When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. This team is efficient. There is no idle chitchat or long debates.

only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them.

Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down?

Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams.

Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly and that team leaders reinforced that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders enforced conversational order, and when someone cut off a teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to wait his or her turn. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal chitchat about weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip. There were teams that contained outsize personalities who hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and others in which introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.

the group’s norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.

Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound.

Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather

‘‘group norms.’’

Most confounding of all, two teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness.

it was almost impossible to find patterns

reviewing a half-century of academic studies looking at how teams worked.

good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical;

groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems.

an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.

‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’

pick apart the small choices

‘We’re living through a golden age of understanding personal productivity,’’

‘‘we all felt like we could say anything to each other,’’

Despite their disparate backgrounds, however, everyone clicked.

‘‘People would try to show authority by speaking louder or talking over each other,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘I always felt like I had to be careful not to make mistakes around them.’’

To prepare students for that complex world, business schools around the country have revised their curriculums to emphasize team-focused learning.

A worker today might start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers, then send emails to colleagues marketing a new brand, then jump on a conference call planning an entirely different product line, while also juggling team meetings with accounting and the party-planning committee

‘‘I wanted to be part of a community, part of something people were building together,’’

Our military representation, currently restricted to just 44 nations, must be substantially increased.

as a signal to our principal adversary, China

joint bilateral/multi-lateral exercises

the exchange of timely terrorist related intelligence

military attaches

regional defence forums (like Shangri La and Raisina Dialogues)

The exception to this rule was India’s willing participation in UN peacekeeping endeavours.

remained ‘isolationist’ in its orientation

India matters more and our worldview must process that in all its aspects.

85 percent of productivity software used by US government agencies was from Microsoft.

Amazon has been the most active, with $15.3 million spent in the first three quarters of the year, versus $9 million at Google and $7.8m at Microsoft. The figures do not include contributions to trade groups such as the Internet Association.

we will continue to be more focused on adapting to regulation than fighting against it.”

Microsoft has also not yet been the focus of any action announced by President Joe Biden’s reinvigorated Federal Trade Commission.

“Microsoft has realized that it doesn’t want to be associated with Google, Facebook and Amazon,” said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly campaign group. “It’s really, really simple.”

with Microsoft in particular looking to distance itself from its Silicon Valley peers.

The initial development of financially, environmentally, and socially sustainable soft infrastructures provides the basis for a strategic rearticulation between the West and developing nations, boosting global multilateralism.

The geopolitical reading indicates that the B3W initiative is intended to be the West’s return to a more active presence on the global chessboard, modifying its critical stance toward the Chinese BRI and offering a real alternative with concrete options to developing countries.

The truth is that both initiatives seem, at first glance, to be more complementary than competitive.

the BRI keeps the focus of its global development interests on traditional projects such as ports, roads, railroads, power plants, and telecommunications facilities (hard infrastructure), although recently, China has expressed its intentions to develop the Health, Green, and Digital Silk Roads.

The B3W in its initial objectives focuses on human (soft) infrastructure such as education, environment, healthcare, gender equality, and digital technology.

a possible “strategic competition” with BRI.

Importantly, the G-7 fell into a pattern of highlighting the BRI’s shortcomings without presenting a concrete alternative to it.

health security, digital technology, and gender equality

Standards will follow, as a benchmark, the Blue Dot Network, an initiative launched by the United States, Australia, and Japan in 2019 to provide evaluation and certification criteria for infrastructure projects for development.

quality standards in relation to environment and climate, anti-corruption, social inclusion and labor guarantees

transparency in public financing.

the mobilization of private capital

“a values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnership”

“people are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”

I do hope is that next year is a lot more settled than this one.

for pandemic preparedness efforts,

I’m hesitant to suggest that anything about the COVID-19 pandemic has been positive. But when we look back at this period, I suspect history will view it as a time of terrible devastation and loss that also sparked lots of massive changes for the better.

Telehealth

in health care.

gain a deeper understanding of how your students are doing

able to get feedback from the software while you do your homework online.

hat curriculum become more responsive as demand goes up, and it will only become more tailored to the individual needs of students and teachers in the years ahead.

dynamic curricula

One of the biggest improvements over what we use now is the use of spatial audio, where speech sounds like it’s actually coming from the direction of the person talking. You don’t realize how unusual it is to have meeting audio only coming from your computer’s speaker until you try something else. There’s still some work to do, but we’re approaching a threshold where the technology begins to truly replicate the experience of being together in the office.

