David Rock, SCARF, And The 3Cs of Business Culture

David Rock is the director of the Neuroleadership Institute, and he explains his acronym SCARF in this interview.

Adam Bryant, NeuroLeadership Institute’s Chief, on Shared Goals

Bryant:So what does the SCARF acronym stand for?

Rock: It stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness.

Status is literally your perception of where you are in the pecking order around you, and it’s a feeling of being better than or worse than others. We feel uncomfortable until we work out our status with people. We are more comfortable and we’re more effective when there’s a clear status arrangement between people. When we feel a higher status, we get a slight reward. When we feel lower status, we get a strong threat. The challenge is that if somebody continuously fights for high status, all the other people around them might be getting a strong threat response.

One of the challenges with management is you’ve got very smart people who are high status, and they like to feel smart. They give lots of feedback to everyone else about what they should be doing better, and other people take that as a threat. People react to a performance review as if someone is saying your life is in danger. And the pushback is real. People will push back so intensely because they experience a strong nonconscious threat response. It’s the same mechanism that makes people argue to be right even when they know they’re wrong.

Certainty is a constant drive for the brain. We saw this with Hurricane Sandy. The feeling of uncertainty feels like pain, when you can’t predict when the lights will come back on and you’re holding multiple possible futures in your head. That turns out to be cognitively exhausting. And the more we can predict the future, the more rewarded we feel. The less we can predict the future, the more threatened we feel. As soon as any ambiguity arises in even a very simple activity, we get a threat response. So we are driven to create certainty.

This is challenging in the context of work. When the boss walks in the room, they create a status threat, but they also create a certainty threat because they often create all sorts of change, all sorts of chaos, and you don’t know what’s coming next. But many organizations are taking an open-book-management approach, making all their financials available to everyone. I think there’s a lot of power in increasing people’s sense of certainty and reducing the inherent uncertainty that can happen in an organization.

The third one is autonomy, which is a sense of control. It’s similar to certainty, but it’s different. Certainty is prediction. Autonomy is control. And it’s a very important thing for us to feel a sense of control, so much so that a small stress where you have no control generally is in fact a very big stress. When autonomy goes down, it’s a strong threat. So when the boss walks in the room, they’ve got the final say, so suddenly your autonomy goes down. So now we’re three for three with just the boss walking in the room.

Let’s shift to relatedness. We make a decision about each person we interact with that impacts basic processing and many other things. And the decision we make about everyone is, “Are you in my ‘in’ group or in my ‘out’ group?’” If you decide that I’m in your “in” group, you process what I’m saying using the same brain networks as thinking your own thoughts. If you decide I’m in your “out” group, you use a totally different brain network. So the very level of unconscious perception has a huge impact based on this decision of: “Is this person similar to me? Are they on my team? Do we have shared goals, or are they in my out group?”

This is the neurobiology of trust in a sense, but also of teamwork and collaboration. It feels good to be with “in” group members. But we basically treat everyone as foe until proven otherwise, with the exception of really attractive people or if you’ve had a moderate amount to drink.

The important question this raises is, “How do we create an ‘in’ group?” And the research is really clear. If you can create shared goals among people, you can create quite a strong “in” group quite quickly. When you can find a shared goal, you turn an “out” group” into an “in” group. Unless a leader creates shared goals across an organization, an organization will be a series of silos. That’s the inherent way that we live. We naturally think in small groups.

The final one is fairness, and it’s very fundamental. A fair exchange of anything is intrinsically rewarding. An unfair exchange of anything is intrinsically threatening — and not just threatening, but very intensely threatening. So you can give someone $20 in a study and they can be really angry at you, rather than happy, because someone else got $40.

So these are the five domains of SCARF, and they are playing out in every situation, every interaction.

When a leader walks in the room, everyone else’s status goes down, everyone’s certainty goes down, everyone’s autonomy goes down. The relatedness to the leader goes down. And often fairness will go down in particular just because leaders are paid so much more money for what can look to others like less work. So what you see in general situations at work is people feeling a threat in all five domains, just due to their boss’s existence.

