2
Collaboration Is Not
the Only Option
The Art of War is not only about making war. It is in fact a manual for how to work effectively and artfully with extreme and chaotic situations and with any kind of conflict. It not only acknowledges that conflict is inevitable in life but also tells us that we can accomplish our objective without adding to the conflict. That’s why people keep coming back to it—not because it tells them how to wage war better but because it tells them that conflict rarely needs to reach the level of “war,” where the highly polarized fight exhausts the resources of the parties involved, be they nations, business partners, colleagues, or friends.
—James Gimian and Barry Boyce1
We can’t work out how to collaborate until we understand when to collaborate. Collaboration is only one of four ways that we can approach situations we find problematic. Collaboration is not always our best option.
THE WAY FORWARD IS UNCLEAR
John and Mary are at their wits’ end. Their son Bob has fallen way behind in his mortgage payments again and this time is at risk of losing his home. They are frightened for Bob and his family and also tired of bailing him out. Should they do what they have done before and give him money to make his payments? Should they use the influence they have over him to make him get his act together? Should they cut him off and let him deal with his own mess? Should they work with him to find a way to deal with this situation? They aren’t sure what to do.
This simple vignette illustrates the starting point for any attempt to collaborate to deal with a challenging situation. Things are not going as we want them to, and in particular, other people are not doing what we want them to. We have several options. Should we try to collaborate?
“THE MIRACULOUS OPTION IS THAT WE WORK THINGS THROUGH TOGETHER”
I first became interested in the potential of collaboration as the result of an inspiring experience I had in 1991 in South Africa. At the time, I was working at the London headquarters of the energy company Royal Dutch Shell, where I was responsible for developing global social-political-economic scenarios: alternative stories about what could happen in the company’s future business environment. One year earlier, the white government of F. W. de Klerk had released Nelson Mandela from prison and began negotiations to end apartheid and to move to democracy. Two professors at the University of the Western Cape, Pieter le Roux and Vincent Maphai, had the idea of using the Shell scenario methodology to think through how South Africans could effect their national transition. They invited me to provide methodological guidance to this effort. This is how I came to facilitate the Mont Fleur Scenario Exercise.2
Le Roux and Maphai decided to do this scenario work not with a team made up only of their colleagues (as we did at Shell) but also with leaders from across the whole segregated society: politicians, businesspeople, trade unionists, community leaders, and academics; black and white; opposition and establishment; from the left and right. I worked with this team over four weekends in 1991 and 1992. I was amazed at how, in spite of their profound differences, they were able to collaborate happily and creatively and to make an important contribution to South Africans achieving a successful transition.
My experience at Mont Fleur upended my understanding of what was possible in the world and in my own life. On my first trip to Cape Town, I heard a joke that exemplified what I was witnessing. “Faced with our country’s overwhelming problems,” it went, “we have two options: a practical option and a miraculous option. The practical option is for all of us to get down on our knees and pray for a band of angels to come down from heaven and solve our problems for us. The miraculous option is that we work things through together.” I loved this joke and repeated it many times over the years that followed. I could see that through collaborating with their enemies, South Africans had succeeding in enacting the miraculous option.
I was so enthusiastic about what I had experienced at Mont Fleur that I quit my job at Shell and emigrated to Cape Town to devote myself to following the thread that I had picked up there. I was certain that collaborating was the best way to address complex challenges. Over the subsequent decades, I led tens of large collaborations all over the world, cofounded a social enterprise to support this work, and wrote three books on the principles and practices that my colleagues and I were discovering.
From time to time over these years, however, I had experiences that raised questions in my mind about the collaborative option. For example, in 2003, agricultural activist Hal Hamilton and I initiated a large-scale collaboration called the Sustainable Food Lab. This effort, which is still going strong, brings together companies such as Unilever, Walmart, and Starbucks, and nongovernmental organizations such as WWF, Oxfam, and the Rainforest Alliance, plus farmers and researchers and government agencies, to accelerate progress toward a more sustainable global food system.3
During our first months of convening the initial members of the Sustainable Food Lab, Hamilton and I talked with many food system leaders about whether they would be interested in participating in such an undertaking. Many of them thought it would enable them to make better progress on their own sustainability objectives, and by mid-2004 we had a large and diverse enough team that we could launch the lab.
