[00:00:00] “Decompose” Theme Music 

[00:00:05] Anne Chappelle: We’ve been doing Adverse Reactions, and this is what our  

[00:00:08] David Faulkner: Fourth 

[00:00:09] Anne Chappelle: Fourth 

[00:00:09] David Faulkner: Season 

[00:00:10] Anne Chappelle: Season 

[00:00:11] David Faulkner: Amazing.  

[00:00:11] Anne Chappelle: So, David, do we have a theme?  

[00:00:13] David Faulkner: Everything is so much more complicated and interesting and more interconnected than we ever think it’s going to be.  

[00:00:22] Anne Chappelle: We’ve really kind of strayed from traditional toxicology in this season. 

[00:00:28] David Faulkner: It’s true. We have been expanding the reach of what most people think of as toxicology because one of the things I love about this discipline is that it is a necessarily applied science and that means it touches basically everything—all the other sciences. 

[00:00:44] Anne Chappelle: Have a listen. 

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[00:00:53] David Faulkner: Next on Adverse Reactions, “Toxicology Is a Team Sport,”  

[00:00:56] Anne Chappelle: with Dr. Steve Fiore.  

[00:00:58] Steve Fiore: What makes interdisciplinarity successful is when it is problem focused. The Manhattan Project was successful because of all of these people working together towards a goal. It wasn’t simply about the war; it was to produce this product: an atomic bomb. That allowed all of the different disciplinary perspectives to align in such a way that they saw how they could contribute to that kind of scientific problem solving. 

[00:01:26] “Decompose” Theme Music 

[00:01:30] Anne Chappelle: We have a big treat for today. We are thinking outside of the box with Dr. Steve Fiore. He is the Director of the Cognitive Science Laboratory Institute for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida. 

[00:01:45] David Faulkner: You mentioned the science of team science. Could you tell us what that is? 

[00:01:49] Steve Fiore: NIH, starting in the ’90s or so, began funding cross-disciplinary, inter-transdisciplinary kinds of initiatives, and they were charged with trying to understand, what does it mean to do scientific teamwork? And, more importantly, how do you assess scientific teamwork? The degree to which we should change the way we do science or add this new model of funding? The science of team science was brought forth to bring people together to identify what are the appropriate concepts, what are the appropriate theories, what are the appropriate assessments we need to consider when looking at teamwork outcomes. It’s about trying to understand the collaborative components and how people work together more effectively.  

[00:02:30] Anne Chappelle: It seems to me that that’s too big. How do you break that down into something that you can measure? I mean, that’s what we do, right? As scientists, you ask a question, and you measure a result. How do you prove your theories? How do you break that down?  

[00:02:44] Steve Fiore: So, there’s a lot of different ways that people have gone about trying to understand this as a social science. It’s not simply about the measurement. It’s about the theories you’re trying to develop. A lot of the work we did at the beginning was about developing the field. 

I realized that the people in my area of research—that is those of us in social psychology, cognitive psychology, organizational psychology—had never really studied science teams. We’ve looked at teams in aviation and the military and businesses, but we never really studied science teams.  

And getting back to Anne’s question, we try to decompose teamwork into subcomponents. The simplest way that we talk about it as a heuristic we refer to as the ABCs of teams; that’s the attitudes, behaviors, and cognition. These are traditional ideas coming out of social science. So, you try to understand what are people’s attitudes, their predispositions about something. Behavior is a very broad category. It considers things like communication; it also includes things like leadership. In the study of teams, we talk about backup behavior, where you step in and help a teammate that needs something. And then, the cognitive component has to do with what’s going on inside the mind of the teammates. What do they understand? What do they know about each other? How do they use this shared knowledge to coordinate effectively? 

In each one of those As, Bs, Cs, (attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions), there’s dozens of sub-concepts. With attitudes, we talk about trust, conflict, cohesion.  With behaviors, we talk about communication, leadership. Within cognition, problem solving, mental models, metacognition. You can spend your entire career, for example, looking at just team cohesion. Or you can look at how team cohesion is related to communication. Or you can look at how team communication is related to mental models and metacognition. 

One of the early ideas in the study of teams was an input-process-output model, the input being the people or the organizational environment; the process, the kind of group dynamics associated with their interactions; and the output, what are they producing? The case of science teams, they’re publishing some papers.  

