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Conventional, Constricted
Collaboration Is Becoming Obsolete

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

—John Maynard Keynes¹

Our most common default mode for collaborating is controlled. But in most complex and contentious contexts, this mode does not and cannot work.

CONSTRICTION PREVENTS MOVEMENT

John and Mary are talking about what to do about their son Bob’s financial problems. They want to help, and they also know from experience that they can’t force him to do anything. They don’t want to fight either with each other or with Bob. So they need to find a way to work this out together.

John takes a directive approach. He thinks that Bob has been messing up his life for a long time and that they need to get him to sort things out once and for all. Mary thinks that Bob is having a tough time with his business and that they ought to give him some money so that his children don’t suffer, but she is willing to go along with John. They agree on a narrow compromise: they will give Bob the money he needs to catch up on his mortgage but also make it clear to him that this will be the last time.

John arranges to meet Bob for lunch, listens to Bob’s explanation of his situation, and then in a sympathetic voice tells Bob what he and Mary have decided they are willing to do to help out. Bob feels defensive but thanks John, accepts the offer, and promises to be more careful with his money.

Bob returns home to his wife, Jane. He tells her that he is relieved to have gotten some help but that he resents the way his parents treat him like a child. He doesn’t know how to change what he is doing, so his financial problems recur. John and Mary feel taken advantage of and disappointed. All four of them retreat; they spend less time together and their relationships become cooler. They have not made any progress on their issues—in fact, they now feel even more frustrated and angry.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT ASSUMES CONTROL

In all of my first jobs and many of my first consulting projects, I worked for large organizations: corporations, government agencies, research institutes. So I understand how such organizations typically do things. Here is a composite story of an organizational change process.

Susan Jones is the CEO of a large hospital that is facing disorienting changes in its social and economic and technological environment, and is producing consistently poor clinical and financial results. She gets her board to approve a comprehensive project to transform the hospital’s operations. She knows that this transformation will require many professionals—doctors, nurses, researchers, technicians, administrators—to make many changes in what they are doing, and that she will therefore not be able to direct or impose this effort unilaterally. So she decides to undertake this project collaboratively.

Jones sets up a transformation team that includes the hospital’s top twenty-five managers from across all departments. She organizes an off-site workshop so that they can jell as a team and agree on a plan for the transformation. She hires expert consultants to diagnose the hospital’s problem, prescribe a solution, and present their report to the workshop. She focuses the workshop discussions on what will be best for the patients and for the hospital as a whole, insisting that her managers put aside their parochial departmental agendas.

At the end of this workshop, the team has reached consensus on a plan to implement the solution recommended by the consultants. It specifies what each department must do in order to effect the transformation and also the incentives and sanctions that will ensure its implementation on time and on budget. Jones and her team are pleased with having accomplished this important and complicated task.

Jones sends out an email to all hospital staff announcing the rollout of the transformation. But most of them greet this communication with cynicism and defensiveness. They doubt that it will work, they worry that they will have to compromise their professional standards, and they fear that their jobs will become less satisfying and secure. They blame Jones, their managers, the consultants, and people in other departments. Public health officials and patients also raise concerns in the newspapers and on social media.

As the managers begin to implement their plan, they run into unexpected complications, delays, resistance, and overruns. The managers push the implementation harder, but the effort becomes more stuck. Clinical and financial results deteriorate further. Finally, the board declares that the transformation project has failed and they cancel it. Recriminations abound.

In implementing this collaborative transformation, Jones made three typical mistakes.

First, she focused all of the conversations about this project on the good and interests of the hospital as a whole. In doing this, she papered over the crucial fact that different departments and individuals had radically different perspectives on what was happening and ought to happen, and that the transformation would produce winners and losers. Jones also overlooked the inconvenient fact that, in conversations about “the good of the whole,” it was true only for her that the interests of the whole and her own interests (her compensation and career) were identical—everyone else’s interests depended largely on what happened to their department and their job. It was not true that there was only one whole to be optimized: there were many wholes to be managed, and to suggest otherwise was simplistic and manipulative.

Jones’s second mistake was that, in trying to advance the transformation, she and her consultants pushed to articulate a single statement of the problem, the solution, and the plan. But the hospital’s situation was too complex, with too many people having their own perspectives and proposals, for them to be able to obtain an agreement that was substantive and sincere. And not only could they not get agreement on what would work, they could not know what would work before they tried it out: lots of people had opinions but no one actually knew. The real work of the transformation was not to choose among existing fixed options but to cocreate new options as the work unfolded.

