July 27, 2026
Before we begin, I want to define what I mean by a team. I’m talking about the small unit. One to four people working so closely together they begin functioning as one. Larger, multi-unit teams fall under what I previously described in Distributed Mitigation Systems.
I have long been fascinated by quantum mechanics, particularly the phenomenon of entangled particles. If you’ll allow me to superpose the discussion for just a moment, I promise we’ll collapse back to teams before long.
The gist of it is this. When two particles become entangled, observing one immediately tells you something about the other, even if they are separated by a great distance. Does one particle control the state of the other? Are they somehow communicating? Is it what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance?” It is none of these.
This property of “instantly knowing” does not belong to either particle individually. It belongs to the relationship between them. They are no longer best understood as two independent particles, but as a single system.
With full awareness that I’m wandering well outside my lane, I’ll do my best to explain the concept.
Imagine you have a pair of gloves. One is a right-hand glove. The other is a left-hand glove. Place each glove into a separate box without looking. Now ship one of the boxes to the other side of the Earth.
When you open the box in front of you and find the right-hand glove, you instantly know the other box contains the left-hand glove. The gloves didn’t communicate. One glove didn’t change because you looked at the other. The answer was always there. The relationship between the two gloves allowed you to know the state of one by observing the other. But the gloves have to be intertwined or in a “pair” to have this special ability to “instantly know”. Two random gloves that are not a “pair” will not have the same property.
Quantum entanglement is far stranger than a pair of gloves, and physicists will quickly point out where this analogy falls apart. But for our purposes, the glove example introduces an important idea. Sometimes the most interesting property isn’t found in either object individually. It’s found in the relationship between them.
So, keeping with the theme of “spooky action at a distance,” let me make the leap from entangled particles to a two-person hose team.
If you’re in the fire service, you’re already familiar with a hose team. One firefighter operates the nozzle, directing both the movement of the crew and the water stream. The firefighter immediately behind them braces against the nozzle reaction while constantly pulling, stretching, and repositioning the hose to find enough slack to move around corners, through doorways, up stairwells, and around whatever obstacles are in the way.
A really good hose team doesn’t communicate very much. They just know. They know when the other is about to move, when they’re going to hold their position, and when it’s time to back out. The backup firefighter doesn’t wait until the nozzle firefighter runs out of hose before pulling more slack. By then it’s too late. He is already anticipating where the nozzle firefighter is going and making sure the hose is there when it’s needed.
They know each other’s techniques, preferences, habits, and pace. More importantly, they share the same understanding of where they are in the incident, where they have been, and where they are going next. That property is not due to either firefighter individually. It is a unique property of the relationship between them. It is a property of the team.
If I take two well-practiced, experienced, knowledgeable firefighters who have never worked together and place them on a hose team, they will not share that ability to just know what the other is doing. They will require a great deal of implicit communication. Communication that is very difficult on the fireground with all the noise, limited visibility, and confusion. No matter how much time these firefighters spend individually going to classes or practicing, no matter how many policies the chief writes on how to be a hose team, they won’t develop that shared understanding until they spend time functioning together as a team.
Jumping all the way back to entangled particles. How do they become entangled? They don’t simply exist that way. Physicists create entanglement by bringing particles together and allowing them to interact. Sometimes they are created together. Sometimes they collide. Sometimes they are manipulated in a laboratory. Regardless of the method, the common thread is interaction. Through that interaction, a relationship is created that cannot be understood by looking at either particle alone.
So what research is out there about teams? A lot, but primarily psychology as opposed to neuroscience. Researchers have spent decades trying to understand what separates successful teams from unsuccessful ones. Their work has identified several characteristics that consistently contribute to team performance, including a shared identity, psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and collective intelligence. Even with decades of research, however, predicting which teams will ultimately succeed remains difficult. Both scientists and industry leaders have continued searching for reliable indicators of high-performing teams.
I really like concrete, objective research and science where we can identify why and how things happen. Just like we break down fire into fire science and the actual chemical processes behind combustion. That’s why I like fMRI, EEG, and other brain imaging research. If we can figure out the neuroscience behind why and how great teams work, maybe we can repeat it.
Although humans naturally function in groups, most neuroscience research has historically focused on individuals performing isolated tasks in laboratory settings. As a result, scientists know far more about how individual brains work than how multiple brains function together during real-world interactions. This gap has become so significant that some researchers have referred to it as the “dark matter” of social neuroscience.
However, recent advances in neuroscience have begun to address this gap through a technique known as hyperscanning. Unlike traditional methods that measure the brain activity of a single individual, hyperscanning simultaneously records the neural activity of two or more people as they interact in real time. Using technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG), functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers can examine how brains coordinate during communication, collaboration, and shared decision making.