But one aspect of our convening work struck me: the thoughtful arguments made by three organizations that we invited to join but that declined. One global company said they would prefer to pursue sustainability on their own as a way to obtain a competitive advantage. An international workers’ organization said they would be interested in being part of such a group but not until they had built up their power and could engage with the participating corporations as equals. And a government agency said they saw their role as working apart from other organizations so that they could make and enforce regulations without being accused of bias. All three of these actors had reasons why collaboration was not their best option.
Meanwhile, on and off from 2000 to 2012, I tried to help some Venezuelan colleagues organize a broad multistakeholder collaboration to address the severe economic, social, and political challenges facing their country. But time after time, our efforts ran up against the unwillingness of Hugo Chávez’s revolutionary socialist government to participate in our project, so it never got off the ground.
In 2011, a congressman from a Venezuelan opposition party told me a story about the extraordinary level of political non-collaboration. “The government and the opposition members of Congress used to be able to work together in certain committees,” he said, “but now the government refuses to talk with us at all. The only conversation I have had recently with a Chavista was in the privacy of a men’s room in the Congress, where one of them standing at the adjacent urinal whispered to me, ‘If you guys get into power, don’t forget that we’re friends, right?’”
What I eventually understood was that the refusal of the Chávez government to participate in our project was not because they didn’t understand the principles or opportunities of collaboration. We didn’t need to explain it again, more carefully and convincingly. They refused because their strategy was based in part on an opposite logical premise: that demonizing their political opponents as treasonous capitalist elites helped them retain the support of their popular base. In this case, then, from the perspective of the Chavistas (like other politicians in other countries), collaboration was not their best option.
And over this period, while I was trying to help other people with their collaborations, I was having problems in my own. I had lots of difficulties getting along with people, and long, quiet, sad estrangements. Three times I had a drawn-out conflict with a different one of my business partners. In each case, we had disagreements that become more harsh and sour, and which we were not able to resolve. These experiences left me puzzled and embarrassed: I was worried that my inability to work out my ordinary conflicts meant that I was a fraud in guiding others to work out their extraordinary ones.
THERE ARE THREE ALTERNATIVES TO COLLABORATION
It was only many years later, in Thailand, that I understood clearly what is involved in choosing to collaborate.
In August 2010, I went to Bangkok at the invitation of a group of citizens who were worried about the ongoing political conflict between pro- and antigovernment forces, which had recently produced bloody protests. They were frightened that the unrest, polarization, and violence might spiral out of control—in the worst case into civil war. This group convened a team of leaders from across Thai politics, business, the military, the aristocracy, and civil society organizations, who represented many factions in the conflict and who mostly blamed each other for what was going wrong. They were, however, willing to work together on a question that mattered to all of them: “What kind of Thailand do we want to leave for our children?”
I participated in these workshops and also in many smaller meetings with different actors, trying to help them find ways to resolve the conflict. In its particulars, Thailand’s history and culture and values are unique and, for me, were bewildering. But Thais are also wrestling with social dynamics that are present around the world, so working with this team enabled me to learn general lessons about what it takes to deal with these dynamics.
The team worked between April and August 2013 to make sense of what was going on in their country. They shared their varied experiences and understandings with one another and also met with academic experts and ordinary people. Out of this immersion they discerned three complex challenges that Thailand faces: social and cultural tensions, economic and environmental pressures, and political and institutional constraints. They agreed that the future that would unfold in Thailand would depend not so much on the specifics of what Thais did to address these challenges as on how they addressed them.
The team said there were three basic stances toward their country’s challenges that Thais could take. They named these stances We Adapt, We Force, and We Collaborate.
In We Adapt, Thais would simply get on with looking after themselves and their families and organizations, and leave addressing the larger societal challenges to others, especially the government and elites. This was the approach that most individuals and organizations were used to taking.
In We Force, many people would become involved in political movements to push for or impose top-down solutions to these challenges. They would fight to win. Thais had taken this stance in the past, most recently during the political unrest of 2008–2010.
And in We Collaborate, many people would get involved in new cross-factional and cross-sectoral efforts to develop a multitude of bottom-up solutions. This approach had the least precedent in Thailand.
