Why "teamwork" can't solve every problem

from TRANSCOMPETITION: Moving Beyond Competition and Collaboration

by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

(c) 1998 by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

Though our work lives tend to be dominated by competition, the parts we most cherish are collaborative in nature. It is one of the human pleasures to team up with others. It is a relief to set aside the anxieties and pressures we associate with competition, the scarcity mentality, and the great people-compartmentalizing power of the Chain of Being. If competition is the repository for our most passionate values, collaboration is the repository for our most revered values: peace, love, and understanding. We have a soft spot for collaboration that our rough competitive exteriors belie.

All our utopias are collaborative in character. That is their appeal, and also, ultimately, their undoing.

The idea of collaboration

The thesis of collaboration is that there are many things individuals cannot do by themselves, or as well by themselves. It is a true thesis. Collaboration is a dynamic by which people increase the amount of knowledge at their disposal in order to perform a task at hand.

Think of any complex task two people may face, like building a house or running a business. We'll call them you and I. Think of the range of choices you and I have as we set about to perform that task. Two fellows named Joe and Harry (not you and I) came up with this in the 1960s, which is why the box is called a JoHari Window. The trick is to pretend you are on LSD and that the four panes can shrink or expand, according to how much is in them.

 

What We Know Together (The Known)	What Only You Know
What Only I Know	What Neither of Us Knows (The Unknown)

This particular window divides the universe of what the two individuals know, and what they don't know. In the upper left is the collaborative pane, where I share what I know with you, and you share what you know with me, adding permanently to what both of us know. This is exceedingly valuable.

The two shaded panels are things you know, and that I know. When we hoard our information from one another, we are triggering the Brute Cycle -- information is power, and information withheld is a lethal weapon. The only way to move from the brute boxes to the collaborative box is by trusting one another, and by uniting in some sort of common vision -- peace, prosperity, full employment, stable boundaries, etc.

The whole point of "society," according to collaborative theory, is to continually share information with one another until the remaining panel, The Unknown, shrinks to nothing. the Unknown has traditionally been everything that is terrible -- disease, famine, the death of the planet, or the failure of an enterprise. When the Unknown shrinks to nothing, the theory goes, we'll know everything and people won't get sick and all the religions of the world will have sleepovers with one another and eat s'mores. It is, after all, a utopian theory.

The problem with collaboration is that the world doesn't work like that. With the Internet, satellite uplinks, and free flow of information worldwide, The Unknown, instead of shrinking, has been expanding. It is as if, the more we know, the less we know. Technology, and the ability to deliver megatons of information by the second, contribute to this expansion. What we are learning about the universe we live in -- the peculiarities of matter and energy at the subatomic level -- account for much of the rest. Shared knowledge is not setting us free -- it is drawing us deeper into a world of paradox, doubt, and uncertainty.

The challenge to us is not to invest in a utopian dream of universal collaboration that will usher in a worry-free era, but to take a different path, one that confronts the Unknown head-on.

"Fire bad, smoke good"

An important point needs to be made. It is wrong, and it is crazy, to equate competition with "bad" and collaboration with "good."

Pure collaboration is as problematic as pure competition. Both have their purposes. But each at its extreme, practiced unconsciously, results in breakdown.

Supercompetition, like a Panzer division rolling over Poland, creates a spirit of over-the-top, scorched-earth absolutism, legitimizing whatever means result in victory: treachery, deceit, corruption, murder.

But supercollaboration has problems, too. It is the sworn enemy of individuality, progress, diversity, and change.

Here are some of its hallmarks:

