and meaning. Which, of course, brings us to your world, I think a little bit.
Bruce Daisley: It really struck me. I wonder if there were just moments of personal reflection that inspired you to think about these things that sort of transcended just the thing that we spend 40 hours a week on into sort of the whole of our life. So you talked about your parents passing away. You talked about at the end of the book, you talked about your daughter sort of going to college or moving on beyond that. And I just wonder if your own sort of personal stages in life helped you get that perspective and that reflection.
Daniel Coyle: I think that is a nice point. I think apparently we get older, Bruce.
Bruce Daisley: Huh?
Daniel Coyle: I was having trouble absorbing this, but apparently it is true and you cannot help but, as you do, kind of take a little bigger lens on things. And I think as a group, we have all learned, we have all seen enough like sad success stories. Like people who were very successful in the conventional, by the conventional metrics, and yet when you meet them or when you spend time with them or you hear about their personal lives, they are a train wreck. There is an emptiness and a sadness to them.
So I guess my interest kind of went that way along with everybody else’s, where it is like, yeah, you know what, when you look at the big picture, how do we become our best selves? How do we find some success? How do we have fulfillment at work? What is that made of? Is that just kind of those people got lucky who do it? Or is there something going on there that is a little bit deeper, and is there a machinery there that we can kind of understand that is all about kind of flourishing? Not just succeeding, right? Not just having the metrics, but actually having this sense of aliveness and growth and possibility that we get to inhabit every day.
Defining What it Means to Flourish
Bruce Daisley: The book is called Flourish then.
Daniel Coyle: It was, yeah. Yeah. Right. Sorry.
Bruce Daisley: The book is called Flourish. So talk us specifically about that, because you have sort of articulated it a little bit there. So flourishing is where we are thriving, we are joyful, meaningful, growth-shared. And the big insight, I think, of my book… I went out there researching places. As I have said, I have spent a lot of my life researching top performers on top of the mountain who had reached the top of the mountain. And this book sent me into the valleys, like places of richness and growth.
Take a little town in Vermont that had produced 11 Olympians, most of whom come back there to live afterwards. Or this little deli in Michigan that started out as a one-room deli, and that was a $90 million community of businesses rooted in the same place. You know, they are turning down offers from Walt Disney to go to Florida and California. They love where they are at. They are joyful, they are thriving, they are creating meaning.
When I started out, I thought I would find places that had, you know, sort of tidy answers. They had figured it out. But what I found was that these places were really good at kind of living into the question, at creating meaningful connection that connects us. And so that was kind of the surprise. I kept seeing the same pattern over and over again. The framework is that they are able to sort of pause and create meaning and open up their attention.
Building a Real Community at Work
Daniel Coyle: The second thing they are able to do is create space for collective leadership. You know, design conditions where people can get into group flow and move toward a horizon together. And it really comes down to the power of community. Like all these places, whether it was at a workplace, whether it was in an actual community, were sort of functioning as a community.
And so the big insight was you cannot do it alone. Like we kind of have a reflexive answer that, oh, we flourish as individuals. But in truth, that is a huge mistake. You know, we evolved to live and thrive in community, and these places functioning in such a way, they are pushing away some of the speed and fragmentation of the modern world. They are able to kind of operate in an older mode where they are slowing down, they are connecting, and they are able to kind of group flow their way through obstacles, toward a horizon, in ways that sort of make them come alive.
And I think one way to think about this is to kind of think about times in your life where you have felt kind of connected to a vibrant community, where you felt like yourself, you know, growing and changing and experiencing joy on the daily. Those kind of moments are what these places are really good at creating. So, you know, flourishing is kind of a synonym for great community, right? Flourishing. You cannot do it alone. We require others to create the best version of ourselves.
Challenging the Relentless Pursuit of Growth
Bruce Daisley: But tell me this, I feel like I am going to skip forward a touch here because the example of the deli really provoked in me something, which is something that we frequently do not ask, but it often comes from common experiences. When I see businesses that are doing especially well, it is a reflection of the question of business models. One thing that comes out in the deli story is that they turned down the chance to take a lucrative offer from Disney or Disneyland.
The standard business model, which is the pursuit of relentless growth, capitalism and profitability, would strongly advise them not to do that. Quite often when I see businesses that are doing well, they are not owned by VCs, for example. They are not owned by private equity. They have got some degree of an ownership structure which structures things in such a way that they are slightly removed from the excesses of greed and capitalism. Now, I think most of us would recognise that capitalism is the system that we have got, but some of your examples and the reflection on community might suggest that there is richness in life when we take a step back from the excesses of financial richness. It is a touch of an existential question, but what is your take on that one?