The team’s primary conclusion was that Thais would be unable to address their complex challenges if the dominant stance they took was either of the two most familiar ones, We Adapt or We Force. The challenges were too complex and the society too polarized for a successful way forward to be dictated from the top down by any particular faction of experts and authorities. They would be able to address their challenges only if the stance they took was the less familiar and more inclusive We Collaborate. The team then created a movement in Thailand to build this capacity, which they called Collaborate We Can. I was happy with these conclusions because they accorded with my long-held belief in collaboration.
In November 2013, I returned to Thailand to help the team finish writing up our report. Our thinking about what could happen in the country was, however, quickly being overtaken by what we could see on television was actually happening. The government had attempted to pass a law to give amnesty to politicians for offenses committed during previous periods of unrest, and hundreds of thousands of antigovernment protesters who thought this law was corrupt organized mass rallies, pushed their way into government buildings, and demanded that the elected parliament be replaced by an appointed council. Mutual enemyfying escalated, with each side denouncing its opponents as irrational, bad, or traitorous. The worst fear of the Thai team, that the country would descend into civil war, now seemed possible.
I was alarmed and disappointed at this collapse of efforts to enact a We Collaborate scenario. Even more, I was surprised that so many of my Thai colleagues, convinced that at this juncture collaboration meant capitulation, were working to enact different variations of We Force through their enthusiastic support for either pro- or antigovernment actions.
Throughout the first months of 2014, the political conflict in Thailand continued in the parliament, the courts, and the streets. The antigovernment protestors occupied parts of central Bangkok, seized government buildings, and forcibly prevented the election of a new government. The government declared a state of emergency and tried to close down occupied sites. The two sides held talks to try to resolve the conflict, but these failed. Finally, in May 2014, the army implemented their own We Force option: they staged a coup, established a junta to govern the country, declared martial law, censored the media, and arrested politicians and activists—including some from our team.
Over these months of Thai history, then, the three options the team had described had all been in play. But as the national crisis intensified, many Thais abandoned We Adapt and We Collaborate for We Force. They saw collaboration with their opponents and enemies as unpalatable. They did not see collaboration as their best option.
Over the months that followed, I spoke many times with my Thai colleagues about what had happened and what it meant. The more we talked about the thinking of the team, the more valuable I found it. I came to believe that the team had uncovered an archetypal framework for the options that are available, not only to Thais but to all of us, to deal with the challenging situations we face.
COLLABORATION MUST BE A CHOICE
What I came to understand in Thailand was that whenever we are faced with a situation we find problematic, in politics or at work or at home, we have four ways that we can respond: collaborating, forcing, adapting, or exiting. (The Thai team did not discuss exiting because they were focused on how to effect change from within the country.) Sometimes not all of these options are available to us; for example, we may not have the means to employ forcing. But we always have to choose from among these four options.
Four Ways to Deal with Problematic Situations
Many people think of collaboration as the best and right default option: that we are all interconnected and interdependent and ought to work together. This was the lesson I took from Mont Fleur, but I now think it is only sometimes true. We can’t always work with everyone or never work with anyone, so collaboration is not always right or always wrong. In practice, we have to decide in each situation whether or not to collaborate.
We may make this decision rationally or intuitively or habitually, but in any event we must have a clear understanding of the opportunities and risks of each option.
We try collaborating when we want to change the situation we are in and think that we can do so only if we work with others (multilaterally). We think that we cannot alone know what needs to be done or that, even if we can know, we cannot alone succeed in getting it done. We may or may not want to collaborate—but we think that, under the circumstances, we need to.
Collaborating presents the opportunity, as we work with others—perhaps opponents and enemies as well as colleagues and friends—to find a more effective way forward and have a larger and more sustained impact on our situation. But collaborating is not a panacea: the risk it presents is that it will produce too little too slowly—that it will lead to our compromising too much, or even being coopted and betraying what matters to us most. In the early 1990s, for example, South Africans chose to collaborate, at Mont Fleur and elsewhere, to effect a negotiated transition to democracy. Most of them believed this was the best option—but this decision and the compromises it entailed were contested then and are even more so now.
We try forcing when we think that we ought to and may be able to change our situation without working with others (unilaterally). We think that we, alone or together with our colleagues and friends, know best what needs to be done, and must and can impose this on others. We can do this imposing in many different ways: peacefully or violently; by enticing or defeating; using our ideas, skills, supporters, votes, authority, money, or weapons.