[00:04:51] David Faulkner: The first thing that I’m wondering is how different are science teams? You have teams in sports. You have teams in business. You have teams in any number of things. How different are each of these types of teams, and how similar are they?  

[00:05:06] Steve Fiore: Right. That’s one of the foundational questions we were wrestling with. What makes them different? Or if they’re different, like most of the sciences, and in particular the social sciences, you’ll get different answers depending upon who asked that. 

The empirical research is only now starting. A big part of creating the field was to get momentum and people interested in studying science teams and associated with that was to try to get organizations in the federal government to fund the research. The other side of that is getting scientists who are willing to be studied. That’s probably been one of the larger challenges.  

Because of that, I’m hesitant to say are they really different or are they not. I can identify some areas where I think there’s some particular differences. For example, I think there’s a huge difference potentially in leadership. The dynamics in science, in particular in academia, are different than in other kinds of organizations. What we know about leadership comes from studies in the military. It comes from studies in the government. It comes from study in organizations. Every one of those has a different kind of dynamic, a different kind of influence than you see in the academy. And because of that, I think that leaders have to have a different kind of capability of influence. There’s a different kind of persuasion that needs to take place, and the power dynamics are different. And that’s just one of the areas that I think we need to do more research. 

[00:06:38] David Faulkner: Is there a difference in leadership and management styles between academic scientific research and the military. What I was thinking about when you were describing the field is Oppenheimer and this idea of what a unique individual he was to be able to shepherd the project, dealing with the huge egos of science, the complexities, the uncertainties, the trial-and-error aspect of trying to achieve what they’re trying to achieve. How could that project have succeeded if you didn’t have someone in that position of leadership who is also just a very talented scientist and intellectual. 

[00:07:15] Steve Fiore: What makes interdisciplinarity successful is when it is problem focused. The Manhattan Project was successful because of all of these people working together towards a goal. It wasn’t simply about the war; it was to produce this product: an atomic bomb. That allowed all of the different disciplinary perspectives to align in such a way that they saw how they could contribute to that kind of scientific problem solving. 

That’s one of the points that I always make about interdisciplinarity: It’s not thinking about science normally think about science. It’s thinking about a topic that you’re trying to better understand, and only by looking at it from the different lenses of these different perspectives are you better able to illuminate that phenomena that is of interest to you  

[00:08:01] Anne Chappelle: I was really struck by with what you’ve said: You can have an interdisciplinary team as long as you’re working towards the same goal. How many teams or projects have we all been on where that was a little murky? And no wonder it stuttered because there wasn’t a clear outline of this is the goal, this is deliverables. And even in my business unit, is my goal client satisfaction? Is it that I’ve got a good margin? Am I making money? Depending on who you ask, they’re going to have a different response. I think that is something to really keep in mind.  

And I actually also just pulled up the National Cancer Institute Collaboration Team Science Field Guide with Bennett, Gadlin, and Marchand. Some of these things that they’re talking about here seem to be pretty fundamental to any team, to any situation. 

[00:08:55] Steve Fiore: The field guide created out of NIH, team science field guide. Howard Gadlin, Michelle Bennett, they worked for the Ombudsman’s Office, and the way Howard and Michelle always talked about this was we wrote this so teams could learn from the mistakes of other teams. Working for the Ombudsman’s Office, they had seen the failures in teams. They had seen the conflicts that emerged. They wrote the field guide specifically trying to understand how to communicate to other scientists and how to ensure that other scientists could take advantage of what they had learned. So, Michelle and Howard did great service to the beginning of the science of team science because of that field guide, and that was one of the first handbooks that was created for practitioners, that is practicing scientists, in order to try to improve their collaborations.  

[00:09:46] David Faulkner: So, it’s almost like just the simple act of communication, that relational component is so much more important than having a plan that can account for every contingency. It’s really almost an exercise of just getting everyone to state where they’re at so that you can shape the team rather than just be like, “Yeah, we hit all of these benchmarks.” 