Daniel Coyle: Yeah, no, it is true. As the co-founder of Zingerman’s, this deli, says: unlimited growth is the model of the cancer cell. And they have created a business with real value on that. I think the fundamental disconnect, the fundamental error we make over and over again, is that we think great businesses are machines. We think a great workplace is like a machine, and there is an area in which that is true, but deep down, great teams, great workplaces, great experiences—they are not, in fact, machines.
Machines are designed to create a predictable, reliable output, right? And they are owned by an owner of the machine who pushes the button that makes things happen. But in fact, great workplaces are alive, right? They are more like a flock of birds moving through a set of obstacles towards some horizon. There is a sense of connection, there is a sense of surprise, all the elements of good culture, of belonging, of vulnerability, of having a purpose, and there is a sense of aliveness that they create.
Why We Must Relationship Our Way Forward
Daniel Coyle: And so the places like Zingerman’s that are able to do this—and it is not just Zingerman’s, they are not a one-off. You know, I have worked with a major league baseball team that also creates this sense of continual aliveness. They are choosing another mode to be in, in an age when information is as cheap as tap water, knowledge and strategy are as cheap as tap water. These places are realising that we cannot information our way to success and fulfillment, but we can relationship our way there. We can community our way there.
And so communities and living things and relationships have a very different set of rules. They are not about optimizing, maximizing every single thing with the maximum information. They are actually built around relationship. And when you are built around relationship, you are built around moments, built around meaning. So what they are doing is designing their spaces in such a way that they are creating moments.
That sounds terribly abstract. So let me give you an example. A major league baseball team with a very low budget—they happen to be the Cleveland Guardians that I have worked with for the last dozen years—realised they cannot simply buy talent like other teams. They have to grow it. They have a minor league system where they take young players and bring them in. At first they decided, well, we just need to bring in expert coaches to tell our coaches how to coach. Let us give them best practices. It sounds good, but it actually does not work.
What turns out to work is flipping it on its head and saying, “Hey coaches, we would like you to get into small groups and discuss a question. And the question we would like you to discuss is, who was the best coach you ever saw? What did they do?” By discussing them in detail, these coaches create small group conversations that are hugely electric and energized. The coaches have gone from being in a defensive crouch, feeling the expertise pushed on them and being part of a machine, to feeling alive, to feeling curious. What was the best coach I ever met? What did they do? How did they connect with me? How did they bring knowledge to those interactions?
From that, we built at the Guardians something called the Model of Excellence, a model of excellent coaching. That shift of action where we take the knowledge—instead of acting like a machine to wait a minute, no, we are going to act like a living set of relationships. We are going to relationship our way forward toward a clear horizon with guardrails. That is the move that I see in these places all the time. When they see something, they do not look outside for answers, but they turn toward each other and they have a conversation that brings people alive, a real conversation. So we cannot information our way there, but we can relationship our way there. And the proof there is that over the last 12 years, the Guardians have won as many games as the New York Yankees and spent $1.5 billion less money because they are accessing the human potential that they have.
The Power of Presence and Attention
Bruce Daisley: You sort of talk through these themes, and the idea of presence I was really taken with. One of the interesting things about presence is probably the way that we would look at it in a work context. Five years ago, talking about presence would have been about the fact that you are present in the office five days a week. The juxtaposition of that, where presence is very much about attention—about whether you are gifting your full attention to people—is a really interesting, timely reflection on the moment we are in right now.
The book for me is all about the themes of attention and connection. Group flow is the way that you talk about connection and how we gift those things. It just felt very timely and very relevant to the world of work, especially because the scarcity of attention, the scarcity of presence, is probably the thing that from school educators through to workplaces, we see the consequences of the lack of it. But we do not necessarily have the answers right in front of us. When you look at the modern world of work, how do you think that we should bring more presence to the way that we operate with each other? What choices should we be making?
Daniel Coyle: Well, I think the first thing, I mean, I think we can all agree that we are…
(The transcript naturally transitions into a structural discussion on how organizations navigate workloads and how leaders create space.)
Structural Challenges and Tactical Solutions
Bruce Daisley: …thinking that I think most organizations feel reluctant to. I did some work with one organization a couple of years ago and right up to the level of European leaders, South American leaders—these people were like regional leaders of this huge firm—none of them felt like they had the permission to change this overwhelm of work. It is just really interesting that, you know, the things you articulate there are so evident and powerful and obvious, but people just struggle to actually build work around them.