A smart boss will notice this and do all sorts of things to try to fix it. Some bosses will try to play down their status. A smart boss will work on certainty and make sure they’re establishing clear expectations. That really helps people. That also helps with autonomy, when you have really clear expectations.

You can’t do much about fairness. You can be more transparent. That will help fairness, but leaders are going to be paid more money for what looks to some people like less work. People will probably think it’s unfair.

I think the domain where leaders can have the biggest impact is relatedness. Many people have had a boss they really wanted to work hard for because they respected them. It doesn’t have to be love, but it’s a sense of respect. And I think that those bosses have worked hard to have a sense of relatedness with people, which comes from having shared goals and making sure there’s a feeling of being on the same team, not a sense of “us” and “them.”

SCARF is a useful model for thinking through the effects of social threats and rewards.

Turning it around, we do best in a work environment of high status, high certainty, high autonomy, high relatedness, and high fairness. Anything less is a tradeoff. But company cultures and individuals’ behavior  often move the needle the wrong way: by threats instead of rewards, and by limiting the various factors in SCARF.

I make a distinction in my work between three kinds of companies: cooperative, collaborative, and competitive. (I’m writing a report at GigaOM Research related to that, right now, in which I lay out the 3C model of business psychodynamics.)

My bet is that collaborative companies — strongly biased toward fast-and-loose networks built on fluid personal relationships, or ‘connectives’ — are a more likely petri dish for high SCARF culture. Basically, the context likely to provide the lowest social stress, at least for those who are temperamentally inclined for a work environment based primarily on many weak ties, voluntarily forged.

Competitive cultures, where dominance by high status individuals leads to high stress and lower SCARF for the rest, sit at the other extreme of social stress, where our psychological groundedness is a hazard in a zero sum game. These are environments more like cats fighting in a gunny sack than social systems, at least from my experience.

And collaborative cultures, where the individual is supposed to find meaning from membership in a collective with shared long-term goals defined by an elite, are better that outright competitive cultures on the SCARF measure, but perhaps require too much loss of autonomy, and too much acceptance of the rigid and inflexible processes and policies of a slow-and-tight organization. These are work environments characterized by imposed strong ties, where social connection by choice is considered a leisure time activity, and pursuing your own professional direction is fine so long as it lines up with the strategic interests of the business. A workplace that’s geared to the elite, and the in crowd.

24 March 2013 15 Permalink

Getting To Trust: Better Swift Than Deep

Venessa Miemis is trying to get a group of ‘change agents’ to collaborate, and is finding it hard going:

Venessa Miemis, How Will We Collaborate if We Can’t Trust Each Other?

The next few years are going to be defined by a culture of learning and interactivity that involves more trust, and so naturally, more risk. If we’re going to go beyond just sharing links with each other to actually *helping* each other, working together, experimenting, prototyping, and adapting to changing circumstances, *we* have to first change in order to make that possible.

I’m in the process of experimenting with this firsthand, bringing people together into an online collaboratory space, and I’ll admit – it’s not easy. We’ve got a group of ‘change agents’ who want to do things together, to form ad-hoc teams around short-term projects, make something cool happen and improve our world and our lives — but how to begin?

Each of us is a free agent, delicately riding the edge of chaos and uncertainty as we try to pave our own path. Each of us likes the sound of a peer-to-peer culture, a transition from scarcity to abundance, a move from a transactional economy to a relational economy (ht jerry michalski), and a redefinition of value and wealth. Each of us sees the promise of a new way of working, living, and Being.

And yet there is still fear.

Are you gonna steal my idea? Are you gonna follow through with your commitments? Are you gonna take the credit? Am I gonna get screwed — yet again?

My question to you is: How do we transcend this, surrender, and take the next leap of faith?

(ponder it)

Assuming you are curious enough about the possibility to find out how it could work, what is the critical component that’ll inspire you to jump?

For me, it all comes down to trust.

Not just blind trust in everyone else, but trust in myself and a commitment to move past fear and into action. Lead by example and see who wants to come with me. Become aware of who I’m connected to and choosing carefully with whom I want to build things. Take small risks together so we can gain momentum. Start having some Collective Epic Wins.