[00:10:07] Steve Fiore: What matters here is how you’re conceptualizing. What do we mean by planning? Different disciplines speak different languages. That’s one of the first things that you need to understand. When I facilitate a workshop with new teams coming from different disciplines, I will forewarn them, and I’ll say, “If you’re having a good discussion by the end of the next couple of days, you’re going to realize that a word or a concept that you have been using means something completely different to your colleagues.” So, that’s one of the challenges with regard to clear communication and interdisciplinarity and some of the more effective interventions that have been developed over the years. 

We’ll try to elicit those kinds of differences. What does it mean to do science, and are we really doing science if it’s applied? And it’s those issues that will come to the fore when you bring people together from different disciplines. 

I’ve been talking about interdisciplinarity as problem based. A lot of people who are deep into science would say, “Once you focus on a problem, you are now an applied scientist.” And this is an idea that goes back decades into the early 20th century, at least in the United States. And I think that’s one of the more interesting elements how different countries don’t have the same problems we have in the US when it comes to doing science. This example of basic versus applied is one of the more fundamental differences. It goes back to World War II and a white paper by Vannevar Bush.  

Bush was in charge of World War II science programs. Roosevelt realized that science helped win the war. He wanted science to continue, and he wanted a way for the federal government to continue funding science after the war ended. He went to Vannevar Bush, who was a brilliant thinker, and he wrote Science, the Endless Frontier that gave a plan for the federal government on how to fund science. But he contextualized it in such a way that basic and applied research were separate. This idea of a continuum from basic to applied research was one of the things he hinted at. And he made a big point about this, and he said we should fund pure basic science. Out of pure basic research, great ideas will emerge. And that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation. After lots of debating, the National Science Foundation was funded, but it was a non-mission agency. It exists just to do science compared to the Department of Energy, which was a mission agency; even though they do a lot of basic science, their mission is really still energy.  

Back in the 1990s, Don Stokes wrote Pasteur’s Quadrant as a rebuttal to Vannevar Bush. Don Stokes’ argument was that Bush really mis-conceptualized the way science really gets done. There’s a famous two-by-two in that book: You have a quest for fundamental understanding, yes or no, and you have a consideration for use, yes or no. If you have a yes in that quest for fundamental understanding, that’s basic research. If you have a yes for a consideration for use, that’s applied research. But what Stokes did was he crossed those such that they’re orthogonal. You can have a quest for fundamental understanding and a consideration for use. Louis Pasteur is the quintessential example of this quadrant because he essentially invented microbiology out of his attempt to cure a disease. He calls that quadrant use-inspired basic science or just use-inspired science.  

When I started working with some of the European countries, they’ve always done use-inspired basic science. They’re bringing people together from different disciplines to try to understand complex, significant societal and scientific problems. pursuing fundamental understanding while trying to come up with solutions to these problems. 

[00:14:01] David Faulkner: I’m delighted by the fact that I’m recognizing some things you’re referencing like, “Oh yeah, I do know about that thing that Vannevar wrote. Complicated man, Vannevar Bush, a lot going on there.  

One thing that comes to mind, talking about contrasting the way that science is conceptualized in the United States versus other countries is the wildly intense individualistic culture of the United States compared to a lot of other countries. I’m wondering to what extent that informs and affects the challenges that we have with team science that may not be present necessarily in other countries,  

[00:14:34] Steve Fiore: What is really interesting about that question is most people don’t realize teamwork is a new idea in organizations. Teamwork in the US really didn’t take off until like late ’70s, ’80s eighties or so. And even then, it wasn’t really the way that everyone was doing something. Even organizations were very individually oriented. I think this difference between a more collectivistic orientation versus an individualistic one, it’s not just in science; it was really part of the US.  

I use as an example, there was a movie that came out in the 1980s called Gung Ho, with Michael Keaton, and it was, an okay movie. But what was important about that movie is he was an American executive, and I can’t remember if they were merging with a Japanese automaker or being bought out by, but one of the plot points was the tension between the team collectivistic orientation of Japanese automakers versus the individualistic mindset of the American auto manufacturer. Teamwork being a more recent concept is illustrated in this 1980s movie. Even though teams have been studied for a long time—groups and teams research goes back into the early 19th century as an organizational entity—it really didn’t take off until the ’80s and ’90s.  

Now talk about science because science had maintained this individualistic mindset. What’s kind of amusing about that is scientists for the most part have always worked on a team, but you’re right about lone scientist toiling away has been the view for a long time. 

