Back in July, in an article on Natural Enterprise, I relayed this story of canine collaboration:
I recently
watched our dog, the hypothyroid and arthritic Chelsea, sitting in the
shade with our visiting daughter's small dog Laker. Chelsea always
enjoys canine company but after introductions they don't really 'play'
together, they just sit around outside (kind of like their humans do),
watching the world go by. Suddenly as I was watching, Laker spotted a
chipmunk and raised her head suddenly. Within 15 seconds,
Laker and Chelsea, who had never 'collaborated' on anything to my
knowledge, and who certainly had never individually caught any of the
abundant wildlife in our area, had, together, outflanked, flushed out,
cornered and trapped the chipmunk, which simply gave up, lay down and
closed its eyes. In that fifteen seconds there had been at least 50
moves made by each of the three 'players' in the drama, a sophisticated
chess game of trial and error, signalling and tactical adjustment. It
was absolutely stunning to watch. When we pulled the dogs away and
rescued the poor chipmunk, the look of triumph and joy on the dogs'
faces was unmistakable. They sat close together panting for several
minutes, looking at each other, their expressions a canine 'high five'.
Both dogs were pound rescues, never trained to hunt. Clearly this
ability to collaborate, and succeed where individual effort invariably
failed, was instinctive.
A few days ago, Innovation Consultant Carolyn Allen wrote me as follows:
The following comment toward the
end of your essay [on The Wisdom of Crowds] stood out to me: "Or is it
just that civilized humans, who see selfish behaviour exhibited
everywhere (and often rewarded), have lost the intuitive skills of
collaboration?" I think you identified an important concept here.
Networking is a crude attempt to establish collaboration in a
non-collaborative system. And the skills involved in identifying the
group's wisdom are important steps toward effective collaboration. But
there seem to be so many steps that are missing. How can collaboration
can be built in a non-collaborative environment? I value collaboration
as an efficient organic form of survival -- but must admit I'm not
good at it. But the hunger for authentic, productive collaboration is
deep and burning. I just know there is hope there somewhere.
We're often told that Western society is individualistic to a fault,
while Eastern cultures are more collectivist. Does that mean they're
more collaborative as well? The evidence would seem to suggest they're
more obedient, deferential and compromising, but not necessarily more
collaborative. And what's more valuable in business: competition or
collaboration?
My Knowledge Management colleague Karl-Erik Sveiby did a survey of
global business a couple of years ago to try to answer this question,
and also test the popular wisdom that the precondition for
collaboration is trust. The results of his survey might surprise you:
Collaborative climate tends to
improve with age, physical proximity, education level and managerial
role. It is generally better in the private sector than the public
sector. Collaborative climate seems to peak at the mid-size firm level.
Employees tend to experience a U-formed appreciation of the
collaborative climate: very positive at recruitment, then deteriorating
and later [among the survivors] improving again.
The Wisdom of Teams says
the preconditions for successful teamwork (something akin at least to
collaboration) are (a) broad commitment to a clear, common purpose or
goal, (b) a shared sense of urgency, (c) broad-based, productive
participation and sense of belonging, (d) open communication and trust,
and (e) complementary skills and diversity of backgrounds and
perspectives. The authors also suggest that organizational leaders make
lousy team-members (they can't relinquish control and they intimidate
others from playing an equal role). The best teams, in fact, are
leaderless, self-managed in an egalitarian way.
Ever watched people try to work together to produce a report or
presentation? It's painful, a tug of war and a battle of wills. It's
about as far from collaboration as you can get. And have you ever
watched a 'negotiation', an attempt to arrive at consensus, turn into a
debate? These activities never seem to produce true win/win
collaboration, and I wonder if they ever really have. The closest we
seem to get to collaboration is agreement on which individual will do
which parts of a 'group' project, and the occasional acceptance by one
person of another's idea. These modest work allocation and knowledge
transfer tasks are what misnamed 'collaboration tools' facilitate. I've
worked with a lot of such tools, and I've never seen anything that
could be called real collaboration happen with them. In fact I even
went to a conference a few years ago, sponsored by the developer of one
of these tools, where the consensus of the audience was, in effect,
"Don't bother trying to make the tool better -- people don't really
collaborate anyway, so a tool won't help".
