Mike Meyer
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

Good article. I’m following your publication. You’ve focused clearly on collaboration versus competition. This is a serious challenge as collaboration appears to be relatively new in evolutionary terms based on its limitation to family, extended family, and tribe at the outside for mammals broadly and primates specifically. Your Pigs versus Owls analogy does a nice job of illustrating the alienness of dong anything other than defeating the other side in a competitive setting.

Expanding the range of collaboration is very difficult hence the high failure rate of collaboration tools in organizations. Unfortunately the normal structure of a large organization is a battlefield and not a family despite repeated claims to the contrary. Basically no one wants to speak to the competition because they are the enemy but conversation leading to discussion is the route to collaboration. It usually, in my experience, doesn’t ever get off the ground because there is no perceived benefit in risking a confrontation because the individual must carry the battle flag of their tribe and do it alone. No thank you. Silence is the best and least risky action.

In organizations I’ve had some luck over the years in shifting the perception of the other departments (competing tribes) to “customers” rather than competitors. This is the only way, in American societies, to begin to build a win-win idea. And that is the idea that is needed. That is a little easier in organizations because they do have shared concepts of success almost always related to an external set of customers. More sales and product deliveries means success for everyone so if the sales folks are also customers of product support then we should use the skills we use to make customers happy to keep the sale guys happy. That is, even though, they are all idiots who say anything to get a sale and then we have to reduce the customer expectation. Etc., etc.

If the shared goals fall apart, good luck. This is the old process of negotiation. If we can’t agree on anything else first let’s discuss the shape of the table at which we will talk. Politically the US is already down to this level but is having trouble even admitting it. The assumptions become, we are no longer part of a common organization so there is no reason to talk let alone agree. If I talk alone I become suspicious. And collaboration is a series of linked conversations between individuals. Hence it works very well in health organizations. Unhealthy, not so much.

Sorry, I think I kind of rained on your parade. I support your goal but have spent a big chunk of my life in working through the reality. While I am open to discussion, all organizations (companies, nations, empires) fail and they fail when the shared goals are lost and the ability to collaborate along with it. Let’s see if there is another route . . .

TheOtherLeft

Exploring change past, present, and future . . .

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Mike Meyer

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Educator, CIO, retired entrepreneur, grandfather with occasional fits of humor in the midst of disaster. . .

TheOtherLeft

Exploring change past, present, and future . . .

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