[00:16:16] Anne Chappelle: So, my head is exploding here because of some of these concepts. I’m trying to figure out from a practical standpoint, “What do I do?” How do I take pieces of what you’re talking about to make my team better because you’ve got me really excited about this?  

[00:16:33] Steve Fiore: Awareness is probably one of the more beneficial things you can do right off the bat. And one thing to realize is a lot of people are going to see this as gobbledygook, or they’re not going to take it seriously. You need to be mindful of how people are going to be receiving whatever it is that you’re talking about when it comes to collaboration and in organizations and the business world, they’re used to this kind of thing. But in science, it’s going to be something new.  

Try to help people understand the difference between teamwork and task work. Whenever I do these workshops, one of the first things I do is introduce that difference because everyone in that room has spent their entire life becoming better at task work. Few, if any of them, have ever gotten any kind of formal training on teamwork. They may have worked in teams or groups, but just about all of them have never had any kind of class or training on how to be a good member of a team. That’s the case for a lot of older scientists, and when there’s younger scientists in the room, they’ll say, “I’ve been working in groups and teams, you know, all through my undergraduate and my graduate.” I was like, “That doesn’t mean you’re good as a team member.”  

The majority of courses that are having students work in groups are not really giving them formal training on how to work in a group. What happens because of that is the students will work together, they may have a good experience, a bad experience, but they’ll get a grade. If they get a good grade, they think they’re good at being a member of a team. That’s problematic because the grade is usually about the task work. Rarely, if ever, is the grade about the teamwork. So, these students are graduating and going out into the real world thinking that they’re good at teamwork. And we have data to show that there’s this big disconnect because not only do they not get training on teamwork, they don’t get feedback on teamwork. So, they never get to learn how well they’re doing.  

So, getting back, Anne, to your question is making people aware of the difference between teamwork and task work and say, “Okay, we’re here for this task work,” but in order to accomplish these scientific test or whatever objectives they need to meet, you need to help them understand the teamwork components. 

And I use the simple heuristic of the ABCs: attitudes, behavior, and cognition. You can help them understand attitudinal components similar to what you’re saying about individualistic versus the collectivistic. There are measures that help us understand, do you have a collaborative orientation? Or do you prefer to work by yourself? So, those are just simple, attitudinal assessments that you can do to look at from the input side to better understand whether the people on that team are ready to think across disciplines, ready to work in a team.  

What you can focus on then from the psychological safety standpoint or from the attitudinal standpoint is this notion of psychological safety. So, psychological safety is an idea that’s been around for a couple of decades in the social sciences, pioneered by researcher Amy Edmondson, and she had done a lot of work to show that teams that have what, again, she calls psychological safety are more effective. And what it essentially means is, is members of that team are not afraid to take risks. They don’t fear punishment, so they’re willing to go out of their way to suggest novel ideas, to disagree with each other, and she was able to show that when there was a psychologically safe environment, those teams would do well. 

This is a fairly robust finding in the social sciences, but like a lot of the social sciences, it was ignored and no one paid attention to it until Google did a study If you listen to the Google executives, they thought it was going to be composition, meaning who was on the team that really mattered, but social science experts know group process usually trumps composition. If you manage the process well, if you implement, if you facilitate an effective interaction process, then, it’s not necessarily as important to pay attention to the personalities on a team. What Google found was psychological safety was the biggest predictor of successful teams. Those teams were able to take risks. When an idea didn’t work, they’d learn from it, and they’d move on. They actually failed more than other teams, but they were able to fail and learn and move on and come up with better ideas. Making team members aware of psychological safety is important  

[00:21:00] David Faulkner: So, there’s a few questions that we like to ask every guest that comes on the show just because it’s always fascinating to see the diversity of responses that we get to them. My favorite question is what would you be doing if you were not doing what you were currently doing? 

[00:21:17] Steve Fiore: That’s actually an easy one ’cause I’ve been telling people that one for a long time. I’d be doing exactly what I’m doing but worried less about getting funding to do what I do. 