The idea is that you will eventually use your avatar to meet with people in a virtual space that replicates the feeling of being in an actual room with them. To do this, you’ll need something like VR goggles and motion capture gloves to accurately capture your expressions, body language, and the quality of your voice. Most people don’t own these tools yet, which will slow adoption somewhat. (One of the things that enabled the rapid change to video meetings was the fact that many people already had PCs or phones with cameras.) Microsoft plans to roll out an interim version next year, which uses your webcam to animate an avatar that’s used in the current 2D set-up.

Maybe you have one team try one configuration while a different team tries another, so that you can compare the results and find the right balance for everyone.

an A/B testing approach to remote work.

why companies need to make firm decisions right away.

Although most companies will likely opt for the hybrid approach, there’s a good deal of flexibility around what exactly that approach might look like.

Digitization is here to stay, but the technologies we’re using will continue to get better over time.

much attention paid to adaptation.

Progress is possible, but not inevitable

Thinktanks and academics can point in the right direction, but at the end of the day—in a democracy at least—it seems to me like you need to pick the right leaders and give them the space to try new ideas.

I believe that governments need to regulate what you can and can’t use social media for. In the United States, this topic has raised a lot of free speech questions. But the reality is that our government already has all sorts of norms around communication.

We caught this variant earlier than we discovered Delta because South Africa has invested heavily in genomic sequencing capabilities, and we’re in a much better position to create updated vaccines if they’re needed.

the latest progress toward ending the COVID-19 pandemic, why decreased trust in institutions might be the biggest obstacle standing in our way, what the climate conversation can teach us about making progress, and how the rapid digitization brought on by the pandemic will shape our future.

This year’s Goalkeepers Report outlines how the pandemic hasn’t set us back as badly as feared.)

Collaboration has been a constant theme with my work this year.

Gartner, a consultancy, calculates that spending on public-cloud services will reach nearly 10% of all corporate spending on information technology (IT) in 2021, up from around 4% in 2017.

Gartner, a consultancy, calculates that spending on public-cloud services will reach nearly 10% of all corporate spending on information technology (IT) in 2021, up from around 4% in 2017.

Messrs Zuckerberg, Huang, Sweeney, Ma et al may promise a future for the internet that is more open, immersive and engaging than the mobile one that exists today. But each wants to get there first, so that they can set the rules to their advantage.

that blockchains and cryptocurrencies are the next big thing—though as Ben Thompson, a tech pundit, points out, these may find much better use cases in the metaverse than in the real world.

Rapidly growing platforms like Roblox, offering a build-your-own games model that attracts 200m users a month, have already captured young hearts.

to promote interoperability—ie, no closed systems—as well as common standards.

Apple is a particular bugbear for Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Sweeney.

Those who remain standing need a compelling new story to tell.

First, the mobile internet is reaching the end of an era. In America and Europe

his firm’s popular WeChat super-app, including WeChat Pay, is already a 2D version of what the metaverse could become in 3D.

Epic has been creating virtual worlds for years, including “Fortnite”.

the omniverse, a technology based on its chips

Mr Zuckerberg has earmarked $10bn this year mostly to develop the virtual- and augmented-reality headsets and glasses that he hopes will provide a dominant access point to the metaverse, much as Apple’s iPhone does with the mobile internet

it will be fought with reality-bending headsets, blockchains, cryptocurrencies and mind-frazzling amounts of computing power.

Epic’s founder, Tim Sweeney, is himself a force to be reckoned with.

Pony Ma of Tencent

Jensen Huang of Nvidia

Microsoft

It says markets with potential annual revenue of at least $2trn could be disrupted by the metaverse.

To others, he was merely the latest middle-aged tech billionaire to chase a childhood fantasy, much as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk were doing with space rockets.

“the hour will come”

His father’s library, with its statues of Buddha and Plato? What room does Tomio Okamura see when he thinks of the EU, with its open doors of nationality and sexuality, and its directors lecturing in unfamiliar languages?

Asked about Hayato, Tomio cannot resist a dig: he would be happy to offer his brother more work someday. “He is a very good tour guide.”

combining right-wing stances on immigrants, gender and the EU with left-wing ones on social welfare and pensions.

“you have to remember that when he was young Vienna was full of people thinking about a new world order, in every café,” Barbara explains. Trotsky, Stalin and Hitler all lived there in 1913. “Lots of cranks with ideas about the future were mixing, and Dicky was one of them.”

“He was a child of the multinational Habsburg empire.”

In “Practical Idealism” he writes that people of mixed race can see things from many sides, but the more they do so, “the weaker usually is their will to act”.

A rival British-backed group, the United European Movement , did most of the planning for the Congress of Europe in 1948, which led to the Council of Europe, an inter-parliamentary body.

