The Culture Code The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups Daniel Coyle a Bantam Books - New YorkThe Hooligans and the Surgeons Taming the Hooligans - Portugal was about to get wrecked. It was the eve of the 2004 European Championships, an _ every-four-years soccer tournament that ranks second only to the World Cup in size and spectacle. Hundreds of thou- sands of fans were streaming toward sparkling venues across this sunny nation. For Portugal, this was a big moment, its : coming-out party on the world sporting stage. There was just one problem, and it was the same problem that has shadowed : European soccer for decades: English soccer hooligans. The Portuguese organizers knew what they were up against because the previous championships, held four years earlier in Belgium, had provided a vivid lesson. The Belgian - police had prepared well for the hooligans, spending mil- lions training their force and equipping themselves with the best antiriot equipment, surveillance cameras, and informa- _ tion systems available. They had worked closely with the British government to identify and bar known troublemak- _ ers from entering the country. In short, they had been as ready as it was possible to be. And none of it had helped.190 The Culture Code Thousands of English hooligans, showing the sort of unifed resolve their team has historically lacked, roamed wild, smashing shop windows, beating up bystanders, and be tling riot police wielding batons, fire hoses, and tear gas. By tournament's end, more than one thousand English suppor ers were arrested, tournament organizers considered banish ing the English team from the tournament, and pundits were wondering whether international tournaments might be a thing of the past. According to most social scientists, this reality was bech logical and historically unavoidable, as English hooligans embodied the working-class aggression known as the En- glish Disease. Decades of experience showed that the disease could not be cured, only its symptoms controlled. As the 2004 tournament approached, riots seemed inevitable. As one English writer put it, sunny Portugal was about to be come the target of the “biggest English invasion since D-D: To prepare, the Portuguese government purchased $21 mil lion of riot-control tools: water cannons, truncheons, pepper spray, and police dogs. It also looked at new approaches, including the work of an obscure Liverpool University sovis psychologist named Clifford Stott. Stott is a plainspoken, crew-cut man who specializes i crowd violence. He studied the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the U.K. poll tax riots of 1990, and as the 2004 chan pionships approached, he was working on a new theory that had less to do with the forces of social history than with social cues. His idea was that it was possible to stop crow’ violence by changing the signals the police were trans’ ting. In his view, riot gear and armored cars were cues thThe Hooligans and the Surgeons 191 activated hooligan behavior in fans who might otherwise behave normally. (Ninety-five percent of the people arrested for soccer violence, his research showed, had no prior his- tory of disorderly conduct.) Stott believed that the key to policing riots was to essentially stop policing riots. Stott’s early trials of his model were sufficiently compel- ling, and the Portuguese authorities were sufficiently desper- ate, that Stott found himself, to his everlasting surprise, in charge of a high-stakes experiment: Could the most danger- ous soccer hooligans in the world be stopped by a handful of social cues? First, Stott set about training the Portuguese police. Rule number one was to keep all riot gear out of sight: no pha- lanxes of helmeted cops, no armored vehicles, no riot shields and batons. Instead, Stott trained a crew of liaison officers who wore light-blue vests instead of the customary yellow. These officers were selected not for their riot control skills but for their social skills: friendliness and ability to banter. Stott encouraged them to study up on the teams and fans and get good at making small talk about the coaches, on- field strategies, and team gossip. “We sought out people who had the gift of the gab,” he says, “who could throw their arm around someone and chat with them about anything.” The bigger challenge for Stott was rewiring police in- stincts. The English hooligans had a habit of kicking soccer balls in public places, booting the ball high into the air and down onto the heads and café tables of bystanders, thus ig- niting the kind of small-scale confrontations of which riots are born. Conventional police procedure is to immediately and forcibly intervene and confiscate the ball before any192 The Culture Code open fighting breaks out. But on Stort’s advice, Pormagney officers were instructed to do something more diffic wait until the hooligans kicked the ball within reach police. Then and only then could the police take the ba! keep it. “You have to play by the shared rules,” Stott says. police can’t just go take the ball, because that’s precisely the kind of disproportionate use of force that creates the lem. If you wait until the ball comes to you and simply hang on to it, the crowd sees it as legitimate.” To some Portuguese police, Stott’s ideas sounded illogical if not insane. Several protested, saying that facing gangs of violent hooligans without protective armor was reckless the time the tournament arrived, the English press had den- sively termed the program “Hug-A-Thug.” The spo: and scientific worlds waited doubtfully to see if Stot’s method would work. It worked. More than one million fans visited the country over the three-week-long tournament, and in areas that used Stott’s approach, only one English fan was arrested. Obsery- ers recorded two thousand crowd-police interactions. y. The onl cidents of violence occurred in an area that was policed cording to the old-fashioned helmet-and-shield system. In the ensuing years, Stott’s approach has become the model for controlling sport-related violence in Europe and around the globe. One of the reasons it works is that it cre ates a high-purpose environment by delivering an unbroker \ array of consistent little signals. Every time an officer ban which only 0.4 percent qualified as disorder! _ ters with a fan, every time a fan notices the lack of protectiveThe Hooligans and the Surgeons 108 armor, a signal is sent: We are here to get along. Every time the police allow fans to keep kicking the ball, they reinforce thar signal. By themselves, none of the signals matter, To: gether they build a new story. For Stott, the most revealing moment in Portugal came halfway through the tournament when a yellow-vested Por tuguese policeman had an encounter with an overly exuber: ant English fan. The policeman tried to calm the fan; the fan resisted, and then the policeman reflexively used force, grab- bing the fan roughly. A ripple of energy moved through the crowd; people shouted and pushed. It was exactly the kind of situation Stott feared most: a single overuse of force that could cause a disastrous spiral. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the fans shouted out to one of the blue-vested liaison officers. “The fans called over to the liaison and said, ‘Hey, can you come and sort this sed, policeman out for us?"” Stott says. “The roles had re and the fans were policing the police. They had socially bonded with the liaisons. They saw them as their advocate.” The Fastest Learners One of the best measures of any group's culture is its le rm: ing velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill. In 1998, a team of Harvard researchers led by Amy Edmondson (whom we met in Chapter 1) tracked the learning velocity of sixteen surgical teams learning to per- form a new heart surgery technique. The technique was called MICS, minimally invasive cardiac surgery, and it in-