Group blogs and community of practice/interest 'spaces' don't engender
collaboration either: People merely 'share' the space to pursue and
document individual activities that are (hopefully) of interest to
others in the group, and to curious visitors to these spaces.
Why, when we are such social creatures, miserable and often even unable
to survive when we're all alone, are we so unable to collaborate
effectively? Is this a talent we never had, or an instinctive one we've
lost, and, if so, why?
Let's assume that tribal, pre-historic, pre-modern-language man
collaborated in hunting activities the same way Chelsea and Laker do.
In Darwinian terms, that makes sense: Such collaboration helped man
survive and therefore such behaviours or instincts would tend to
self-perpetuate and even evolve. After all, compared to carnivores,
man's 'natural' hunting tools are pretty rudimentary: Chelsea and Laker
have a better sense of smell, sharper claws and teeth, stronger
digestive juices, and thanks to their 'dew claws' an ability to change
direction during the chase more quickly than any man. Language is of no
real advantage: There is no time to plan, coordinate or shout
instructions. You have to know
instinctively what your role is in the collective task of trapping your
prey. That means split-second reactions to the actions of both the prey
and your collaborators. Is collaboration, as Carolyn suggests, perhaps
instinctively limited to situations where there is simply no time for
anything else?
I don't think so, because I can think of several examples of much more
leisurely collaborations. Case in point: A few years ago one of our
neighbours sent out invitations to a 'work bee', to repair and refinish
the century-old barn that serves today as their garage. Refreshments
were offered as inducements, but my initial reaction was reluctance:
Were we being 'Tom Sawyered' into doing someone else's work? My wife,
who has a lot more sense than I, dismissed this and volunteered us
immediately. As readers know, my lack of manual dexterity and
coordination are legendary, but I participated, learning how to do
several things I'd read about but never understood, and making up in
energy what I lacked in competence. I can't describe what an incredible
sense of accomplishment we felt, or how much sheer fun we had. Every time I drive by that barn, I say to myself with unrestrained joy: We did that!
I've also watched jazz combos improvising, and it's electric -- pure,
joyful, leaderless collaboration. I'm sure that this is what, in their
prime, the creative efforts of Lennon and McCartney and George Martin
and the rest of the Beatles' team were like, and that this is why their
collaborative work is so vastly superior to anything any of them
produced after that collaboration ceased. Such collaboration is surely
a form of magic, creating and accomplishing what no individual could
ever do.
Another example: Being so uncoordinated, my favourite sport is
volleyball, six to a side. When you've played with your team-mates for
awhile, you can sense without
even looking where they are and who will take each volley. Rarely does
anyone give instruction to the others on the team, you just learn, as part of the organism that is the team, how to be a better player by just playing.
I don't have any biological children, but I was part of my two
step-children's lives from when they were 5 and 7 respectively. They
were brilliantly brought up single-handedly by my wife, under
challenging circumstances. I was just there, late, to reinforce and
offer moral support until they were well into their teens, when I
finally had the audacity to provide, when asked, my personal advice. It
would have been irresponsible of me, a late-comer, to have behaved
otherwise. This was not collaboration. But my daughter-in-law, whose
first marriage also ended quickly, took a very different approach to
raising her daughter, and continues that approach with the second
daughter she bore with my step-son: Let anyone who wants or cares
participate in the shared, collaborative effort of raising her
children. She's a believer that it takes a village to raise a child. It
drives my wife, who sees this as irresponsible, crazy. But it's
certainly easier, perhaps a richer learning experience for my two
grand-daughters, and probably more fun for all concerned. Not better,
necessarily, just different, and more collaborative.
