THE CASE FOR COLLABORATION

Charles HeckscherJuly 1, 2013

The need

We face today problems of unprecedented complexity and severity, including a once-in-a-century global economic crisis, the worldwide danger of terrorism, the threat of irreversible environmental damage, and technological innovations that promise and threaten to upend all our understandings of birth, life, and death. To find our way through these issues we need more than ever the combined efforts and knowledge of citizens pulling together. Instead, we have a retreat to narrow tribalism, and a “culture war” with sharply increased division and anger. We are experiencing widespread and long-simmering breakdown in confidence in our ability to master crises and to maintain prosperity and security. As confidence in the future declines, people push with more intensity for their own views “before it’s too late.” Growing desperation makes each party more purist and more willing to impose its views on others; they attribute their failure to improve things to the fact they haven’t entirely gotten their way. At each failure the battles only grow more intense, as each view blames the others for the growing problems, creating a vicious spiral of mutual recrimination and a retreat to tribalistic warfare.

Three dominant approaches to these problems are battling in today’s political discourse. One emphasizes the need for rational planning and expert knowledge. Another proposes freeing individual initiative and experimentation through a widening of markets. A third seeks to revive traditional values and relations. All have proved unequal to resolving highly complex problems in an increasingly interdependent society.

Collaboration is a fourth approach: it brings diverse people together to pursue common purposes deliberately and cooperatively, engaging the widest possible range of capacities and perspectives. It is the only one capable of uniting people across the society and drawing on their full range of knowledge and commitment. At the same time, it is the least developed and understood.

In many fields today the first three approaches -- administrative, market, and traditional -- are in contention, but none has worked well. Where collaboration has been tried, though it is still in its infancy, it works better. For example:

Health care has long been organized as a traditional and closed craft, with doctors holding knowledge inaccessible to those outside their community, and patients dependent on their goodwill and self-monitoring. In recent decades patients and society have lost confidence in that approach, seeing it inefficient and exclusionary. Insurance companies and regulators have sought to break the traditional community by imposing an administrative model with consistent standards and methods. Another alternative has proposed reliance on the free market, measuring and publicizing results and letting patient choice weed out the bad doctors. Neither of these approaches has

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worked, alone or in combination: standardized administrative rules are too rigid, measurements far too crude, and the various solutions have created only conflict and complexity.

But in some places there are collaborative efforts, in which doctors, nurses, and specialists come together with patients to discuss integrated plans that consider a range of values – not just pure health outcomes, but also patient quality of life, quality of work life for providers, cost. We have found strong evidence that these efforts can lead both to better patient outcomes and to improved cost control, as well as much higher satisfaction among doctors, nurses, and other care providers.

Education has seen much the same pattern. Teachers have traditionally been independent authorities controlling their classrooms, and educators in general have claimed professional expertise in deciding curricula. Parents have increasingly challenged those assumptions, demanding involvement in deciding objectives and evidence of success. Administrators have tried to manage teachers by applying tighter rules and standardized lesson plans. Free-market advocates have pushed the development of “choice” through charter schools. The results of these efforts have not been good: frequent bitter conflict; angry and disillusioned teachers, with the best ones leaving the field; manipulative behaviors and “teaching to the test”; and, so far, no evidence of improvement in educational results.

But in some instances extraordinary leaders or communities have adopted instead a collaborative approach: bringing parties together, discussing values, engaging diverse skills and viewpoints. Unions have worked hand in hand with administrators with a clear focus on the success of students as well as the support of the parents. Teachers have engaged in peer assessment and counseling, showing a willingness to be tough on the (relatively few) really bad teachers but also to help marginal teachers to improve. We have evidence that this collaborative approach succeeds on several dimensions. In a study we have just completed, the schools scoring high on standardized tests are not the ones with the tightest controls or the most market choice, but the ones highest in cooperative networking among teachers and across lines of school and hierarchy

In the field of environmental protection, the usual failed panoply of responses is in contention: relying on the market, applying government regulation, trusting to the deity. But there are cases in which the stakeholders come together together to talk to each other and seek routes together to the shared objective – maintaining economic profitability, which is necessary for sustainability; taking into account union concerns about job protection; involving local communities, who may have conflicting needs.

The collaborative vision

The idea of working together seems simple but requires a deep rethinking of institutions. The combination of decentralized initiative with coordinated

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pursuit of shared goals is not part of our tradition. It will take sustained effort to clarify how this could work and to build support for this vision of society.

Think of society as a team, with diverse skills and perspectives working together to achieve security, prosperity, and happiness. It is a particular kind of team: relatively self-organizing, with a lot of improvisation, depending mainly on the self-developed skills of the players. It gains from being able to draw on a huge variety of capabilities and knowledge, and on the active commitment of citizens. It is focused on building the future rather than defeating an enemy. It is open to new ideas and influences that make a real contribution to those purposes. People have a basic orientation of cooperation rather than competitive self-interest, but they are not passive or conformist: they are very willing to argue and push and to try out new things, within an overall framework of help each other and moving towards common goals.