The claim that this was the origin of the Victor Laszlo plotline in the film “Casablanca” is circumstantial but persuasive. Among other things, Paul Henreid, who played Laszlo, was a fellow graduate of the Theresianum.

Europe could be unified by cultivating leaders and elites.

Due to migration, he wrote, “today’s races and castes will gradually disappear,” becoming “the Eurasian-Negroid race of the future”. The Jews would furnish the “leaders of humanity”.

that politics be organised by profession and class rather than simple democracy.

He believed in an aristocracy of education and talent, and associated universal suffrage with nationalism.

In “Pan-Europa”, Coudenhove-Kalergi argued that unless Europe chose political and economic union, it would slide, again, into war and end up ruled by America and Russia.

a secret “Kalergi plan” comprising the EU’s real mission: to destroy European nations through miscegenation.

Few Europeans remember Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.

He counselled Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle on creating a European federation, and proposed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as its anthem.

He was probably the model for Victor Laszlo, the activist fleeing the Nazis in “Casablanca”.

Matakadya kare haanyaradzi mwana literally means, “If a child is crying because they are hungry, you cannot tell them to stop because they once ate in the past.”

“We don’t learn from the past as much as we should,” concludes Mr Chirikure. “Here is a place that was occupied by people who were heavily invested in production, who developed regional links, who were also interacting with other parts of the world—and they built a place with such strength and resilience.”

Just 17% of Africa’s exports go to other countries on the continent, compared with 68% in Europe and 59% in Asia.

The site’s connections with other African states, he adds, underline the need for more intra-African trade.

The more African scholars do the writing, the more likely it is that the field benefits from new methods and insights.

Of these only about 10% were written by authors based in Africa (compared with 86% for America, 76% for Europe and 40% for Asia and Oceania).

Just 3% of the papers published in four prestigious history journals from 1997 to 2020 were about Africa.

about incorporating “local sources of knowledge”

After living there they moved on again (no one knows precisely why), ending up in Khami, from 1400-1650, near what is today the city of Bulawayo in southern Zimbabwe.

It was seen as the successor state to Mapungubwe, in contemporary South Africa, which dates to 1200-1300. When this state collapsed its inhabitants allegedly left for Great Zimbabwe.

And since even minorities could occasionally prevail over quadratically constrained majorities, everyone could win at some point. As the Dodo said, “All must have prizes.”

That would allow passionate minorities occasionally to outvote indifferent majorities.

the “best way to explain it is to do it”

to go beyond “the simplicity of yes or no,”

In Brazil the city council of Gramado has also used quadratic voting to set its priorities for the year and to find consensus on tax amendments.

In both cases, a strong statement costs nothing. In the quadratic poll, people faced a constraint. Expressing vehemence on one issue required them to weaken their stand on another. This constraint forced them to be more discerning about their passions.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of a blockchain platform called Ethereum, has used similar principles to govern his crypto-community’s decision-making. He describes it as “an initial foray into a fundamentally new class of social technology”.

voters are nudged to cast some relatively cheap votes for second- or third-choice options. In this way, the method encourages compromise.

The first vote for a candidate costs one credit. But casting two votes for a single candidate costs four credits (ie, two squared); casting three costs nine (three squared), and so on.

In its simplest version, each voter would be given a budget of “marks” as Carroll might call them or “voice credits” as Mr Weyl calls them.

“the square root or death”.

He instead proposed a middle way between the two. Each country should be allocated a number of votes corresponding not to the size of its population, but to the square root of its population. The population required for one thousand votes might be one million. For two thousand, four million. For three thousand, nine million. To put it another way, the population required for a given number of votes should be that number multiplied by itself (or squared).

Giving every country a single vote, regardless of its size, was undemocratic.

voter’s power diminishes as a committee grows in size, but it does not shrink proportionately. It shrinks at a more gentle pace, proportionate not to the size of the committee but to the square root of its size.

with nine members, many more potential knife-edge combinations of votes exist.

By the same index, the voter’s power is 140 out of 512 or 27.3%—down by less than half.

You might think that would divide a voter’s power by three.

Like Carroll he was fond of riddles, paradoxes and inconclusiveness.

to reserve some marks for their second or third choices.

One was a version of the “method of marks”. Each voter is given a number of points or “marks” to spread across candidates as they see fit. They would give the most marks to their favourite candidate. But they might also give a few to acceptable alternatives. This would allow voters to express both the fact of their support and its intensity.

The result of the Brexit referendum would also have been different if the myriad versions of Brexit (modelled on Australia, Norway, Switzerland and so on) had been pitted against Remain and each other. Opposition to the EU would have been fragmented among many alternatives.

