We need to embrace coopetition if we want to build climate resilience
Cooperation + Competition = Coopetition
People who know me well know that I’m more comfortable working with data than working with people.
Throughout my life, I’ve found comfort and joy in solitary pursuits — reading, playing the piano, solving puzzles. It’s served me well by supporting things I do well — things like making sense of complex issues, dealing with problems in innovative ways, and planning. I’ve also found that, by themselves, my skills aren’t very useful — or something that people are willing to pay for. I’m not a programmer, or a GIS expert, or a very good writer. To be successful, I need to work with people who have those skills.
So over the years, I’ve found the additional joy of working with people to do the work that we do. Together. Working with talented people isn’t just additive, it’s multiplicative. Everyone brings their own set of experiences and talents to the table to create a wonderful synergy.
As you’ve seen from other posts, both in this publication and over on the NEMAC blog, it takes a wide range of skillsets to provide resilience services. Nina Flagler Hall discussed the critical role she plays as a writer and communicator in a team dominated by scientists and programmers:
Dave Michelson wrote about the importance of user testing — always listening to your customers and testing your assumptions:
Kim Rhodes talked about blending GIS with applied research to develop a tool that’s being used to make decisions:
These posts clearly show the multiplicative value of our team, and what we can achieve by using a wonderful pool of shared talents. We’ve been able to leverage that pool even more through NEMAC+FernLeaf, NEMAC’s public-private partnership with FernLeaf Interactive.
It’s one thing to figure things out in a group where people are working together and driven by similar profit motives and projects. But that’s not enough. There’s a growing demand for resilience products and services. Unfortunately for our nation, and the planet, a changing climate is increasing the risk and vulnerability of communities across the globe.
Climate resilience and adaptation practitioners, as a professional community, must find ways to scale solutions affordably and train new groups of adaptation professionals — a task that’s way beyond the ability of a single entity to do.
That’s why NEMAC+FernLeaf is building partnerships to provide a high level of service nationwide, and why we’re proud members of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, the Resilience Ecosystem (a collaborative driven by NOAA’s Climate Program Office and the Climate Resilience Fund) and local partnerships here in Asheville. Only by working across boundaries can we build the capacity that’s needed across the nation to address this issue.
But, ay, there’s the rub! To build future capacity, we need to have more cooperation. But in today’s tight resilience market, many of us are competing over the small number of projects that are out there.
How do we balance this competition with cooperation to get to COOPETITION — or ”collaboration between business competitors, in the hope of mutually beneficial results”? It takes a great deal of trust. Trust in the types of partnerships we’re building in today’s lean times to meet the challenges that we know will be facing our nation in the very near future.
We’ve found that, over time, folks we may have once considered competitors are actually natural collaborators, because they also bring something very valuable to the table. We’ve just needed to have an open conversation about how we could build trust and both win through the collaboration.
The issue of building climate resilience in our nation — and across the world — is large enough that it really needs to be all hands on deck, bringing all of our talents to bear. The problem isn’t going away, and it’s getting bigger all the time. We have to be wise enough to harness our energies to meet the challenges that lie ahead of us.
It’s good work. Let’s continue to find good people to work with.