I think Venessa is trying to do something that’s very hard: she’s trying to get a group to form a collective, with a shared set of principles and shared goals. And she’s right. To get there you have to build deep trust: a polite way to say that the folks in the collective have to sort out the politics involved. In general that can take months, even when the participants share a great deal in common in education, background, and temperament.

But why form a collective? As she points out, it’s risky. If you want to build things, you can define a small project to test some ideas, and form a Hollywood-style project team to accomplish it. Instead of trying to collaborate on a big, wholly integrated vision of the future — where everything has to be discussed and agreed on before the first thing gets done — just cooperate on something fast, small, and low risk.

The way of the future is cooperation, not collaboration.

Among other reasons cooperation merely requires swift trust, a well-researched human universal. People are capable in some circumstances of relaxing their general desire to establish deep trust — that time-consuming, political practice —and will simply adopt a role in a project, and suspend their disbelief about other’s motives, etc. This is a way to get folks to suspend their innate concerns about trust and control. In these contexts, people start with the presumption that the others in the project are professionals and that everyone will focus on doing their jobs as best as the can. A lot of communication is needed to keep it all working, but much less than in deep trust organizations, like the conventional enterprise.

This is how freelancers generally work, and it’s the way that cities work.

But Venessa and her friends are involved in forming a collective, and there is no short cut for them. They will need to build deep trust, and establish processes and practices, and politics to manage them.

My recommendation to Venessa was and still is to take the short cut, though. Define some constrained projects, with more modest goals and defined time frames, and work on them with a few others. It might lead to deep trust, but even if it doesn’t you can still be working, making headway, and maybe some money, too.

Me, I’m trying to work on a few interesting projects with some smart people, but I am not pushing them into one group and trying to create a way that all of us can be involved in everything. I’m going to work with Teresa DiCairano of Intervista on ‘ambient innovation’, which is our term for social, bottom-up innovation. I’m going to work with Claude Théoret of Nexalogy exploring the science underlying social networks, and trying to make that more accessible to the average person. And I am going to push ahead with my analysis in work media — the use of streaming social media tools in the enterprise — and I will be pulling a few others into that project with me, too. But these will be three discrete projects, with non-overlapping groups of participants. I am not making everything, everything.

I am trying to remain liquid, loosely connected to others, heading the same general direction. I am specifically not trying to solidify relationships — build deep trust — before getting something done with others.

So, my general recommendation is that people should favor loose connectives — social networks with less tight ties — that rely only on swift trust. If and when you establish deep trust with individuals, perhaps during short-term, swift trust-based projects, then perhaps your can form a collective, where the principles shared common, long-term purpose.

But such collectives are not a higher form of human solidarity that we should aspire to, and are not what we have to build in order to get big things done. On the contrary. An increasing proportion of professional work is being performed by freelancers, who live in a short-term project based economy. Why should I have to agree on a long term strategic vision about the future of work media just to work with other researchers on the state of that industry, for example? Or to take the example of the city, all the stores on Main Street do not have to agree to not compete with each other, or to pool their profits, or even to paint their storefronts the same color.

The costs of deep trust are too high, in general, for what they return. This is one reason that work is changing so quickly. Companies are loosening their hold on employees, providing them more autonomy, relaxing the requirements for deep trust: becoming more like cities and less like traditional armies, with everyone is made to march in step, and pointed in the same direction, all the time.

9 January 2012 101 Permalink

No Future To Risk: Why Social Unrest Is Inevitable

Nicholas Kulish digs into the rise of civil unrest in recent months, and finds decentralized, bottom-up, and spontaneous resistance to established order, even those parts of the establishment that theoretically represent the interests of ‘the people’, like political parties and unions:

Nicholas Kulish, As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe

Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.

In that sense, the protest movements in democracies are not altogether unlike those that have rocked authoritarian governments this year, toppling longtime leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Protesters have created their own political space online that is chilly, sometimes openly hostile, toward traditional institutions of the elite.

The critical mass of wiki and mapping tools, video and social networking sites, the communal news wire of Twitter and the ease of donations afforded by sites like PayPal makes coalitions of like-minded individuals instantly viable.

“You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,” said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.”