[00:21:27] Anne Chappelle: yeah 

[00:21:28] Steve Fiore: I used to be in marketing and business, and I had a midlife crisis in my early twenties and I realized early on that I was bored. And I actually was fortunate enough to be in kind of a management fast track position working with the CEO of the company, even though I was fresh out of college. I saw what this guy was doing, and I said, “Oh my God, I’m going to bust my ass for the next 20 years to do what he does. No way. This is just not interesting to me.” So, I said, “I need to find a career that’s going to be interesting to me.”  

I had always been interested in the brain and how people think and things like memory, problem solving, and I discovered there was this field called cognitive psychology So went back to school. I got my PhD, and I’ve been studying now, not simply individual cognition, but collaborative cognition, team cognition, and now cognition when we interact with machines as well. 

[00:22:26] Anne Chappelle: Our podcast is Adverse Reactions. We always like to ask our guests, what was your biggest adverse reaction that you’ve ever had?  

[00:22:36] Steve Fiore: It fits well with what we’ve been talking about. It was my shock and my own ignorance that academia was not interdisciplinary. I was shocked because for whatever reason I was fortunate enough in my undergraduate to work at an interdisciplinary laboratory at my university, as well as an interdisciplinary laboratory at the National Institutes of Mental Health. 

And then, when I went to graduate school, I happened to work in an interdisciplinary research center. Even though I was getting a PhD in cognitive psychology, my advisor, his appointment was also with what was called the Learning Research and Development Center. So, that was an interdisciplinary center that brought people together, not simply from psychology but education, neuroscience, computer science, public policy—all about how to improve learning and education—and cognition was part of that.  

So, I thought academia was a bunch of smart people coming together, trying to think about difficult problems. And then, I came down to the University of Central Florida and realized when I got a traditional postdoc appointment, that is not the norm. That’s why I ended up at the Institute for Simulation and Training with a joint appointment in an interdisciplinary program, Cognitive Science. But I spent most of my career promoting interdisciplinarity  

[00:23:55] Anne Chappelle: This has been very enlightening, fantastic exploration because I think we can all think that we could work together a little better, and maybe the same is true. You take these concepts, and you apply them to your personal life, maybe your dog, your kids,  

[00:24:09] David Faulkner: We should interview more social scientists.  

[00:24:11] Steve Fiore: I appreciate the opportunity. I’m always happy to preach the gospel of team science.  

[00:24:16] “Decompose” Theme Music 

[00:24:22] Anne Chappelle: Next, on Adverse Reactions.  

[00:24:24] David Faulkner: “Tox in Your Backyard” with Dr. Julie Miller of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. 

[00:24:31] Julie Miller: When we’re looking at a contaminated site and the community nearby, environmental justice metrics absolutely influence how that community is going to have that exposure affect them. It’s not just that maybe they live near a plant that’s emitting a lot of particulate matter or something like that for generations, but also, there’s the components of the added stress. Are they connected to health care? Do they have access issues?  

[00:24:58] “Decompose” Theme Music 

[00:25:03] Anne Chappelle: Thank you, all, for joining us for this episode of Adverse Reactions presented by the Society of Toxicology.  

[00:25:09] David Faulkner: And thank you to Dave Leve at Ma3stro Studios,  

[00:25:13] Anne Chappelle: that’s Ma3stro, with a three, not an E,  

[00:25:16] David Faulkner: who created and produced all the music for Adverse Reactions, including the theme song, “Decompose.”  

[00:25:23] Anne Chappelle: The viewpoints and information presented in Adverse Reactions represent those of the participating individuals. Although the Society of Toxicology holds the copyright to this production, it has,  

[00:25:34] David Faulkner: definitely,  

[00:25:35] Anne Chappelle: not vetted or reviewed the information presented herein,  

[00:25:40] David Faulkner: nor does presenting and distributing this podcast represent any proposal or endorsement of any position by the Society.  

[00:25:46] Anne Chappelle: You can find out more information about the show at adversereactionspodcast.com  

[00:25:52] David Faulkner: and more information about the Society of Toxicology on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  

[00:25:57] Anne Chappelle: I’m Anne Chappelle,  

[00:25:59] David Faulkner: and I’m David Faulkner.  

[00:26:00] Anne Chappelle: This podcast was approved by Anne’s mom.  

[00:26:04] “Decompose” Theme Music 

[00:26:07] Episode Ends