The third mistake was in how Jones and her managers and consultants saw what they needed to do to effect this transformation. They thought that change management meant getting other people—subordinates, suppliers, patients—to change their values and thinking and actions. This fundamentally hierarchical assumption, that higher people change lower people, makes everyone defensive: people don’t dislike change, but they dislike being changed. This transformation would require everyone to be open to learning and changing.

“THERE IS ONLY ONE RIGHT ANSWER”

All of my training was to be an expert problem solver. In 1979, I started an undergraduate degree in physics at McGill University in my hometown of Montreal, proud to be in such a brainy field. I enjoyed spending my evenings calculating solutions to mathematical problems. I got perfect marks on exams because beforehand I had worked through the correct answer to every question in the textbooks.

In the summer of 1981 I attended a global conference of scientists concerned with big problems such as nuclear war. I wrote a conference paper that made a logical but naïve argument for using planes rather than satellites to monitor compliance with arms treaties. One of my mentors used a phrase to criticize my paper that I had never heard before: “Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good.” I was surprised by this notion that there was not simply one correct answer.

At this conference, I heard a presentation on the environmental problems of energy production and was attracted to working on such an important public issue. So in 1982, I started a graduate degree in energy and environmental economics at the University of California, Berkeley, that trained students in the rational assessment of complex policy issues. My master’s thesis proved that the Brazilian government program to substitute sugar-based alcohol for gasoline was uneconomical. Then I got a series of research postings in the United States, France, Austria, and Japan. In each of these places, I was given the same kind of assignment: figure out, for some complex issue, the optimum policy response.

After I graduated from Berkeley in 1986, I was hired as a corporate planning coordinator at Pacific Gas & Electric Company in San Francisco. The essence of my job was to come up with quick and succinct answers to business questions posed by the company’s executives. Once I attended a strategic planning retreat of the company’s executive committee and was shocked to see them make decisions based not only on the analyses that my colleagues and I had prepared, but also on habit, politics, and game playing.

Then in 1988, at twenty-seven years old, I got a job in the global planning department of Royal Dutch Shell. During these years, the most common feedback I got was that I was intelligent but arrogant, which I thought was an acceptable trade-off. Shell people had a similar reputation, so when I got there, I thought I fit right in.

Shell’s planning department was staffed with bright people recruited from across the company and from external think tanks. Our job was to challenge Shell executives to pay attention to changes in the world that could present new business risks and opportunities. We did this by constructing scenarios of possible futures through reading and talking with people from around the world and then arguing among ourselves, for months and months, about what we were observing and what it meant. The window of my office looked down on the British Houses of Parliament, and I fancied that we, like the parliamentarians, were employing robust and reasoned debate to find the best answers.

By the time I was at Shell, then, I was confident that I knew how to solve complex problems. The model I had internalized from all of my training had three basic steps. First, smart people think through the problem and the solution and make a plan to execute this solution. Second, they get the people in authority to approve this plan. Third, the authorities instruct their subordinates to execute the plan. This all seemed obvious and reasonable to me. Later, my boss at Shell, Kees van der Heijden, explained that this model provides the foundation for all conventional strategic planning; it falls into

the rationalist school, which codifies thought and action separately. The tacit underlying assumption is that there is one best solution, and the job of the strategist is to get as close to this as possible within the limited resources available. Having decided the optimal way forward, the question of strategy implementation is addressed separately.²

THE LIMITATIONS OF CONVENTIONAL COLLABORATION

After my experience at Mont Fleur, I left Shell to work on collaborative efforts to address complex public challenges. Almost everyone I worked with—in governments, companies, and nonprofits, around the world—was implicitly using some variation of the three-step conventional, rationalistic, linear, hierarchical model that I had learned.

I tried to make this model work in my collaborations, but it didn’t.

What I observed was that people who come together to work on a complex challenge almost never follow these three steps, even if they think they are supposed to. They often produce useful outputs—new relationships, insights, commitments, initiatives, and capacities—but they rarely do this through executing an agreed-upon plan. Sometimes they produce some outputs and sometimes others; sometimes they end up doing something close to what they originally intended and sometimes they make radical changes; sometimes they are able to work together only briefly and sometimes they end up continuing for years; sometimes they move forward in alignment and sometimes in fierce contestation. In practice, they figure out what to do as they go along.

For a long time, I thought the unpredictability of these collaborations could be remedied by participants’ being more explicit or disciplined about following the three steps: by doubling down on planning and control. But eventually I realized that the model I had always thought was normal simply does not and cannot work in complex and conflictual situations.

