A Monument to Team Collaboration, Forged in Steel

Team Collaboration: An Historical Case Study
To help you understand the profound impact that teamwork has on innovation, one only needs to look at a key idea in the modern world: the idea of steel.
Steel isn’t a mere metal. In fact, you cannot mine steel or find it occurring naturally. Instead, steel is rooted in an idea: the concept of amalgamating iron with other elements to make it stronger. The invention of steel as we know it today has reshaped our world. Steel reinforces the concrete in our bridges and buildings. In creates the mighty gears of our industrial centers and motor vehicles. It’s the substance of our knives and shears, allowing us to cut everything from food to trees to other kinds of metal.
The mass production of steel from the 1850s onward ushered in the modern world. But this modern era could have been propelled forth over 2,000 years earlier, if humanity had just been better at team collaboration.
How can this be? How might steel have been invented hundreds of years before Christ? Well, that’s not exactly the right question to ask. Because the fact is, steel was invented in antiquity. Although historians are sketchy on the details, they estimate that “Damascus steel” was invented sometime between 600 and 500 BC.
Contrary to its name, Damascus steel does not appear to have been invented in Damascus. Instead, the raw steel itself was developed in South Asia, likely southern India or Sri Lanka. From there, the steel traveled along trade routes to Syria, where skilled blacksmiths in Damascus fashioned the steel into formidable sword blades.
Damascus steel was an incredible invention. To this day, historians speculate at how an ancient collaborative network of smelters, blacksmiths, and traders from around the world were able to give life to ancient steel. This steel — however it was developed — was as strong at the modern steel that would come 2,300 years later.
As an idea, Damascus steel had a long lifespan. This important metal flourished and spread in the initial centuries after it was conceived. There are records of Damascus steel blades being shipped and sold across the world from 300 BC to the 1700s AD. However, by around 1750, this popular steel, created seemingly ahead of its time, slowly disappeared and was forgotten.
What killed this idea? Global strife appears to be the culprit. Damascus steel’s slow worldwide demise coincides with a rise in armed conflict across the globe. The creation and proliferation of Damascus steel swords fell as the Crusades — a global war between the Eastern and Western worlds — heightened. Other world conflicts fomented as well. As Europe rose out of its stagnant Dark Ages it entered into fierce rivalry and war. Western armies were in perpetual confrontation, and in time, Europe’s various forces also violently descended on the new world. As all of this unfolded, the Mongol Empire’s hordes further contributed to international clashes, terrorizing the Far East and Middle East alike.
Under the impact of such widespread rivalry, violence and distrust, international cooperation lost out. The world’s collaborative networks for manufacture, trade, and the sharing of ideas began to erode. As a result, the production network for Damascus steel died out and was forgotten. International cabals of contentious, divisive warriors continued to wage their battles, but they did so with less and less access to steel blades.
By the time Damascus steel vanished entirely, the very idea behind it also slipped the mortal coil. No one could remember how Damascus steel had even been made. As an idea, steel had been born at a time of unprecedented human collaboration — it had been spawned by the agricultural revolution. When humanity collectively turned away from collaboration in favor of distrust and conflict, this idea died, along with all of its benefits.
The idea of steel gained life again only when peace and open communication was restored. European Enlightenment, reform and stability in the Middle East, and Chinese-led unity in East Asia allowed steel to be reinvented and re-proliferated. Only this time, the world was a far more interconnected place than it had been in 600 BC. When steel was re-invented in England the mid 1850s, international idea-sharing was at an historic high, far beyond the proto-collaboration that had spawned Damascus steel. This allowed the idea of steel to not just become real again, but to make a permanent comeback. And in a new era of open global sharing, steel was no longer just for making weapons.
Zillable: Team Collaboration Tools in the Modern Era
When the next “steel” is invented, what will it look like? How will it reshape our modern world? And how does one tap into the power of team collaboration today, now that the Agricultural Age, the Enlightenment Age, and the Industrial Age have all passed?
The answer may lie in Zillable, a new kind of online collaboration network that promotes innovation in the Information Age. Try our team collaboration tools today. Discover new ideas and be part of their success. Find others around the world who will help your ideas grow. Together, we can reshape the world again and again. And in this information age, the Zillable approach to idea sharing can ensure that our best ideas will never be lost.
via [Zillable Blog]
