It’s easy to believe that co-operating with other people, other teams, and other organizations is a great way to build success in whatever form you might define that. But when you look at it, there’s a naiveté that just can’t be ignored.

Companies and business leaders at all levels are especially susceptible to this one. How many times have you heard “we need to communicate better and work together better and then we’ll achieve….” whatever it is someone wants to achieve? It’s a pretty common battle-cry: unfortunately it’s kind of empty.

The fact is that

working with others can be really rewarding, just as it can be a pain in the ass. Often times we experience both with the same group of people. And I’m not trashing co-operation per se, what do want to do, however, is make some of its boundaries a bit more visible.

Co-operation is generally the notion of a bunch of people working together for a shared goal. Working together (as mentioned earlier) can be cool, and a pain. Having a shared goal is the part where it shifts to being for sissies.Here’s the thing, when you pull a bunch of people together and they share a goal, it’s actually fairly simple. You rally around the goal and the common interest is obvious, explicit, it’s what brought them together and likely compelled them in the first place.  The problem is that most of the important things in the world just plain don’t work that way anymore.Co-operation is easy, collaboration is the tough stuff.

Now many people will use co-operate and collaborate interchangeably, but I don’t see it that way at all. I see collaboration as working with people across different kinds of borders where there is barely any common ground - until you take a systemic view. Let’s break this down a bit.

First, what is a systemic view? One way to think about it is like an ecosystem. I’m sitting in garden outside of an Inn in California today. I am breathing air from the environment; there are plants all around here that use water from the local water sheds; the amount of sunlight today has warmed the brickwork that’s now cooling in the night air;  in short, I’m sitting here in an environment. If you were sitting here and we were having a heated argument about my sometimes fragmented sentence structure and what might border on run-on sentences at times. We could argue all day long. Then let’s suppose it started raining heavily - major downpour. We might unite in that moment to get inside and stay dry. Better yet, let’s say we found out that in one hour there would be no more breathable oxygen where we were unless you and I came up with a way to solve it. In that moment, we might set aside our grammatical assaults and handle the bigger issue.

Short version? When we focus on what’s happening in the system around us, that’s a systemic view. Going back to our understanding of collaboration, to collaborate successfully requires having a systemic view of relationships.  This is how we start to get a grip on the “across different kinds of borders”.

When we are dealing with systemic issues, we need participation from voices that speak for all the different parties in the system because if we don’t, we’re just kidding ourselves in thinking we’re informed. If it were a business we might need to hear from our staff, our bankers, our suppliers and our customers. Pretty obvious stuff. But it would probably also include people who hate our industry, our competitors, people who refuse to do business with us, government groups, NGO’s and many others. That’s where the obvious ends, and the guts to step past being a sissy comes in. This is not easy ground.

Collaboration demands of us that we set aside mere success, and actually move toward significance. We may have to set aside some positions and perspectives that have been hard-won in our lives in order to serve what the system requires of us. Interestingly, with all the uncertainties and risks that can live in this arena of true collaboration, the only real surprise in the communication breakdowns that occur is that we’re actually surprised by them!

Some of the biggest challenges in business today, perhaps challenges that threaten our sustainability or even our viability in the not-too-distant future will only be fully solved when true collaboration across potentially uncomfortable boundaries takes place. I don’t have some magic formula for how to do this, but what I do know is where the battlefield is, and I’m stepping onto it.

Be outstanding - Chris