Such teams do exist in many parts of the society, and we have learned a great deal in the last few decades about how to build them. The most developed so far are those driven by strong business purposes, though not necessarily profit-making. They include open-source software efforts – the Firefox browser or the Linux operating system demonstrate the possibility of building very complex products, competing with the strongest commercial firms, through the coordination of volunteers pursuing a purpose they believe in. Some major businesses, including IBM and Procter & Gamble, have also contributed a great deal to the learning of how to make collaboration work: they have developed organizaitons based heavily on flexible recombination of task forces around shifting tasks.

These organizations have created fundamentally new cultures and organizing principles. Their key innovations include the creation of shared purpose, the fostering of an ethic of contribution, and the invention of new mechanisms of coordination among diverse projects. They are more powerful than pure free markets or bureaucratic management for solving complex problems, and they create greater commitment and sense of meaning. They are not only innovative at the level of culture and community, but also successful in hard-headed practical terms. The challenge now is to extend these principles of collaboration more widely in the society.

Towards a collaborative society: core principles

The collaborative vision of society has two key elements: the encouragement of diversity of capabilities, so that each member of society can develop to the fullest extent; and the coordination of those capabilities for the advancement of the common good. The key assumptions and elements are:

Diversity of capabilities

Human beings grow and develop through society; both their moral and material lives benefit from the interaction of many different people with varied capabilities.

Societies and all their members are strongest when they include the widest possible range of capabilities working together collaboratively.

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It is in the interests of society and all its members to help everyone develop their capabilities to the greatest degree possible, in order to enrich the pool from which are drawn innovations and solutions to difficult problems.

Purposeful coordination

Diversity is constructive only when linked in collaborative relations.

Collaboration requires a basic shared attitude of helpfulness and mutual respect. This attitude must be taught and reinforced throughout society – in families, schools, workplaces, and local communities.

Collaboration requires a set of mechanisms for bringing people together to solve problems and perform tasks. This goes beyond systems of formal democratic voting, requiring deeper and wider engagement.

It is the responsibility of all members of society to contribute as best they can to the development of their community, and society has the right to hold them accountable for their contribution.

Societies should seek constant learning and growth, expanding their scope and capabilities through the engagement of their members.

Building shared purpose: the real culture war

It may seem impossible today to agree on on basic purposes. The “culture war” is a real struggle among groups with fundamentally different views of the world and the purposes of society. The pursuit of collaboration requires first engaging in this battle and fighting for core principles.

There are some purposes on which virtually everyone can agree. The U.S. Constitution lists them as justice, security, the general welfare, and liberty. Today we might need to add at least one more: the opportunity for self-development, which has grown steadily stronger in our culture over the last few centuries.

Many current political battles are really about means to these common ends. But a collaborative society also has purposes that are distinctive, controversial, and that must be articulated and fought for. A collaborative community must be diverse rather than tribal, in a way that engages the diversity of perspectives and capabilities for the public good. It demands of all members that they contribute as best they can to advancing the core social purposes. It requires a relatively high level of participation in public activity, and it a great deal of discussion and argumentation as people seek to understand and learn from each other. There must be many projects for social improvement, most of them local, engaging people in shared problem-solving and the construction of alternatives. It must be less unilaterally focused on commercial activity and economic growth than today’s society.

The real culture war is not about particular policies. It is the fight to widen community rather than narrowing it, to move from a politics of confrontation to a politics of collaboration. The enemies are those who would retreat to tribalism, insisting on conformity to some partial vision and trying to impose it on others; those who suppress other voices they do not agree with; those

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who glorify narrow self-interest or restrictive religious beliefs. The challenge is to argue consistently that a collaborative approach, with mutual help and learning, is better.

This is, in other words, a battle for legitimacy. There are fierce partisans dug into strong positions; but most people have not yet joined a side. Many see that to embrace any of the current ideologies or political programs requires denying a lot of reality, suppressing a great deal of experience and aspirations. A collaborative approach has greater potential to make sense of experiences in complex, highly interdependent modern societies, and to succeed in building agreement and mutual benefit.

Vision matters. The strongest and clearest visions of society today are on the conservative side of the political spectrum: that we can solve our problems through the free market, the traditional family, and the local neighborhood. This view has driven a remarkably organized movement over the last thirty years. But its success has revealed its limitations: it excludes too many people and too many experiences. Thus it has become more shrill and angry, insisting on imposing its vision rather than seeking to include those who disagree.

Our claim here is that existing visions, conservative and liberal, are too narrow and have therefore become divisive. And it’s not just a matter either of balancing them, compromising, being moderate and civil. We have some serious problems. We need to get together and work on them. And we need to continue learning how to do that.

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