More roots to collaboration
Last week, I posted on the Human Roots of Collaboration and laid out some thoughts on how empathy and creativity might be some the specific social behaviours that enable collaboration. It was a fun post to put together and I got some great feedback that I thought I’d explore in this post as a way of building on last week.
In one note, Tony suggested that the key points of build safety, share vulnerability, and establish purpose, from the Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, might also be building blocks of collaboration. (check in with Tony on his website).
To me, safety, vulnerability, and empathy all seem to be in a similar orbit. Safety is a condition that must exist for any level of vulnerability or empathy. And as Coyle describes it, safety comes from having a strong sense that you belong to the group. He talks about belonging cues like physical touch, eye contact, humour, and others as creating the signals that an individual belongs to the group. Taking it a bit further, it likely requires a degree of empathy in order to generate safety.
Vulnerability is an interesting concept. As Coyle describes it, vulnerability is a willingness to share shortcomings and seek help from others to overcome the shortcoming. I’m not sure vulnerability is required for collaboration, because collaboration can go beyond a shortcoming to be an additive combination of skills and strengths to create something new. Is it a shortcoming of a pianist that they don’t play the violin?
Establishing purpose is one of those ‘it depends’ elements of collaboration, because a purpose can be collaborative or it can be something else, like competitive or destructive. Of course, purpose can be both collaborative and not at the same time. It’s collaborative inside a team and competitive among teams.
There’s another interesting question that comes up from Tony’s suggestion though, and that is if the elements of culture are the building blocks of collaboration, then does that mean that a successful culture is collaborative? My intuition is leaning towards ‘yes’. I think of collaboration as being a creative process that builds connections between people by exploring and developing new innovative ideas to achieve a common purpose.
In some of the other comments I received, Andrew suggests that our social natures and our ability to be a community is foundational to collaboration (which also makes me think that the success of a community is linked to its degree of collaboration).
Our vocal capability is also pivotal to our ability to collaborate. Andrew had the opportunity to work with Dr. Jane Goodall in his research into human instincts and he reminds us of Dr. Goodall’s point that language has given us humans the ability to communicate ideas past, present, and future. Without language, we don’t have the ability to be social, define purpose, convey thoughts so we can empathize, establish belonging, and collaborate. (Thanks Andrew for pointing out what should have been first in my list of human attributes that allow collaboration. Check out more from Andrew O’Keeffe at Hardwired Humans).
Finally, Cindy reminded me of how society’s norms affect how we see things like empathy and how it affects our individual behaviour. Sometimes we use our ability to understand how someone else feels so that we can fit in and avoid acting in a way that gets a response that we ourselves don’t want to experience. It’s not empathy exactly, but it does require some of the same skills to understand how situations can affect people and attempting to understand those reactions.
So, we started with empathy and creativity. Through this week’s discussion, I think we can clearly add language. Creating safety, sharing vulnerability, and our nature as social creatures are at least contributing factors, if not foundational. And defining purpose is a definite maybe.
Thanks for the feedback and the opportunity to puzzle through a few more pieces in the collaboration picture. Of course, your comments and insights are always welcome. Leave a note in the comments or at scott.millar@collaboration-dynamics.com.
Happy Collaborating.
Scott Millar, through Collaboration Dynamics, often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together.
Season 2 of the Cool Collaborations podcast is coming this fall. Join Scott as he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
