“In a complex world the optimal social form is the multi-organizational network and emergent practices must be continuously developed through cooperation. In such an environment, the lone expert is at a disadvantage. He or she cannot learn and adapt as fast as a cooperative network.” – Harold Jarche
Read more at Life in Perpetual Beta.
It’s been an amazing year in the cooperation business. We’ve worked with 500 high school honor students in Northwest Florida to help craft a shared vision of the purpose of their future education. We’ve collaborated with Frog Design and the Well Project to help women from all over the world tell their stories of advocacy for women with HIV. Studying patterns of dialogue in groups of interns at the University of Alberta’s School of Medicine, we’ve modeled how innovative teaching styles can help create more engaged students and better doctors. We’ve helped Jamaican Americans develop empathy for what led so many to leave Jamaica decades ago. We’ve co-created an identity and organizational structure for Students United, an inter-university group of social innovators from Georgetown, Tufts and Johns Hopkins currently working on East African famine. We’ve designed and built an integrated web platform for the Restorative Justice Project to support the emergence of identity and core narrative in diverse communities of practice. We’ve helped the Terry College of Business at UGA listen to their MBA students and transform narrative into meaning and action. And we’ve started a collaboration with the Power of Half to help at risk students in Atlanta Public Schools put pain into words and in the process find self-empowerment. I can hardly wait for the new year.
via London Creative Labs.
There is ample (and growing) evidence that human cognitive limitations, some of which may be caused by mismatches between the EEA (the environment of evolutionary adaptation) and today, can lead to information overload conditions that invoke heuristics and biases that prevent us from reaching our goals – in our particular context, cooperation and the coordination of collective action. What if we could design smart tools for augmented cognition (AugCog) that would adapt to our shortcomings and make coordination more likely? Check out Wired articles on DARPA’s AugCog efforts here and here and information about the Augmented Cognition International Society here.
There’s been lot’s of talk lately about John Maeda‘s rocky relationship with the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was appointed president in 2007. Digital maven Maeda is not someone that the more “analog” institution understands well, and recently he has even suffered a faculty vote of no confidence. Now, I have a certain amount of respect for someone like Maeda who has the courage to attempt such transformational change, and I grow increasingly worried about the inability for academics to adjust to the realities of the earth moving beneath their feet. So, the no confidence vote holds little import for me except possibly as an indication that Maeda is doing his job.
What is more interesting is how Maeda is learning from the experience. He seems to now recognize that digital media cannot be a substitute for the hard work of building relationships.
“People don’t want more messages; they want more interactions. There’s no perfect memo where you can press send and get connected, or Facebook group you can join to be committed.”
This got me thinking about connections to some of my own work, which recently, in large part, has focused on the environmental mismatch between modern society and our evolved cognitive capacities. Our brains evolved in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers, characterized by relatively dense, high bandwidth relationships. Increasingly, however, we find ourselves living in fragmented, unequally distributed social networks, characterized more by low bandwidth weak ties. This is not a prescription for trust, loyalty and cooperation.
So, in some respects, Maeda is just another victim of our natural history, a human being dealing with the messy business of dealing with other human beings. But his intuition is exactly correct. If you want to be an individual, or a business, or an institution with social significance, you have to create high bandwidth relationships with your constituencies. And this entails hard work and this takes time. You have to get your hands dirty.
Ethan Zuckerman‘s recent piece on the realities of overcoming political polarization weighs in on the recent New York Times poll that found that Americans are in a particularly pessimistic mood about the future. Zuckerman seems to agree with Fareed Zakaria, who places the blame for our declining prominence on the world stage (and thus the declining opinion about our future), on the increasingly polarized political discourse and the seeming impossibility for compromise. He dissects the question of bias that each side in American politics constantly accuses the other of suffering from, pointing out that a conversation about bias (at least a productive one) is impossible given the extent to which the sides disagree about definitions of consensus, deviance and controversy. And questions the value of “facts” in bringing the parties to a shared table. Brilliant.
“Is America on the wrong track? Are things getting better or worse? Has our political culture become so toxic that compromise is no longer possible? These aren’t questions we can answer through marshaling collections of facts. They’re questions that force us to tell stories about our values, to listen to the stories our fellow citizens are telling, and to seek the elusive common ground that allows us to have a functional society.”
Values are where the action starts. Zuckerman asks, “If the path that leads from polarization towards common ground is rooted in understanding values as well as facts, we’ve got a challenge – how do we start listening to the needs, wants and aspirations of people who view the world differently?” His conclusion relies on well-crafted narrative. Not only telling stories of our own, but surely more importantly, listening to the stories of others, taking for granted that they are valid expressions of the lives led by the storytellers. Yes! Surely we can agree that the stories that people tell are a more reliable reflection of their identity than any sort of “objective,” fact-generating analysis. Maybe this exercise doesn’t lead us all to substantive agreement on the issues, but if it might create a glimmer of empathy and forestall discounting out-of-hand value laden views that are distinct from our own, that would be an excellent start.