• Sameness. Competition is brutal one way, and pure collaboration can be brutal in a less direct way. Collaborative groups adopt rigid standards and impose them on themselves, foreclosing creative deviation. Think of certain churches, fraternal organizations, and professional groups whose codes of conduct have shut down the thought process.
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• Groupthink leads to inquisitions of perceived outsiders, and stultification of insiders. Think of corporate cultures so symbol-driven that they cause individuality, and ultimately their own organizational freshness to wither, and prevent the truth from being spoken. Many ex-EDS'ers complain about that company's white shirt uniform, as have escapees from the team rigors (morning calisthenics, pep rallies, group apologies) at Nissan.
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• Blurriness. When everyone has input into planning, planning loses focus. Think of the way Congress, the ultimate collaborative body in the U.S., works, and you have a fair critique of extreme collaboration: gridlock, waste, lack of critical judgment, and countless false starts. An organization that doesn't pick winning ideas just keeps adding all ideas -- good, bad, indifferent -- to its knowledge and operations base. This inclusiveness results in democracy's downside: bloat.
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• Slowness. Consensus doesn't "snap to" the way intimidated agreement does. It is a slow ooze forming, and organizations lose momentum waiting for the ooze to arrive. In the time it takes your team to put on a play, you could have read it by yourself. Oftentimes, you could have even written it.
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• Leaderlessness. When everyone is encouraged to lead, the usual result is that no one does. Or leadership is replaced by alternating pressures: "You got to do it your way last time, now it's our turn."
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• Defenselessness. When everyone knows everything, because sharing is so important, there is no confidentiality, and no firewalls. You are at the mercy of whoever sees you are vulnerable and crosses the street to beat you up. "Flattened" organizations, where only two job descriptions may exist ("chief customer satisfaction officer" and "customer satisfaction associate") sacrifice defense to simplicity. Effective organizations often find they need role variety, including the roles of warriors and champions.
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• Interiority. Collaborative groups have a way of becoming cross-eyed over time, focusing on subjects of interest exclusively to the group. Politics often forces collaborative groups to think in severe us/them ways, and to invest all resources in immediate concerns. This tendency is why Lee Iacocca scoffs at worker-owned enterprises. "Somebody's crazy. It can't work. What do you think will happen when it's a choice between employee benefits and capital investment?" Collaboration, critics say, has no guts.
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• Mercilessness. "The many are stronger than the one," is the motto of supercollaboration. It is also the motto of fascism. The fasces of Mussolini was a bundle of Roman sticks bound together. Individually, each stick could be snapped; together, they were unbreakable. A supercollaborative group is ferocious in its intolerance of outsiders, and oppressive in its domination of minority insiders.

Perhaps the worst thing about supercollaborative environments is that there is no way to fight them. This was a point which Jeane Kirkpatrick, American ambassador to the United Nations, caught a lot of heat for in the 1980s, when she said that authoritarian or totalitarian governments were preferable to communist governments. Kirkpatrick was a hard-line anti-Communist, so the remark predictibly aroused the ire of people on the left, who replied that a firing squad is a firing squad, regardless of whether the dictator is on the right (Somoza in Nicaragua) or the left (Castro in Cuba).

What we suspect Kirkpatrick meant was that it is easier to overthrow a single bully than it is to undermine an entire system. Heroic stories abound of individuals who bring down a giant, or minotaur, or dragon. There are fewer tales of individuals who had that kind of impact against the consensus of an entire culture. When they do prevail they often pay the ultimate price: Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.

We agree with Kirkpatrick that supercollaboration poses a greater danger than supercompetition. Killing the king is an easier assignment than ending the Dark Ages single-handed.

A lot of this book, for that reason, is about how to handle brutes in the marketplace -- the people we work with and for, and the organizations they make up. And handle them we must, because handling the alternative to them is so difficult.

The Play's the Thing

An analogy we like is to your business as a piece of stagecraft, and the people in it as actors in a play. There are three kinds of theatrical performance:

1. The competitive cast. This is where the actors are insecure, and they are all mugging like crazy in hopes there is a famous producer in the audience, who will discover them and take them away to something grander. Competitive actors have no loyalty to the play or to the author or to the director or to one another. Imagine an all-egomaniac play starring Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Jack Lemmon, Barbra Streisand and Paulie Shore. It's every actor for himself, and an agony for the audience to watch.

2. The collaborative cast. These actors are the exact opposite -- well-mannered, trained in the art of working together, sensitive to the slightest nuances of one another's performance and eager to do justice to the play as a whole. They encourage one another, and embrace frequently. Indeed, they are repertory theater in the highest sense, people dedicated to staying together for this play, and for another, and then another, and then another. Picture a cast in which everyone wears a black body stocking and wears a mask -- like Mummenschantz or Cirque du Soleil! The theater is their life, but that does not prevent them from being incredibly boring.

3. The transcompetitive cast. To these actors, the play is everything. It is valuable in and of itself, but it is also their ticket to better things individually. There are stars and journeymen actors, but they have found a way to work together without resentment or conflict. The great actors pick the lesser actors up, and the lesser actors provide a foundation for the stars to play off. No one imagines the cast will be together forever. And there is no pretending actors don't have egos and are not trying to outdo one another on-stage. But it is all within the context of the play, making it a success in order so everyone can share in the proceeds. Now you've got a cast with life that is not trying to suck the life out of one another.

We submit that if you have to choose one type of cast to put on the play that is your business, this is really a no-brainer.

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