Collaboration as Mindset: Installment 3

Brett,

I'm focusing on some of the areas of your post that I had immediate thoughts on.

In your reply and within the 'Mechanics' section, you said the following regarding the scenario I painted in my original post:

This is not an impossible scenario to overcome, but it would require explicit negotiation and radical transparency regarding intentions from both parties to avoid miscommunication and misunderstanding.

I agree that the scenario is not impossible to overcome and that explicit negotiation would be required in advance to the extent possible to provide decision making frameworks for the Executive to use. I'm wondering though if that would be enough or if even with the most explicit agreements and transparency (defined as symmetric visibility into decisions that executive makes by both organizations?) it would work. The problem is that it seems inevitable that one of the parties will ultimately feel disadvantaged by a decision made by the Executive. Perhaps what is needed in addition is a formalized conflict resolution process that will split value when that value is challenged as contravening the agreements. I wonder if the costs of such a conflict resolution system could be borne by the organizations in smaller scale collaborations as it would certainly increase the cost of collaboration. There's also the question of whether such a process should remain between the collaborators or if it should involve a neutral third party. If the latter, one might want to preclude any formal legal actions as part of the process given their (as you point out) adversarial nature.

In the 'Marketplace' section of your reply you say:

Also, does the market being served, whether by you, or potential competitor, still result in a net-gain for society? (i.e., making government more efficient, reducing industrial waste, innovating higher education, etc?) If so, one can take more comfort in a mindset of collaboration, because even if you don't win, or you win less, good things are happening. However, if no meaning is derived or good produced as a result of your participation in an industry other than personal financial wealth-creation and general increases in efficiency, there are no logical structures to encourage collaboration.

I'm not sure the evidence of past successful collaborations bears this last point out. It is possible to list several successful collaborative ventures such as joint research and development ventures, co-authorship of works by multiple authors, or even collaborative management of natural resources that are based entirely on selfish aims by the collaborators alone. The key to these collaborations is the fact that the parties do not possess something alone that they do together. I think that setting "net-gain for society" as a necessary condition for collaborations goes against cases we've seen in the past. That said, I think that having a gain that credibly extends beyond and in addition to personal benefits likely does make the collaborators more likely to succeed.

In the 'Mindsets' piece of your reply, you say:

If both parties operate with the assumption that their counterpart will in bad-faith exploit a weakness in the collaborative arrangement, it will usually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ask any attorney about why this mindset is important and they'll tell you that it's because although participants don't want to think about it at the beginning there is a high likelihood that any partnership will end or that one or all of the participants will have grievances against one another that cannot be resolved with simple discussions. The way this has been presented to me is that the "business people" want to just get the deal done to gain the benefits but that they don't carefully think about the ramifications if things don't go as planned.

All that said, I think that you're right that if the partners start with bad-faith as assumed this can set the collaboration up for failure by sowing the seeds of difference as opposed to commonality. More importantly, it can reduce the creativity with which the participants come to the entire negotiation process. One approach to reducing this "bad actor contamination" (not removing it) that is often taken is to have representatives (often attorneys) and not the actual participants negotiate such that any of those bad actor assumptions are held by people who will NOT be co-creating within the collaboration.

How else can we look at this "bad actor" mindset when we have the reality that enables people to feel that they can comfortably invest themselves and their resources into a collaboration? Assuming that all other participants will act to maximize collective benefits (within and beyond the collaboration) isn't realistic to me as it seems to beg for free riding.