Why Do Some Teams Work Better Than Others?

Data collected from interviews and observations were transcribed, translated, and cleaned in preparation for ethnographic coding (similar to tagging). Tagging qualitative data for meaning is a time-consuming process. All of the tagging was done by human raters using Dovetail App software that is designed to help discover patterns in qualitative data. When tagging qualitative interview data, each transcript was read in its entirety twice by each reviewer. In the first round, the reviewer identified anything they found obviously matched a tag and marked other text to revisit later that seemed important but not yet clear. In the second tagging round, each reviewer resolved any question mark tags and checked for any errors in the original tags. After each rater completed their tagging, we used inter-rater reliability to test the degree to which independent raters agreed on the meaning of the text. The raters showed very high (80%) tagging agreement, which gives us confidence that human tagging was objective enough for our results to be valid.

There are over 180 known cognitive cognitive (decision-making biases and heuristics). We narrowed that list down to 86 biases to track as highly relevant to team based creative projects. Only 65 of these showed up with at least one tag.