Yonatan Levi, 26, called the tent cities that sprang up in Israel “a beautiful anarchy.” There were leaderless discussion circles like Internet chat rooms, governed, he said, by “emoticon” hand gestures like crossed forearms to signal disagreement with the latest speaker, hands held up and wiggling in the air for agreement — the same hand signs used in public assemblies in Spain. There were free lessons and food, based on the Internet conviction that everything should be available without charge.

Someone had to step in, Mr. Levi said, because “the political system has abandoned its citizens.”

The rising disillusionment comes 20 years after what was celebrated as democratic capitalism’s final victory over communism and dictatorship.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, a consensus emerged that liberal economics combined with democratic institutions represented the only path forward. That consensus, championed by scholars like Francis Fukuyama in his book “The End of History and the Last Man,” has been shaken if not broken by a seemingly endless succession of crises — the Asian financial collapse of 1997, the Internet bubble that burst in 2000, the subprime crisis of 2007-8 and the continuing European and American debt crisis — and the seeming inability of policy makers to deal with them or cushion their people from the shocks.

Frustrated voters are not agitating for a dictator to take over. But they say they do not know where to turn at a time when political choices of the cold war era seem hollow. “Even when capitalism fell into its worst crisis since the 1920s there was no viable alternative vision,” said the British left-wing author Owen Jones.

Protests in Britain exploded into lawlessness last month. Rampaging youths smashed store windows and set fires in London and beyond, using communication systems like BlackBerry Messenger to evade the police. They had savvy and technology, Mr. Jones said, but lacked a belief that the political system represented their interests. They also lacked hope.

“The young people who took part in the riots didn’t feel they had a future to risk,” he said.

I will leave aside the political and economic motivations of the folks involved in these anti-establishment movements worldwide (if you’d like my views on that side of things, take a look at Underpaid Genius). However, as a student of social tools it is obvious to me that liquid media are so low-cost, ubiquitous, and social, that resistance movements will take on the shape of the tools that inform them.

And it also seems likely that the organizations that these activists oppose won’t adopt social tools to rally their supporters. They will use conventional media and communications. The establishment organizations are massively solid, and threatened by the apparently anarchic resistance that is popping up. But it will be like a bear trying to fight a swarm of bees.

Again, leaving aside my feelings of whether the resistance is justified, and simply accepting the premise that these protesters will continue their actions until dramatic changes take place, it seems obvious to me that this unrest will continue and it will grow.

Why? Liquid media provides a matrix in which the disaffected can easily come together around short-term and unmanaged activities. These activists don’t have to share long-term goals, pull together a complete platform, grow a large base of financial supporters, or even collate a list of all the participants of the action. There is no control, there is no organizing committee, there is no leader. This is loose alignment: cooperation.

These are the same reasons that business is moving toward a rōnin economy, based around short-term projects, leveraging freelancers and outsourced work groups. The efficiencies that arise when business politics are put aside and people simply focus on contributing to the immediate and clear-cut goals of a near-term project. I don’t have to agree with the long-term strategic goals of AOL, for example, if I come aboard for a short-term engagement. We just have to agree on highly constrained tasks for the project, and then go our own ways a few weeks or months later. I’m simply cooperating, while full-time employees of AOL have to get into line on the long-term strategy there: they have to join the collective, and collaborate consistently and over time.

So, we can expect that both sorts of pressures will impact our society. On one hand, organizations see the benefits arising using the rōnin workforce in short term projects. And on the other, the realm of social discourse is moving past talking toward outright civil unrest, leveraging the same sorts of efficiencies latent in loose cooperation.

Expect to see civil unrest increasing, directly in parallel with the adoption of these open social tools, and as the world slides into a more liquid configuration.

28 September 2011 224 Permalink

The Meaning Of Work, Connectives, And Swift Trust

I attended a truly great presentation earlier this week, where Simon Sinek spoke. Sinek is the author of Start With Why, and he gave a casual, rambling, and still deeply inspiring talk about, among other things, how hard it is for businesses to be purpose driven. I won’t steal too much of his pitch, except to restate some of his themes.

