I was having a nice time in Portugal. But after ten days of having to wait until 3pm to eat my lunch, something cracked, and I terrorized everyone within an arm’s length of me. It didn’t take too long for everyone to figure out that all I needed was a glass of vinho verde to take the edge off my hangry outburst. 

Fortunately, my fellow travelers and I had a good enough rapport to know what the others required to function well. And it made for a far more successful trip.

Rapport is similarly important to a team’s ability to function well. Today, we dig into research from Sally Blount examining how it plays into the performance of two-person flight crews. 

Plus, can data centers and a healthy environment coexist? They can, if developers adopt a technology that’s on the market right now.

How rapport helps teams take flight 

A crucial element for the success of high-stakes, intricate work involving teams is rapport—how harmoniously people get along and communicate. But “rapport” is a squishy term, one that’s hard to define. 

“We all know what it’s like to be on a team when you’re in flow or in the swing, as they say in rowing teams,” Blount says. “But what does that sense of flow or rapport really mean?” 

Blount and colleagues studied how three core aspects of rapport—interpersonal liking, emotional positivity, and interpersonal coordination—contribute to the performance of two-person flight crews on simulated takeoffs and landings. 

Across dozens of two-person flight crews, the researchers found that neither liking nor positivity was significantly predictive of the experts’ evaluations of crew performance. But interpersonal coordination did predict the pilot’s performance. The higher the pilots’ interpersonal coordination was, the better their performance was.  

Interestingly, when liking and positivity were high, the pilots themselves thought they performed better, but that perception did not always translate into better expert evaluations. The tendency to associate more-positive interactions with better performance is common within teams, but it can be misleading and is a well-known contributor to groupthink, Blount says. 

“What is critical in the cockpit is the ability to adapt and align your behavior to your partner’s, both physically or verbally, to create more complex and fluid communication,” she says. 

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

The data-center thirst trap 

AI data centers are hot—literally—and must continuously be cooled to stay functional. Controversially, that cooling is currently done by fresh water—hundreds of billions of gallons of it each year. Needless to say, this isn’t a positive for the environment or communities already facing water shortages. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. In his Substack, The Write-Down, Kellogg’s Matthew Roling writes about an existing technology on the market called liquid cooling that can reduce direct water consumption by 95 percent. 

Hyperscalers like Microsoft have, fortunately, taken note of the public outcry over their water-intensive facilities and have started voluntarily adopting liquid cooling to get ahead of pending regulations. 

“Data centers don’t have to be adversaries of the towns that host them. The technology to fix the water problem already exists, and companies are already selling it at scale,” Roling writes. 

Read more in Roling’s Substack post, and hear more from him on the latest season of Insight Unpacked, “Can We Still Build a Green Economy?”

See you next week,

Laura Pavin, multimedia editor
Kellogg Insight