Only individuals can have ideas. Only individuals can make decisions. Only individuals can be accountable. But unless you collaborate you will be accountable for poor decisions based on crappy ideas.
Today we are going to talk about the magical mindset of collaboration. Why the magical mindset of collaboration and not, for example, the magical process of collaboration? Because I think that collaborative behaviour usually follows pretty naturally if people’s minds are set in that direction first.
We will not be discussing the optimum number of people to have in your meeting. We won’t be searching for the handshake techniques that best project your collaborative intentions. None of that mechanistic rubbish.
Why Collaboration is Effective
Lets start from the premise that we only care about collaboration between humans (boring!) and that humans want to grow as a species. Humanity can obviously grow in population (through, ahem, collaboration) and it can also choose to grow in complexity. I think it is the latter type of growth that our species in particular identifies with; we aren’t really satisfied, we are always building shinier things.
A great example is our construction of the pyramids at Giza (that actually were shiny when they were built). Could a single individual has achieved that? Fairly obviously the answer is “no”, but not, fundamentally, for the reason that you might think. Let’s take a look at some of the challenges in building a wonder of the world by yourself:
| Challenge | Magical Mitigation |
| Physics – these blocks are huge! | Okay, you have futuristic tech to move everything. |
| Lifespan – I can’t complete this in my lifetime. | Don’t worry, you don’t age. You are forever 21. |
| Knowhow – I don’t know how to make a pyramid. | Hmmm. Use your infinite lifespan to figure it out from this manual. |
| Other commitments – like, I need to gather food. | Right, fine. Infinite food (and beer!) on tap. |
On the species level, it is collaboration that ultimately provides the magical mitigations shown above. People “working” together gives extra muscle to move stuff (I’m afraid I do have to do a bit of glossing-over of the sort of forced collaboration you get with slave labour). Tasks can be handed over to others in our absence, or demise. We can build expertise over time, creating individual experts in less time through specialisation. We can also free people up to be trained as stone masons if we don’t require them to gather their own food – perhaps we have some other specialists who have recently nailed agriculture, for example.
It pays for humanity to diversify its expertise into clusters of individual experts, and then have those experts work together. You see I’m not totally against specialists after all!
Collaboration vs Acquisition
So you have your pyramid. Nice. What’s next? Feel like it is missing a bit of greenery? Maybe you aren’t happy with the lighting. Are you really going to have to go through this whole thing again? It was exhausting to build that bloody pyramid from scratch.
But hang on, don’t those Babylonians have a pretty good garden? They must know a lot about plants. And come to think of it, those chaps with the lighthouse could surely solve our lighting issues (actually the Egyptians had their own solution to this, using giant mirrors, which was amazing – but pretend they didn’t). If we had their expertise at our disposal we could get this done in no time. Let’s make two teams, one focussing on plants and the other focussing on lighting.
Your VP of Plants is pro acquisition. If he were around today he would probably be a big fan of Mark Zuckerberg. His favourite film would be Wolf of Wall Street or something. He is going to buy out the Babylonian team and seamlessly integrate them into your pyramid-building operation, culture and all. No sweat. If he has to lay off a bunch of them and introduce a new subscription pricing plan for customers then so be it.
Your VP of Lighting, on the other hand, isn’t a dick. He likes Wu-Tang Clan and looking for win-win scenarios. He would like to understand how the Pharos Corporation works and what they are interested in. He has a good hunch that they can solve the lighting issues in the pyramid but he is also curious – are those guys sick of cylinders? Would they like pyramid shapes for anything? Maybe we could show them some of our expertise with mirrors (oh wait, I said we didn’t have that. Oh well).
If you haven’t guessed yet, I am team Lighting. Wu-Tang for life.
Bloat – How Acquisition Can Destroy Value
Our enterprise can now build pyramids and deliver gardening solutions, although we actually had a lot of difficulty in embedding that new group in our organisation. Turns out that their culture was actually different from ours. Odd. Anyway, we have solved that now; they have adopted our culture. I hope that their culture wasn’t somehow feeding into the excellent quality of work that they were doing.
Not only can we now “do plants”, but anyone that wants some for themselves has to come to us – it is brilliant, we charge whatever we want! That is actually proving quite useful because we had to increase overheads to cover our diversified activities. Oh and I suppose it is true that we need to rework our branding a bit now since it is less clear what we actually do, but that is fine.
Why Pirates are Cool – the Antithesis of Scale
Our VP of Lighting likes pirates. He has read my future blog post on the brilliant business acumen of pirates and he likes emulating their strategies. Pirate crews are small and fast, no match for massive navies. And yet, they ran rings around their bigger, established (bloated), adversaries through collaboration. They coordinated with other pirate ships to swarm their opposition, immediately dispersing once their objective was completed. Think of them sort of like a nautical flash mob, but with a lot more killing and rum.
The VP of Lighting is out to win big. He isn’t interested in gaining the ability to “do lights”. He wants to make the pyramids better and advance the overall technological picture for humanity at scale. He wants his lighting needs met, not at the expense of weakening Pharos Corp’s expertise. In fact, anything he could offer them that might improve their business would be seen as a part of a “win-win” scenario for him.
At the end of their joint project together, Pharos Corp leave with a great feeling about our pyramid company. News of pyramids spreads like, ahem, wildfire through the lighthouse community.
Some of My Favourite Collaborations
To wrap up I thought I would share some of my favourite collaborations (not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination). Each of these will form the basis of future case studies, but for now an overview:
Shaq and Kobe, Los Angeles Lakers
The best “1-2 punch” in the NBA during the early 2000’s (the formative years of my own basketball journey). Each won NBA championships individually, but together they were basically unstoppable. Their story is somewhat mired by the disintegration of their personal relationship which precipitated Shaq leaving the Lakers after three consecutive championships.
Giorgia Lupi and Stephanie Posavec, Dear Data
My data idols. I love data analysis and visualisation but I rely heavily on python libraries and occasional references to Edward Tufte. This duo went full analogue for the Dear Data Project. They recorded “personal” datasets, drew their own visualisations on postcards, and sent them to each other weekly. I love the discipline, creativity, and honesty in this project.
Wu-Tang Clan
The greatest hip-hop group of all time. Not only is their music incredible, but they hard-baked a collaborative mindset into their identity. It is part of their brand. The were able to negotiate a group record deal that allowed individual members to make their own solo deals with other record labels. This inspired move effectively guaranteed that they could collaborate across multiple labels, while also hedging risk for the group.