Traditionally, businesses that are great to work for are centered on ‘why’ — their reason to exist — which makes the how and what — processes and products — easier to figure out, makes them make sense. And working in such companies makes people happy. In fact,  companies that have forgotten — or never had — a reason to exist other to make money or to employ the founders are not great places to work, and aside from the basics of getting a paycheck, don’t make their employees happy.

But what about freelancers, or teams that come together for a given project and then disband? How does freelance work line up with finding what I call ‘the meaning of work’, the purpose behind the time and effort we pour into our work lives.

Speaking personally, I am a long-time freelancer, and I work with a wide variety of clients. But I am motivated to find meaning for my actions through work (as well as extra-work activities), and I select projects based on how they line up with my abiding motivations.

For example, I am a strong advocate for the use of social tools, and the thinking behind that is deeply grounded in the belief that creating more social connection is a positive benefit to all those that participate, and that social tools are the best hope we have to change the world, and steer it away from destructive political, financial, and economic systems.

So for me, working with a start up that is developing a social calendering app, for example, is not just work. It’s not just making bricks. it’s part of my calling. I am focused on the outcome, the social revolution, that has at least 10 or 20 more years to run. I am involved in building a new platform for society that will last a thousand years.

But I am still involved in many projects, and so are many other people, who are pursuing their own ends, perhaps ends that are unrelated to mine.

So this begs the question: Can individuals — including people working in companies — come together on ad hoc projects, projects of limited duration, and still be aligned with their meaning for work?

I read an instructive piece recently, that touches on this:

Neil Perkin, The Rise Of Talent Networks

When a new agency called Co: launched this month in New York, a lot of people in the industry seemed to sit up and take notice. The reason had less to do with the fact that four senior execs had left their jobs at JWT, BBH, Wolff Olins to venture out on their own, and more to do with the fact that Co: seemed like a start-up with a difference. The name deliberately evokes their business model of co-creation, collaboration and co-venturing, of a small, agile organisational hub that works with and draws from a list of 40 agencies, businesses and consultancies that are specialists in particular services ranging from digital marketing, to PR, Social Media, Design, technology, gaming, events and media. There’s even a venture capitalist firm amongst the network.

Part of the reason that this is so interesting is that it is symptomatic of a broader trend - the rise of talent networks. In the case of Co:, the founders describe the agency as a ‘brand studio’, likening it to a movie studio that pulls in talent to work on specific projects, facilitates a good result, and provides the environment and the infrastructure for effective collaboration. One of the founders, quoted in the New York Times, talked about how “teams are formed around individual client needs, and when those needs are satisfied, the team is dispersed”.

Relentless digitisation and the recession have combined to create an environment in which the value of much of what we have known is depreciating, and which increasingly requires a culture and a pace of innovation that is consistent with start-ups. Organisational value is shifting from protecting knowledge assets, to encouraging knowledge flow. In ‘We Think’, Charles Leadbetter said: “In the past you were what you owned. Now you are what you share.”. New models are springing up that follow a philosophy where access trumps ownership. Assets are increasingly about relationships.

[…]

Corporate down-sizing and technology have combined to create an influx of highly talented individuals into the market with the ready means to turn that talent into real value. There have always been freelancers of-course, but this is talent that is equipped with cheap, effective, readily available yet potentially transformational tools and technologies, and connected to inspiration, to opportunity, and to each other, like never before. It’s a world powered by ideas, enthusiasm, and know-how. But it is also a world powered by collaboration, supported by increasing numbers of co-working spaces and a whole raft of ‘unconference’ style meet-ups, events, and hack days that are both the originator for and a catalyst of innovation. The difference is that the number of people working in this way, equipped with the enterprise tools to enable it, means that perhaps for the first time, the possibility of a real ecosystem of talent networks operating at some scale has suddenly become viable.

Networks, whether of individuals or small firms, are naturally extremely efficient. You can select and partner with some of the best talent in the industry. You make use of the talent you need when you need it. And you don’t have to pay an overhead when you don’t. You benefit from a broad talent pool that brings diversity of thinking and ideas, yet is unencumbered by corporate habit or channeled thinking. And there are numerous pieces of research that prove the value of skill diversity in innovation.

