Never work alone
www.nesta.org.uk/blog/never-work-alone/
www.nesta.org.uk/blog/never-work-alone/
Ashinaga and Tenaga are famous collaborators from Japanese folklore. Ashinaga had extremely long legs while Tenaga had extremely long arms. They worked together as a team to catch fish by the seashore. In order to do this Tenaga climbs onto the back of Ashinaga who then wades out into the shorewaters, staying above water with his long legs, while Tenaga uses his long arms to grab fish from his partner's back. Alone they are weak and fishing is all but impossible, but together the combination of their strengths and the neutralising of their weaknesses makes them far better together.
This rather unusual pairing illustrates what has been long understood but too frequently expressed and implemented, namely that the pair is the primary creative or productive unit. Other familiar examples of small creative groupings include the likes of Lennon and McCartney with their prolific songwriting, and Watson, Crick and Franklin with their shared discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.
Despite our individualistic bias of western culture, some organisations such as Menlo Innovations always work in pairs. They have learned teamwork is not optional and embraced the idea that people work in pairs every day, switching their partners every five days and sometimes sooner. They have realised this approach creates energy and enthusiasm that is incredibly powerful and productive.
“The pair is the primary creative unit - at its heart, the creative process itself is about a push and pull between two entities, two cultures or traditions, or two people, or even a single person and the voice inside her head.”
Joshua Wolf Shenk
The reason why this type of collaboration is not more common is because of the knowledge illusion, a term coined by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernback, which shows that we usually fail to distinguish the knowledge inside our heads from the knowledge outside it.
In fact the average brain holds only 1GB of data – a tiny amount! Therefore we only remember what they have to. What matters more than having actual knowledge is having access to it instead through other people, and increasingly enabled through tools such as the internet.
So real intelligence is not a personal attribute, rather it is a social phenomenon.
“Most knowledge actually resides with other people yet we usually fail to distinguish the knowledge inside our heads from the knowledge outside it.”
Rebecca Lawson
The fact that intelligence is increasingly an attribute of groups has inspired the launch of a new Centre for Collective Intelligence by Nesta, that seeks to investigate the opportunities and challenges of more collaborative working at scale.
To launch the centre, it hosted a busy and wide ranging event earlier last week entitled ‘Designing Collective Intelligence: mobilising humans and machines to address social needs’. Examples of collective intelligence that were showcased at the event included Zooniverse (a longstanding and hugely successful citizen science community), The Open Seventeen (crowdsourcing initiative in response to the 17 UN sustainable development goals) and the CrowdLaw Manifesto (a new initiative to collectively build better government policies). Another example includes Nesta’s own experiment to institutionalise serendipity via random pairing of people in coffee breaks with encouraging results.
The event inevitably generated more questions than answers and here are three that stayed with me in particular following the discussions at the event:
These questions are of particular interest to me right now given that I’ve recently stepped down from my role as Managing Director and Co-Founder of 100%Open, which has been a lively and productive partnership with my fellow co-founder and the whole team that joined us on that journey over the past decade.
During that time we learned that collective intelligence comes from the power of working alone together. In summary the essence of smart groups is to ensure equal and honest participation and to engineer independence between perspectives as best as possible. As I move on to pastures new, I am now on the look out for long armed partners that can complement my long legs so that we can go fishing together.
And as our political, social, economic and business models become more complex and connected we need to figure out new collaboration combinations and collective intelligence tools. In other words, to misquote another great songwriting duo, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and adapting their song made famous on the terrace’s of Liverpool football club; in the near future “you’ll never work alone.”
Roland Harwood is co-founder of multi-award winning open innovation agency 100%Open. He is also a compulsive connector, lapsed physicist, father of 3, failed astronaut, piano player, and now working on a new venture that is due to launch in early 2019.