I know, I'm rambling all over the place. There's a point here:
Collaboration is instinctive and selected-for in evolutionary terms
because it succeeds. But we collaborate not because it succeeds,
necessarily, but because it's fun.
True collaboration, in hunting, in the arts and music, in sports, in
raising children, is a joyous experience, and gives you a feeling that
you cannot get from any individual pursuit. That feeling is the
remarkable sense of collective accomplishment. We did that.
So why do we so rarely get this in business and in other 'group'
activities? I think one of the main reasons is the modern and
self-reinforcing spiral of personal egos and the over-exercising of
personal power and authority. Hierarchy and individual competitiveness
have perhaps quite deliberately killed all the fun of working together
-- that joyful feeling of collective accomplishment is, after all, threatening
to egos and to power, since those in power lose control and can no
longer take credit as leaders for the successes achieved. In fact,
there is some evidence that (with the possible exception of basketball)
the best sports teams are those with no superstars and
non-interventionist coaches, where the team has balanced talent, makes
collective decisions and takes collective responsibility for successes
and failures. Maybe we don't need leaders or management, and maybe we should all be earning the same salary.
Can't have that in a modern corporation, can we? And aren't all our
modern social, economic and political structures -- companies,
organizations, political parties, institutions, schools, governments,
professional sports teams, even musical and arts and charitable groups
-- really similar: Hierarchical structures with unequal power and
authority and compensation, and big egos at the top dedicated to
keeping it that way?
We have a cult of leadership, at least in North America, where consultants don't dare
make a proposal that doesn't suggest leadership will play a critical
role in every project's success, where we idolize and give
globally-televised awards to actors and singers and network anchors who
do nothing more than competently mouth the lines fed to them by
brilliant, ignored and underpaid writers and researchers in settings
painstakingly created by thousands of equally ignored and underpaid
workers, where CEOs are obscenely overpaid and new recruits are paid
less than in any other developed nation, where sports heroes and talk
show hosts and rock stars earn tens of millions of dollars per year in
industries where the average wage is less than the minimum wage. And
why do TV networks have this compulsion, after team sporting events, to
pick an individual 'star of the game'?
Those few with the wealth and power have a lot to lose if word ever got out that:
- The Wisdom of Crowds, which costs almost nothing to obtain, produces consistently better decisions than the best managers and experts,
- Truly collaborative teams without leaders or managers or
superstars consistently outperform hierarchical groups, and have a lot
more fun, and
- As Norman Jewison said when he received the Irving G.
Thalberg lifetime achievement award at
the Oscars five years ago, it is writing excellence and collaborative
behind-the-scenes effort, not the delivery of the result by a few
individual stars, that produces great film, music, television, and
theatre.
Is the crushing of our instinctive tendency and desire to collaborate a
conspiracy by the rich and powerful to keep us under their control?
Maybe it is, but the important question is What can we do about it? Here are my thoughts:
- Get involved in truly collaborative activities. If you have
never experienced that remarkable feeling of collective accomplishment,
you don't know what you're missing. Not only are such activities fun,
they're extraordinary learning experiences too.
- Be vocal when a project or activity that could or should be
(or is advertised as being) collaborative, is not, either because it's
set up hierarchically in the first place, or because some of the
'players' don't behave in egalitarian, collaborative ways. Most people
don't recognize the critical difference between a truly collaborative
team and a group, but if that's articulated, most people, either by
instinct or from experience, will recognize the difference and the
superiority of true collaboration. Teach them. Show them.
- Help the team self-select and self-manage. Oust the big egos and out the wallflowers and lurkers.
- If your work and play don't give you regular, real
opportunities to participate in truly collaborative efforts, and if as
a result you're not really having fun in either, maybe it's time for a
change.
I've outlined a few examples of true collaboration here, but there are
probably better models and examples to follow. What are your best and
worst experiences in collaboration, and what advice would you offer to
those looking to collaborate more, in this decidedly uncollaborative
world?
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
