This is the eleventh article in the SUN series, a regular column in the business section of the Vancouver Sun, the cities largest daily newspaper. The introduction to this series is here.
Martin Luther King is attributed to have said that the ‘arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice.’
In business, and by implication society, it can be said that the arc of the innovative universe is long but bends towards collaboration.
In his book Non-zero, author Robert Wright uses aspects of game theory and the principles of evolution to demonstrate how the
historical movement of human progress involves at its heart an escalating increase in collaborative efforts.
historical movement of human progress involves at its heart an escalating increase in collaborative efforts.
From trade routes to the printed press to the internet, he details the ways in which we humans tend towards net positive sum outcomes as the internal will of our common humanity engages in an ongoing epic struggle with the concurrent instinct for fragmentation and zero-sum conflict.
It’s not so far a stretch to equate Reverend King’s moral arc with this movement beyond zero-sum competition. In a fractured world divided along various lines of state, ideology and religion, it’s becoming a moral imperative that we generate better and more beneficial ways to work together towards a sustainable future.
While the modern failure of socialist and communist societies confirm competition as a necessary ingredient for growth and innovation, we have also learned from recent events that competition alone produces gross inequality and even outright collapse.
As important as it is that each individual in an organization or society be given the freedom and opportunity to fully develop, we are in the end social creatures. We’re therefore, ultimately, at our best working in concert with one another. This isn’t a newsflash. The very purpose of an organization is to leverage collaboration otherwise we would all be entrepreneurs. The more pertinent question is how best to work together and what forms of governance best support a collaboration that is at once dynamic, innovative and sustainable.
Authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams capture the most recent innovative movements in their books Wikinomics and Macrowikinomics. Both books champion the growing trend towards information sharing, openness and mass collaboration.A shining example involved Goldcorp Inc. who, unable to locate new gold deposits, and besieged by high production costs and internal pressures, took the unparalleled risk of publishing its geological data and holding an open competition on the internet for any virtual prospector to provide best methods and estimates. Their half million dollars in total prize money reaped enough benefit to help transform a hundred million dollar operation into a nine billion dollar one.
Clearly such risks and openness are vulnerable to the dark side of human motivation. The leadership required to sustain such practices is unconventional by today’s standards and rarely found. A recent IBM study surveyed global CEO’s about the leadership qualities necessary to thrive in the information age and found that creativity, integrity and global thinking topped the list. It is an uncommon mixture but necessary to tolerate the speed and ambiguity that comes with transparent platforms and mass collaboration.
There are plenty of cynics and pessimists who would undermine this potential by their inability to see past conventional opinions and solutions, which is why we always seem to need prophets like Reverend King capable of seeing the trajectory of current circumstances rather than simply the limitations. Odds are a sustainable future will involve more collaboration, not less, and the visionaries that understand that are busy creating it as we speak.