Large organisations have a tendency to pull people into a vortex of internal focus. The smart ones are beginning to recognise that more flexible structures that allow them to interact with, learn from, and work with this external pool of talent will give them genuine competitive advantage. The smartest are structuring their businesses to be agile and flexible enough to allow collaboration of this kind to not be the exception, but the norm.

Impermanent teams operate as well as they do because of a well-researched social phenomenon, called swift trust:

Debra Meyerson, et al, Swift Trust and Temporary Groups

As an organizational form, temporary groups turn upside down traditional notions of organizing. Temporary groups often work on tasks with a high degree of complexity, yet they lack the formal structures that facilitate coordination and control (Thompson, I967). They depend on an elaborate body of collective knowledge and diverse skills, yet individuals have little time to sort out who knows precisely what. They often entail high-risk and high-stake outcomes, yet they seem to lack the normative structures and institutional safeguards that minimize the likelihood of things going wrong. Moreover, there isn’t time to engage in the usual forms of confidence-building activities that contribute to the development and maintenance of trust in more traditional enduring forms of organization. In these respects, temporary groups challenge our conventional understandings regarding the necessary or sufficient antecedents of effective organization.

These observations come together in a fascinating puzzle. Temporary systems exhibit behavior that presupposes trust, yet traditional sources of trust — familiarity, shared experience, reciprocal disclosure, threats and deterrents, fulfilled promises, and demonstrations of nonexploitation of vulnerability — are not obvious in such systems. ln this respect, temporary systems act as if trust were present, but their histories seem to preclude its development.

In the following discussion we argue that one way to resolve this puzzle is to look more closely at the properties of trust and of temporary systems. A closer look suggests that temporary groups and organizations are tied together by trust. but it is a form of trust that has some unusual properties. In other words, we propose that the trust that occurs in temporary systems is not simply conventional trust scaled down to brief encounters among small groups of strangers. There is some of that. But as we will show, the trust that unfolds in temporary systems is more accurately portrayed as a unique form of collective perception and relating that is capable of managing issues of vulnerability, uncertainty, risk, and expectations. These four issues become relevant immediately, as soon as the temporary system begins to form. We argue that all four issues can be managed by variations in trusting behavior, and if they are not managed, participants act more like a permanent crowd than a temporary system. It is the configuration of these variations in behavior that accounts for the unique form that trust assumes in temporary systems, a form that we call swift trust.

[…]

The characteristics of temporary systems, which have potential relevance
for the formation of trust, include the following:

1. Participants with diverse skills are assembled by a contractor to enact expertise they already possess.
2. Participants have limited history of working together.
3. Participants have limited prospects of working together again in the future.
4. Participants often are part of limited labor pools and overlapping networks.
5. Tasks are often complex and involve interdependent work.
6. Tasks have a deadline.
7. Assigned tasks are non-routine and not well understood.
8. Assigned tasks are consequential.
9. Continuous interrelating is required to produce an outcome.

To convert the individual expertise of strangers into interdependent work, when the nature of that interrelating and work is not obvious, people must reduce their uncertainty about one another through operations that resemble trust. Interdependent strangers faced with a deadline also face the need to handle issues of vulnerability and risk among themselves.

These techniques that resemble deep trust, but are lighter-weight and faster to adopt, can be used to quickly get down to business in an ad hoc team, and focus on doing what is needed to get done; instead of getting bogged down in actual trust development, which can take weeks or months to build.

I believe, along with Neil Perkin and the unnamed founder of Co:, that swift trust is becoming the default for creative work, and that we are all increasingly operating as if every activity we are involved in is impermanent. Increasingly, at least for most creatives, that is the case anyway. But some people, like the founders of Co: and me, are intentionally adopting the ad hoc project team as the form factor for all creative work.

Partly this is to take advantage of swift trust — where deep trust activities are deferred or completely put aside — and the team members operate in a social demilitarized zone, putting aside long-term obligations and politically-negotiated power arrangements. Instead, we join such teams and rapidly assume the role that fits us, people interact based on the nature of the roles that all members play. We suspend our disbelief and agree to trust within the confines of the groups narrowly defined goals.

