TED Talks Daily - The surprisingly simple reason teams fail | Tessa West

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

In 1999, a NASA mission to Mars failed ... not from a technical glitch, but because people weren't talking to each other. Psychology professor Tessa West explores how assumptions, overlooked details and "hidden languages" can quietly sabotage even the smartest teams — and explores the small shifts in communication that can make a big difference in how information lands. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

What happened on September 23rd, 1999? 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. 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.

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 close. 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, 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 about 4.4. Now, at no point to the folks at NASA say, hey guys, you're using the Newton as a unit of force, right? No, no, no, no, we were using the pound.

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. And just to put things into perspective, imagine instead of sending something into space, these folks were making a cake. If I thought I was using a pound of butter and you thought we were using a kilogram of butter, that's about 2.2 pounds of butter. Your cake would end up tasting pretty gross. Now, before we get too judgy 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 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. Do we really need to cover that kind of thing? And the answer is yes, we should have that 20 second conversation so that our probe does not explode when it hits the atmosphere. But we often do not do this. 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 they did not fill out the right form. Now, all of us know that if you send a important message over Slack and everybody was on email or over email and everybody was on Slack,

we just missed that critical information. But we don't think that a failure to fill out the right form is going to be the difference between our mission of 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 context. 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. But I've been studying miscommunication for over 20 years now, and I have to say that what actually happened at NASA is much more the norm and 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.

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 of four. And 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, applicant C 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 applicant C that only they have. And here's how this task goes. If this person does not share that unique information, applicant C will come across is the worst job candidate. If they do share this unique information, applicant C is going to come across as 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 over 40 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, teams online, teams in person, teams in which the person who is holding that unique information as an expert doesn't matter. And I have actually found in my own research of about 370 teams,

20% unanimously pick applicant seat. So the question is, what's going on here? Well, the obvious explanation and one 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 applicant's see 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 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. 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. 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 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, and our workplaces, acronyms, synonyms, turns of phrases that we use all the time and we don't even realize it.

And we often call these things hidden languages. And they're everywhere. You probably have already used 50 of them today without even realizing it. They're all over our resumes, often in the forms of random letters strung together, that very few people recognize. And these are great.

They actually make our lives more efficient, and they build a sense of community. They build a sense of identity. But if you don't know them, and most of us know what it feels like to sit in a meeting where people are using them and we don't know them, you feel really stupid and you feel really left out.

And it's awkward to actually ask people what they mean. Things like, let's get this done ASAP. I hold a BA, MBA, and I'm the CEO. This person is very proud, and they're showing it with all of these letters. Yeat, which I've learned as a thing. It is both a verb and a noun. I yeated the ball.

I am yeat. I think that's true. I probably got that one wrong. That idea is cringe. NASA. And sometimes these things actually disappear just as quickly as they show up. I'm not allowed to say cringe anymore,

according to my 12-year-old. Now, if anyone's ever gone to another country, you realize some of these things don't track. I have a lot of German colleagues who've told me that there's a phrase that says, like it's all train station to me. That is a terrible English translation of a German phrase that means something like it's all Greek,

which also doesn't make a ton of sense. So we use these phrases all of the time, and they can infiltrate the ways in which we speak. But one thing you probably don't realize is just how quickly they actually develop. And so some researchers from Caltech showed this through this very clever experiment. They handed people photos of offices

that looked nearly identical to each other, And in pairs, they had them describe these photos to one another, and they looked at how quickly they actually came up with their own hidden languages. So at first, they started off pretty slowly. This one has a computer, three ferns, a cup of coffee, so on and so forth. This one has a computer, headphones, a cup of coffee, a foam. But over time, and by overtime, I mean a matter of minutes, they got very efficient. Team A would call this wall fern. Team B called this one tidy vibe. Why? Nobody knows. We just know that they do it. Team A calls this one lots of stuff, and Team B calls this one Want to Be writer. Now imagine that we now have someone from another team

come join yours. 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 Walfurn. You know the Wallfern and Team B says something like, stop saying Walfern, 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. 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 is 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? 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. That 20-second conversation 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. Realize 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 have 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 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. 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. 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 in 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 Walfurn. Thank you.

That was Tessa West at TEDx Kataba in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonicaa Sung Marnie. Vong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisie Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for

listening.