Later I learned that, in transposing the way I had worked on physics problems to my work on policy and strategy, I was making a common mistake. In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber wrote:

The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, because of the nature of these problems. They are “wicked” problems, whereas science has developed to deal with “tame” problems. Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about “optimal solutions” to social problems. Even worse, there are no “solutions” in the sense of definitive and objective answers.³

Once I started to question the conventional problem-solving model I had been using, I realized how unsuitable it was for the collaborations I was trying to support.

The difficulty starts with the assumption that there is one right answer. Being certain that we know the right answer doesn’t leave much room for other people’s answers and therefore makes it more difficult to work together. I saw a vivid example of this in 2010 when I made my first visit to Thailand. My hosts had organized back-to-back meetings over three days with thirty top leaders from across Thai society. A few months earlier, pro- and antigovernment forces had clashed violently in Bangkok, and in these meetings we heard radically different accounts of what had happened and why and who was to blame. I found this series of disjointed conversations to be confusing. But on reflection, I realized that one thread ran through each of the accounts we had heard. In one way or another, every single person had said, “The truth of this situation is . . .”

This is the typical starting point for attempts to collaborate in complex and contentious situations. Usually most of the people involved are convinced that they know the truth about their situation. They are right and others are wrong; they are innocent and others are guilty; and if only the others would listen to and agree with them, then the situation would be rectified. In hierarchical systems such as Pacific Gas & Electric and Thailand, this level of certainty can be dangerous. A belief that “I am right and you are wrong” can easily slip into “I deserve to be superior and you to be inferior.” This is a recipe not for generative collaboration but for degenerative imposition.

We hold on to being right to protect our sense of who we are. In 2009, while I was attending the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, I had a brief conversation with Berlin researcher Anja Koehne. She was criticizing the German stance toward other countries in the negotiations and used a phrase that penetrated me like an arrow: “feeling superior as a condition of being.” This phrase showed me that I was attached to winning arguments and being right, in part because I saw being superior as integral to my identity. I feared that if I was wrong, I would lose a vital part of who I was: that I would not just fail but be a failure. I could not relax my grip on having the right answer until I could relax my identification with success.

The typical starting point for collaborating in complex and contentious situations, then, is that the participants do not agree on what the solution is or even on what the problem is. They each have their own truth about what is going on and why, and who needs to do what about it. One way to approach this situation is to understand the participants as the blind men with the elephant. In this fable, the blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar, the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope, the one who feels the side says the elephant is like a wall, and so on. This metaphor suggests that each of the participants in a collaboration has a different perspective on the situation that they are all part of and care about, and that if each reveals his or her perspective, then together they can construct a more complete picture.

But the construction of a single agreed-upon model of the whole situation is often not possible. Futurist Don Michael points out that

in today’s world the most advanced among us know about little more than one small piece of the elephant, and there are now so many different pieces, they change so rapidly and they are all so intimately related one to another, that even if we had the technology to put them all together, we would still not be able to make sense of the whole.⁴

So we need to do something more than simply fit together different truths to form a single larger truth.

Political philosopher Isaiah Berlin takes this argument further. He says that trying to agree on and implement a single set of understandings and values is not only unachievable but dangerous:

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise.

The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. This idea is false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods—but for an even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other.

So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois and it does not engage the generous emotions. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood.⁵

Collaborating with diverse others therefore cannot and must not require agreeing on a single truth or answer or solution. Instead, it involves finding a way to move forward together in the absence of or beyond such agreements. This is true not only at work but also at home. The research done by marriage therapist John Gottman, and discussed by Michael Fulwiler, suggests,

69% of relationship conflict is about perpetual problems. All couples have them—these problems are grounded in the fundamental differences that any two people face. They are either 1) fundamental differences in your personalities that repeatedly create conflict, or 2) fundamental differences in your lifestyle needs. In our research, we concluded that instead of solving their perpetual problems, what seems to be important is whether or not a couple can establish a dialogue about them. If they cannot establish such a dialogue, the conflict becomes gridlocked, and gridlocked conflict eventually leads to emotional disengagement.⁶

So the conventional approach to collaboration that I learned in the first part of my career is of limited use. It works only in simple, controlled situations where everyone agrees or goes along and where their actions produce the results they intend. In most social systems—families, organizations, communities, nations—complexity is increasing and control is decreasing, so such situations occur less frequently.

Conventional collaboration is therefore becoming obsolete.

We get into trouble when we incorrectly assume that the situation we are dealing with is simple and controllable, and therefore that conventional collaboration is applicable. In these circumstances, we employ conventional collaboration because it is familiar and comfortable, and we know it works. But it does not work: it increases enemyfying and makes our situation even less workable. This causes us to instinctively tense up and double down on conventional collaboration. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble,” the quip goes, “it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Conventional collaboration works only in simple, controlled situations. In other situations we need to stretch.