The opportunity of forcing is that it accords with a way of thinking that for many people is natural and habitual. They believe that in most situations, forcing is the best—perhaps even the only realistic—way to effect change; that in principle it is right to use force for a just cause, and that not to do so would be wrong and cowardly. The risk of forcing is that as we try to push through what we think needs to be done, others who think differently will push back, and therefore we will not achieve the outcome we intend. In 2014, the two sides in the Thai conflict tried to force the outcome they wanted, and then the military forced theirs. Many people agreed with the military’s action because it prevented the violence from escalating, but it produced only halting progress in addressing the country’s challenges.
We try adapting when we think that we cannot change our situation and so we need to find a way to live with it. Adapting may require us to employ lots of intelligence and ingenuity and courage, but we do this within a limited sphere. We believe that we are not able to change what is happening outside our immediate area of influence; we cannot change the rules of the game, so we must play it as well as we can. We therefore focus on doing the best we can and ignore or avoid or fit into what is happening around us.
The opportunity of adapting is that we can get on with living our life without expending energy on trying to change things we cannot. Sometimes adapting works just fine for us, and sometimes it does not work fine but it is the best we can do. The risk is that the situation we are in is so inhospitable that we will be unable to adapt and will struggle even to survive. The three parties that declined to participate in the Sustainable Food Lab thought they could achieve their objectives best if they worked within the system as it was, rather than entering into a novel collaboration to try to transform it.
We try exiting when we think we cannot change our situation and we are no longer willing to live with it. We can exit through quitting, divorcing, or walking away. Sometimes exiting is simple and easy, and sometimes it requires us to give up a lot that matters to us. In Venezuela, more than one million people despaired of the crisis in their country and emigrated.
This elaboration of the four options enabled me to understand better what I had been doing during the times I had conflicts with my business partners. First, I would try adapting: seeking a way to do what I wanted to do while fitting into the status quo of the partnership—going along to get along. When this didn’t work, I would try collaborating to change the status quo, but I wasn’t able to make this work. I was afraid of conflict—worried that I would get hurt or lose face—so I shrank from it, attempting to keep things polite and under control. This prevented me from resolving our disagreements in a way that allowed us to continue to work together, and because I found the conflict so uncomfortable, I didn’t see how we could continue to work together if we couldn’t agree. In the end, I would try forcing: trying to get things to be the way I wanted them to be, even if my partner didn’t. In some of these cases, I won and my opponent was forced out of the partnership, and sometimes I was the one who exited.
We can view our choice among these four options through the pragmatic lens of power. From this perspective, we choose to collaborate only when it is the best way to achieve our objectives. More specifically, we choose the multilateral option of collaborating when the unilateral options of adapting and exiting are unpalatable and the unilateral option of forcing is impossible. Put another way, we adapt or exit when others are more powerful than us and so can force things to be the way they want them to be; we force when we are the more powerful; and we collaborate only when our power is evenly matched and neither of us can impose our will.
Of course, we cannot choose to collaborate all by ourselves. It is easy to begin to collaborate when we and the others all agree that we need to and want to. But often we want to collaborate and the others don’t (or vice versa). The others are making the assessment that exiting or adapting (not dealing with us) or forcing (defeating us) is a better option than collaborating (working with us). In such circumstances, we can wait for their frustration, doubt, or desperation about the viability of their unilateral options, and hence their interest in collaborating, to increase. Or we can act to increase their frustration, doubt, or desperation about the viability of their unilateral options—for example, by demonstrating that we are willing and able to employ countervailing force. Or we can act to increase their excitement, curiosity, or hope about the viability of collaborating—for example, by getting a third party to guarantee the safety of the activity.
Finally, we may decide to collaborate not only because of the characteristics of the specific situation we are in, but also because of our general preferences. We may have reasons—political, social, cultural, psychological, spiritual—to prefer to be in collaboration and community and communion.
Collaborating is not our only option, so we need to think clearheadedly about whether, in any given situation, to choose it or forcing or adapting or exiting. But let’s say that, through whatever combination of reason and intuition and preference, we choose to collaborate. We then face the next question: How can we do this successfully?