Daniel Coyle: It is a structural problem. You are right. It is very difficult, and the people I have seen who have done it well have done it almost as an act of subterfuge in a way, right? Like they will do something that sort of sounds very organized, but in fact, they are secretly creating a little bit of space.
One of the ways to do that is flight checks. You know, if you are on a project, they will have a meeting at the beginning, middle, and end, and it is like a check-in. But the actual purpose of the check-in is to see how the team is doing and what they are energized by. So the check-in is like, “What excites you about this project? Okay. Are you still excited by that? Like, are you still getting it?” And so there is a kind of an architecture that looks transactional, but in fact, in it, you are creating a space.
Another way people do that is through a 30/70 meeting, which is a typical meeting, but you spend the first 30% kind of defining the problem and the last 70% just loosely exploring the problem. There is a lot of structure in creating the conditions for group flow. You need to really clearly define the shared horizon, right? You need to be really clear on what do we want the outcome to look like? What direction are we going here? Let us spend a lot of time on that, exploring that, and then, what are the guardrails? What do we definitely not want to do on this project? And then it becomes a question of agency. How do we get agency going?
But you can sort of do that in a way that is a little sneaky, right? Another way to do that would be in a feedback conversation, typically. I mean, you are going to give me feedback on my work. It would be tempting for you to give me all the answers. It would be tempting for you to give me all your opinions on how I have been doing. But what I see good groups doing is you would ask me two questions. You would ask, “What do you want to do more of, Dan?” Well, that is a different kind of question, isn’t it? Another question you would ask might be, “What do you think you should do differently?” And that is it.
So you are doing less; you are putting it on me, as you should. And it ends up being these coaching moments. Every coaching moment is not about delivering answers. They are about framing questions that allow people to self-organize into them. So I have got to organize myself to answer those questions, right? And I have to think about in a deep way what really energizes me. What do I think I am doing well now? What do I want to do differently? That is a deep question, actually.
So I think you are right that this transactional fizz—I love that phrase—that is actually what it feels like. We are bouncing around in this carbonation, but smart groups see what you and I are seeing. And smart leaders see it too. And so they are finding ways to kind of smuggle presence and get these things into the water of the organization where you can create these moments. Because that is actually the beautiful advantage of thinking relationally. Relationships are not machines; they happen in moments. And that moment in conversation where you say, “What do you think you should do differently?”—that is a moment that changes the relationship.
So that is, I guess, if there is… I know the world of work can feel like a dystopia, because it kind of is, but I think the optimistic story and the hope lies in the fact that relationships are not machines. Moments can change things. Good questions can change things, even when they are embedded in a structure that seems kind of inhuman at times.
Challenging Our Predictions on Connection
Bruce Daisley: One of the things that I have been researching something myself and I love the work of Nick Epley, and so when I saw that you drew on his work, I was really taken with hearing what you said. I guess when we are talking about connection and relationships, quite often we might imagine the experience of these things from the outset. And so Epley’s work was really helpful for, I think, challenging some of our priors on these things. Do you want to just talk through Epley’s work and what it can teach us about connecting with others, and how we might anticipate it before we are actually experiencing it?
Daniel Coyle: Oh, I love that you are digging into that. I mean, if you think about the world of the office, it very much resembles the train…
(The discussion moves into how intentional connection alters workplace interactions and predictability.)
Finding the Next Mystery
Daniel Coyle: …that are opening new pathways. And so tuning into that ends up being just a way to make life more alive.
Bruce Daisley: Love it. Love it. Dan, obviously, you know, you have written a couple of sort of huge books before that have had a huge impact on people. As you have sort of put this together, which has got applications for both work and life, is there a project that you think you are going to tackle next? Or how do you think about this? You said this has taken you four years. What would you think about doing next?
Daniel Coyle: I do not know. Each project has a way… you know, I started with individual talent, which led to groups, which has led to kind of flourish and thriving. And so each book kind of opens the door to the next mystery in a way. So I do not know what that mystery is. I am waiting for the yellow door. So if you see one, Bruce, put a spotlight on it for me.
Bruce Daisley: Yeah, I love it. Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today and for putting more content out there. I think that is going to be incredibly useful for leaders and for people in organizations as they try and wrestle with the themes that they are dealing with right now. So, a strong recommend on the book. I loved it.
Daniel Coyle: It is great to see you again, Bruce. Thanks for making the time and thanks for what you do. I think you have a big impact on people and it is just cool to be part of it.
