Fundamental collaboration

It struck me yesterday that collaboration in the sense of working cooperatively with other people, a lot of other people, is essential to our existence as a species. Imagine living without any help from other people. No one to pick up the other end of the sofa and help you move it to the other side of the room. No one to help you fold a king size flat sheet. No one to grow your vegetables, to fix your car, heck no one to build you a car! It's impossible, we can't imagine it. Not even hermit monks on the side of a mountain in Tibet live without the assistance of someone to bring them food once in a while. So, it seems logical that since collaboration is one of the fundamental skills that ensures we stick around in the bio-sphere, that we know how to do it. That our sensory systems are actually tuned to other people and their response to us on a very broad band.

But we don't seem to be aware of this in most of our communication. We act as if talking or writing things down, maybe showing a picture, is all we have to work with.

I am still amazed at the growth of teleconferencing and web conferencing. It's like turning all the lights off and then asking a bunch of meeting attendees what's on the wall. We can only guess at most of it. We communicate with each other much more effectively through body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, smell apparently, than we do by what we say. But we don't trust the information that comes in on these channels. Don't value it enough.

I was also pondering on how few tools for promoting authentic communication are permitted in a typical business setting. We are limited most of the time to meeting in sterile rooms with tables and not very comfortable chairs. Some rooms don't even have natural light and they are mostly too hot or too cold, rarely just right. The facilitator is expected to work exclusively with hearing and sight. Bringing the rest of the senses onto the agenda is greeted with suspicion and embarrassment. No item 3. "Stand up and shake out the tension". Attendees want to stay safely seated behind the comfortable barrier of a table top.

So, we try to do our best work in a setting that automatically induces defensive behavior in pretty well everyone, without engaging any parts of the body below the chin, and with a preexisting tendency to dismiss any information that comes to us as a feeling, a hunch. We design interesting and engaging ways to get individuals to speak, and we help organize what they say into some kind of order, but we don't suggest validating our decisions with muscle testing, or intuitive knowing. We rarely support the energy of the group in a meaningful way. We don't get the group in a circle on the floor to promote a sense of community. We don't suggest a five minute silent meditation to clear the mind. It's all a bit too L.A. for us Canadians.

Too bad! I vote we start a movement.