Seth Godin‘s latest “bite-sized,” one-sitting serving, Poke the Box, does what Godin does best – deliver a simple idea or two in a very direct, accessible way. This time, its the well-worn, but nevertheless important, idea that much of success in life is contingent on showing up and getting started. Get yourself to work and say “Go!”
Godin updates this advice with the assertion that the role of intermediaries is becoming less and less important, leaving more of the onus on innovators and increasing the importance of initiative. He puts his money where his mouth is by publishing his book through the Domino Project, a collaboration with Amazon that seeks to reduce the influence of publisher and distributor middlemen in the publishing industry. I enjoyed reading Poke the Box – its nice to be confronted with a couple of sticky ideas in return for an hour or two of reading. Thanks to David Cannon and Tod Martin at Unboundary for passing on a copy.
Most of us, somewhere back in the receding memories of our education, were exposed to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, that iconic game theoretic formulation that introduced us to the idea of a public good. If we learned this in an economics class, we were led to believe that cooperation was not possible in the long-term and that life was “red in tooth and claw” and necessarily “nasty, brutish, and short,” at least without the intervention of privatization or external regulation, the Hobbesian notion the codification of which was partially responsible for John Nash’s Nobel Prize. But many of us looked around with worried looks and whispered amongst ourselves because we knew that this was not consistent with how we saw people behave in the real world.
Now, we didn’t remain idealistic for long. You don’t have to look very far to find plenty of uncooperative, selfish, out-only-for-themselves people living amongst us who know the wisdom of prosociality. And in our most honest moments, we could admit that we are sometimes guilty of selfishness ourselves. But we clung to the hope that we might be able to create conditions under which the best of people might emerge, where their natural tendency to cooperate would be promoted.
Recently, we have found redemption. In 2009, Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. She has devoted her career to studying the conditions under which the tragedy of the commons is averted; conditions that allow groups to manage shared resources for themselves; conditions, in short, that promote collective action. Lin’s scholarship is daunting by itself, and the broader literature on collective action and public goods larger still, but at a recent conference, I had the good fortune to spend time with David Sloan Wilson, the prominent evolutionary biologist, who has taken notice of Lin’s work and is integrating it with his own. As David pointed out in our discussions, Lin’s decades of field work, in many different contexts, can be boiled down to eight essential ingredients, a “recipe,” if you will, for collective action:
Clearly Defined Boundaries. The identity of the group and its rights to the common resource must be clearly delineated.
Proportional Equivalence between Benefits and Costs. Members of the group must negotiate a system that rewards members for their contributions. High status and other disproportionate benefits must be earned.
Collective-Choice Arrangements. Group members must be able to create their own rules and make their own decisions by consensus. People hate being told what to do but will work hard for group goals that they have agreed upon.
Monitoring. Managing a commons is inherently vulnerable to free-riding and active exploitation. Unless these locally advantageous strategies can be detected at relatively low cost, the tragedy of the commons will occur.
Graduated Sanctions. Transgressions need not require heavy-handed punishment, at least initially. Often gossip or a gentle reminder is sufficient, but more severe forms of punishment must also be waiting in the wings for use when necessary.
Conflict Resolution Mechanisms. It must be possible to resolve conflicts quickly and in ways that are perceived as fair by members of the group.
Minimal Recognition of Rights to Organize. Groups must have the authority to manage their own affairs. Externally imposed rules are unlikely to be adapted to local circumstances and violate Ingredient Three.
Small, Multi-Layer Groups. For groups that are part of larger social systems, there must be nested enterprises. The previous ingredients work best in relatively small groups. Society at a larger scale must be multicellular, with groups interacting with groups, often in multiple layers.
(Adapted from David’s blog, Evolution for Everyone, at http://scienceblogs.com/evolution). The extent of the literature demonstrating the applicability of these ingredients to all sorts of groups is overwhelming and some careful thought will reveal that they apply to most, if not all, of the social groups we encounter. But don’t take my word for it, David is putting Lin’s recipe into action.
In the Binghamton Neighborhood Project, (http://bnp.binghamton.edu), David is putting social science theory to work, collaborating with community partners to improve human welfare, one neighborhood at a time. The collaboration helps community groups coalesce around Lin’s principles in a way that greatly enhances the likelihood that neighborhoods will develop a sense of shared destiny and will work together to make life better for everyone. The possibilities are numerous, but their current focus is on what they call the “Design Your Own Park” project which is empowering neighborhood groups to turn vacant lots and neglected spaces into public parks of their own design. Beyond the obvious benefits of safe, outdoor play spaces, and venues for neighborhood events, the planning process requires broad-scale interaction and on-going shared responsibility within a framework that produces the social capital so critical for collective action, but so often missing from the neighborhoods in which we live. Nobel-Prize-quality theory meets boots-on-the-ground practice. Imagine that.