One study that illustrates the potential of hyperscanning was conducted by Diego Reinero and colleagues at New York University. https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/16/1-2/43/5912973
Researchers placed EEG sensors on 174 participants working in four person teams while they completed a series of problem solving tasks. Rather than examining each participant independently, they measured whether patterns of brain activity rose and fell together over time. Like waves rolling toward a beach. Two waves do not have to be identical, but when their peaks and valleys begin arriving at the same time, they are said to be synchronized. Researchers found that brain activity can behave in much the same way. During effective collaboration, the electrical activity of team members became more closely aligned in time. This phenomenon, known as interbrain synchrony, does not mean people are thinking the same thoughts. Instead, it suggests they are observing and comprehending the same information, anticipating one another’s actions, and building a shared understanding of the problem. Teams with greater neural synchrony consistently outperformed other teams, even when traditional measures of team cohesion failed to predict success. The study suggests that effective teamwork is not simply the sum of individual cognitive performance. It emerges as individuals become cognitively aligned while solving a problem together.
One of the other things I found interesting about this study is that none of the participants came in as established teams. The researchers assembled four person teams from mostly complete strangers, then randomly assigned them to either work together or work independently as the control group. The teams were given a common goal, asked to create a team name, told they were competing against other teams for a shared reward, and allowed to collaborate through a real time chat while solving problems. The control group completed the exact same tasks at the same time, but worked independently, could not collaborate, and competed as individuals rather than as a team. This design allowed the researchers to isolate the effect of teamwork itself. Even though the teams had only been together for a few minutes, their brains became more synchronized as they worked together, and that synchronization predicted how well they ultimately performed.
Here is Diego Reinero explaining the results:
https://www.linkedin.com/embeds/publishingEmbed.html?articleId=9038364389475409907&li_theme=light
The more the teams repeatedly worked through interdependent actions together, the more their brain activity synchronized. Each decision built on the last. Information flowed back and forth, members adjusted to one another, and over time the team developed a shared mental model. The teams whose brains became more synchronized consistently performed better.
In the second installment of this series, When is Now?, I explored how every person experiences the present through their own Now Blob. Our understanding of now is not a single instant. It is a span of time with faded edges that blends memory, the present, and prediction. I would argue that what this study shows about teams relates directly back to that idea. As team members exchange information and repeatedly work through interdependent actions, their individual Now Blobs begin to overlap. They develop the same relative understanding of the present. They are not thinking the same thoughts, but they are becoming aligned in what is happening now, what it means, and what is likely to happen next. Interbrain synchrony may simply be the measurable expression of a team sharing the same perception of the present.
As “Now Blobs” begin to overlap in synchrony, effective teams spend less time reconciling different versions of reality and more time acting on a shared one. Conversely, if a team is trying to figure out what is happening, communicate what is happening, figure out where to go, decide what to do, and then communicate that, the incident continues to evolve. Entropy continues to sprawl. A team operating in synchrony compresses time. Multiple actions occur simultaneously instead of sequentially. Resources are applied in parallel instead of waiting for direction. Information moves faster because everyone shares the same relative understanding of the present. The result is not simply more capability. It is greater capability delivered in less time, before entropy has the opportunity to sprawl.
Two “individuals” on a hose line will spend time figuring out which way to go, how far to advance, when to move, and communicating each of those decisions. A synchronized crew already shares the same relative understanding of the present. They anticipate each other’s actions instead of reacting to them. Less time is spent coordinating and more time is spent advancing the line. That compression of time is what allows the team to stay ahead of entropy or in their case, ahead of the fire.
Alright, if synchrony makes teams more effective, the obvious question is this: How do we turn individuals into synchronized teams? In the study referenced above, the researchers did not give participants months of training or years of experience together. Participants were organized into small teams, given a common goal, encouraged to develop a team identity by choosing a team name, offered a shared incentive for success, and allowed to collaborate while solving problems. Through repeated, interdependent actions, their brains became increasingly synchronized as they built a shared understanding of the task.
The fire service has been doing this for a long time. We assign firefighters to the same companies. We train together, eat together, respond together, and solve problems together. Firefighters spend a tremendous amount of time together. Yet some crews consistently outperform others. The difference is not simply time together. It is repeated, realistic, interdependent experiences under pressure. Repetition makes actions instinctive. Realism turns training into experience. Interdependence creates synchrony. Pressure embeds it. When the real incident occurs, the situation is no longer new. The brain recognizes it, the team synchronizes faster, and more cognitive capacity is available to solve the problem instead of reacting to the stress.
If done correctly, synchrony is not a property of any one individual. It becomes a shared property of the team. Like a pair of entangled particles, the relationship itself contains information that neither member possesses alone. The shared perception of the present simply exists. It does not have to be negotiated, explained, or communicated in the moment. Like opening one box and instantly knowing which glove is in the other, one firefighter’s actions immediately inform the other. Not because they communicated, but because the relationship already contains the answer. The team has eliminated time from the decision. What intuition is to the individual, synchrony is to the team.
That is why replacing a member of a high performing team changes the team. It doesn’t matter how experienced, knowledgeable, or successful that person has been on other teams. The synchrony belongs to this team, not the individual. The shared perception of the present has been disrupted. Until that relationship is rebuilt through repeated, realistic, interdependent experiences under pressure, the synchrony does not fully return.
Next in the series I plan to examine technology’s role in responding in time.