Most election pundits lavish vast attention on the political creatures in the competition and the prizes they might win. But Carroll was different. A mathematician and logician, he turned his eccentric intelligence to the rules of the race.

Restaurants have little choice but to continue to adapt. That means moving still further from the utilitarian model of the 18th century and before, and instead doubling down on what they do best: offering those who need to eat a taste of romance, glamour and love.

In recent weeks global restaurant reservations have been near their pre-pandemic levels. The best ones are booked up for months: Silicon Valley nerds have created automated bots which instantly reserve tables.

The upshot was that the people with the most money to spend on dining out increasingly needed it most, since they had the least free time.

The third factor was changing working patterns.

The second factor was the changing microeconomics of the family.

The first is immigration.

Dining out became relatively more expensive: in America in 1930 a restaurant meal was 25% costlier than an equivalent meal at home, but by 2014 the gap had risen to 280%.

Eating out became less of a communal activity focused on calorie intake and more of a cultural experience—and a place, as Baudelaire wrote, where people could show off their wealth by ordering more food than they could eat and drinking more than they needed.

Out went the set menu of the table d'hôte; in came the à la carte kind.

Until the 18th century elites largely viewed public spaces as dirty and dangerous, or as an arena of spectacle. But as capitalism took off, public spaces became sites of rational dialogue which were (putatively) open to all.

counted 158 snack bars in Pompeii, a city destroyed by a volcano in 79AD—one for every 60-100 people, a higher ratio than many global cities today

Being deprived of restaurants has made people realise how much they value them.

Americans were, for the first time, spending more than half their total food budget on eating out.

Laughter, as much as courage, will sustain astronauts on their long quest to Mars.

to understand each member of the group and defuse tensions.

the clown

needs people to fulfil various roles, including leader, storyteller and social secretary.

is the preciousness of one trait in particular: a sense of humour.

good communication and an ability to adjust are critical.

First is the need for routines, not just for work but for cooking or downtime, too.

Equipped with such information, Dr Contractor’s team is trying to come up with ways to mitigate problems, including by tweaking the “playbook” given to crew members.

such as creative thinking and problem-solving, tend to decline about halfway through a mission.

That person can critique others’ work without crossing lines—lines which each crew member may define differently.

Avoiding conflict can discourage the creative friction that can generate new or better ideas. Conflict associated with tasks is different from that associated with personalities. Conflict over ideas can be helpful. But when conflicts get personal, things can get ugly.

Dr Contractor calls HERA the “ultimate human Petri dish”.

Meteorologists turned to computers in the 1950s; social scientists began computerising “human factors” a decade ago.

But Dr Contractor likens his work to weather-forecasting. Weather is a complex, non-linear interaction of factors including air temperature, pressure and wind speed.

Its researchers are creating computer models of how different people interact when confined together, and using those models to predict conflict and optimise performance over a long mission.

As the Mars crew ventures deeper into space, gaps in their communications with mission control will grow to 20 minutes or more; crews will need to be able to co-operate without support to solve unforeseen problems.

A voyage to Mars will probably be an 18-month round trip in a spacecraft no larger than a small house, as well as perhaps a year spent on the planet.

“narcissism, arrogance and interpersonal insensitivity”.

Flexitarianism—eating less meat rather than refraining from it entirely—will probably drive demand for meat-free products more than strict veganism, especially if companies succeed in producing steaks and pork chops in labs, without any involvement from animals.

The global food system currently accounts for 21-37% of human emissions.

Between 2019 and 2020 total sales of plant-based food in America increased by 27%, to $7bn.

Almond milk—which records suggest was first used in Europe during Lent in the 13th century—and its newer competitor, oat milk, are both growing in popularity.

They are part of a machine, developed by Redefine Meat, an Israeli startup, that can print a steak made entirely of plant-based ingredients.

Faithfully recording that cacophony, and trying to extract some sense from it, is the foreign correspondent’s job, at every latitude.

Foreign affairs more closely resemble a noisy, ceaseless family argument that outsiders can never fully understand.

human beings are overwhelmingly interested by their own societies.

Regional generalisations suggest some larger truths about human nature.

“Get Back”

The highest-performing teams derive the greatest satisfaction not from each other, but from the work they do together.

When they are not playing music, they are talking about it or thinking about it.

The Beatles love what they do for a living.

the combination of a deadline and autonomy yields remarkable results.

“specific, challenging and attainable”.

in 2016 called Project Aristotle,

when and how to let it be.

the importance of “renewal”, the habit of keeping staleness at bay by taking risks, by learning from others and by innovating.