Collaboration
From Change
Collaboration in Society
To me it is clear that for our civilisation to accelerate its progress, there needs to be a greater degree of collaborative effort in our society. Furthermore, any group wide progress will benefit all members of society.
However, my observation is that humans seem more inclined to collaborate when time are hard. I summarise this in the following progression:
| collaboration for survival | → | individual survival is easier when explicitly acting as part of the group. |
|---|---|---|
| ↓ | ||
| individualistic behaviour | → | basic survival is not under threat, so it is easier to act alone and be competitive to maintain the status quo. |
| ↓ | ||
| collaboration for progress | → | individuals realise the potential benefit of working together even though their basic survival does not depend on it. |
Clearly it would be beneficial if we could increase the amount the we, as a society, explicitly collaborate for progress. This has the potential of improving the world for all of its occupants, as apposed to the competitive approach in which any improvement for the group as a whole is merely the lucky side effect of explicit effort to improve only the individuals immediate surroundings.
It seems that many the communities in the developing world are more likely to exhibit collaborative behaviour - often as part of a collectivist culture. This behaviour is often commended, especially by the members of the more individualistic sectors of society. My comment, is merely, that for the more individualist and competitive sectors, the realisation is that collaboration is needed for progress rather than merely survival.
So, the key question for me is then, how do we encourage collaboration in an individualistic and competitive society?
Now, given that (almost ironically) the individualist and competitive societies often have better group wide mechanism for co-ordination and control, it is possibly tempting to try enforce collaboration, for example, via taxes and laws. However, this standard hierarchical top-down approach requires ongoing effort and policing. Thus, it may be sufficient for keeping the basic shared infrastructure running, but it does not really drive explicit progress. Thus, any progress that occures is more of the evolutionary and accidental nature. The problem with this is not that there is no progress, but rather we end up supporting the so-called red queen effect where we all have to remain running just to stay in the same place -- that is we never move beyond our draining competitive practices, even though an external observer would surely notice progress.
To me there are two key observations that may help support collaboration carried out for progress, and yet are currently deficit in many areas of society:
- We need to pay more attention to decentralised co-ordination.
- We need to pay explicit attention to the need for providing members of society with feedback on their investment.
The reciprocal of the first point, is that we need to rely less on top-heavy power structures and invest more in distributed mechanisms. The second point is actually a related artifact of the first point - when top-down methods of management are used, it is very often done by leveraging different sources of power over the people further down in the hierarchy. Simply put, people are merely told what to do and there is no respect of their individual needs. The result is that, the members of society will conform to the laws as required, but are not particularly invested in creatively engaging with shared problems that need would be beneficial to solve.
My view, is that the key to getting more individuals to want to collaborate is to explicitly build mechanisms to provide meaningful feedback. This feedback needs to be ongoing and must reflect the overall progress of any given group effort, as well as the specific impact of the individuals contribution. Furthermore, the feedback should include descriptions of the overall system so that people can understand both where their contributions will fit in and what future progress to expect. To ensure that this feedback is accurate it needs to be generated dynamically by having mechanism that automatically monitor the overall system development.
In summary, collaboration seems to be more likely if we combine distributed mechanisms of co-ordination and systems thinking with explicit awareness and attention given to the personal needs of individuals.