And just as important, as a consequence of deferring the complex and involved discussions of personal purpose, every ad hoc team member can cast the project in terms of how it lines up with their personal meaning for work. The members do not need to collectively agree to a single shared reason for existence. That is shelved, since the team members will be going forward on their own life paths, as soon as the project is completed.

This reminds me of the recent discussion about cooperation and collaboration, and a great distinction between collaboratives and cooperatives by @shiftctrlesc:

cloudhead, Cooperation versus Collaboration

We often use these words interchangeably, but they represent fundamentally different ways of contributing to a group and each comes with its own dynamics and power structures that shape groups in different ways…

When collaborating, people work together (co-labor) on a single shared goal.
Like an orchestra which follows a script everyone has agreed upon and each musician plays their part not for its own sake but to help make something bigger.

When cooperating, people perform together (co-operate) while working on selfish yet common goals.
The logic here is “If you help me I’ll help you” and it allows for the spontaneous kind of participation that fuels peer-to-peer systems and distributed networks. If an orchestra is the sound of collaboration, then a drum circle is the sound of cooperation. 

For centuries collaboration has powered most of our society’s institutions.
This is true of everything from our schools to our governments where we have worked together through consensus to build systems of increasing complexity.

But today, cooperation is fuelling most of the disruptive innovations of our time.
In virtually every aspect of our culture, the old guard is being replaced by cooperative, self organizing, distributed systems.

Collectives collaborate. 
Collectives are part of the machinery of the previous era. They give priority to the group over the individual and encourage members to adopt a joint identity that unites them around their shared goal. 

Connectives cooperate.
A connective doesn’t give priority to the group or the individual but instead supports and encourages both simultaneously. There’s no shared sense of identity in a connective because each member is busy pursuing their own goals.

Collectives are breeding grounds for hierarchies and power struggles.
Even with the best intentions, collaboration often encourages pyramids of power and authority. The higher up the pyramid you are in a collective, the more freedom you have to carve out your own individual identity and direct the group’s efforts towards your own goals. The conductor is famous while the tuba player remains unknown. But if the tuba player gets up to leave someone needs to step in to replace her.

Connectives are self-organizing and self-sustaining.
No master architect, conductor, or blueprint is needed. You can join or leave a drum circle at any time and the beat goes on with or without you.

I would perhaps restate that When cooperating, people perform together (co-operate) while working on selfish yet not-conflicting goals. If I decide to accept a project with a new client, I don’t have to sign up to the motivations of their five-year plan, I just have to confirm that their five-year plan — if successful — would counter the basic tenets of the beliefs that form the foundation of my meaning for work. That’s what makes our association a connective, as @shiftctrlesc styles them.

Generally, people building social tools or trying to apply them are advocates for the same things I am: they want, at the least, to make work better for the folks doing it, and they believe, at least to some degree, that social tools can help.

On the other hand, I can’t cooperate with groups who’s long term goals are contrary with mine. For example, I would have a hard time consulting to the Tea Party, or a repressive government.

And the same principles apply to others, with the consequence that you can become deeply unhappy as a freelancer by working with companies that have antithetical purposes to yours. If you believe, for example, that building a strong community in your hometown is a central tenet of your worldview, it would be difficult to work for a company that was shutting down its facilities in your town and outsourcing the work to South America or Asia. However, if you are a Chilean eager to attract foreign currency to your country to build strong communities there, you might be fine working with that same company.

As swift trust and ad hoc project teams become the dominant form factor for working over the next few years, we will see the transformation of large businesses away from monolithic power and belief systems, to something much more of a mosiac. In  this not-too-distant future businesses may principally be organized around helping every employee find and achieve their personal meaning for work, instead of trying to indoctrinate workers to a corporate agenda.

Almost paradoxically, our longest-range personal goals may be best advanced by working in a succession of short-term, apparently unrelated projects, cooperating with others meandering in the same general direction as us, instead of joining a tightly-knit group with tightly-defined shared purpose. Living and working in loose and open connectives, not tight and closed collectives; like a city, not an army.

13 July 2011 28 Permalink