Why do I have to cooperate?
Somebody working in a large industrial firm recently asked me: “Why do we have to cooperate? I know my job. If I do my job and everybody else does his, we will be fine. The people I work with every day should know what to do. I don’t get it why I need to be communicating with those other guys.”
I answered that work itself and the way we understand work have both changed in a fundamental way. What we do is not separate actions but connected tasks. Today’s organizations are complex systems that require continuous, responsive coordination to be effective, as we know from the growing number of meetings and internal email. Industrial work today is much less repetitive than before. As a result, job roles cannot be seen as independent and separated. Work instructions can neither be complete descriptions of what needs to be done. Who needs to connect with whom cannot be fully planned in advance or described in a process chart. The days when we could just do our own thing without paying attention to the bigger picture are over. We are interdependent and this interdependence is contextual, situational.
It is not an easy change of perspective for many of us. When it comes to understanding the organizations in which we work, most of us understand best our own jobs and the work groups we have been part of. As a result from individual, reductionist scorecards, most people are ignorant of the larger network in which they work. When problems arise, this unawareness of how things affect one another often leads to short sighted and suboptimal solutions. Issues are resolved in favor of just one point of view — typically mine.
When the circle of involvement is larger many changes start to occur. When people see where they fit in the bigger picture they are able to see the real interdependencies and are able to respond much, much faster and more effectively to changing conditions. Our research shows that transparent processes are more than five times faster than corresponding processes where people just see and play their own part.
We always need a community of different people who willingly participate and provide their insights to address the increasingly interdependent issues. Cooperation is necessary because one person no longer has the answer. The boss does not know. Answers reside in the interaction, between all people affected and all the people taking part.
The challenge today is engagement. Widening the circle of involvement means expanding who gets to participate. It is about inviting and including relevant, new and different voices. Success is increasingly a result from skillful management of participation: who are included and who should be, who are not, who are excluded.
A grave misunderstanding is that productivity will suffer if larger numbers of people are involved. The new social platforms and interaction technologies have dramatically reduced the cost and increased the efficiency of participation. Temporal communities can be formed to solve a problem or to tackle an opportunity easier, cheaper and faster than ever before — if people are invited and if people want to engage.
We all have the experience of teams discussing among themselves about what is working and not working. People often degenerate into blaming the parties that are not present. “If only the other group would get their act together!” This kind of thinking never produces learning and agility. Bringing those people into the conversation is essential.
When you widen the circle of participation, you widen the solution space. “If there are enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow” as Linus Torvalds put it.
