Today’s business world requires a great deal of collaboration. That’s especially true because technology is inevitably both intergroup and across groups and disciplines. Yet collaboration skills are very tough for people to learn. You'd think that teamwork, where people have shared values and objectives, would facilitate collaboration. But no, put people from two different divisions or groups together--and it can become a really painful task with a lot of argument.
Hugo Mercier of the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, has been looking at this issue all of his academic life. His conclusions are intriguing. Based on my own experience in a completely different context, he’s right on target.
In one of his earlier studies, Mercier and Dan Sperber looked closely at our human capacity for reasoning. Remember that collaboration is about reasoning through options and differences and coming to a workable joint decision. Team members walk into collaborative discussions with a lot of ideas. Typically, they're conclusions they've held for a long time. But for collaboration to take place, there must be a lot of joint reasoning. As you know, however, when you get together to collaborate on something, most everyone already has their own conclusion to the problem. Their reasoning, supposedly, has brought them to the best conclusion(s).
What Mercier and Sperber point out is that though reasoning is usually seen as the best way to improve knowledge and make better decisions, it usually leads to distortions of meaning and poor decisions.
So they suggest that the entire use of reasoning should be rethought. In other words, they assume that people believe the purpose or function of reasoning is argumentative. So put reasoning in any group or collaborative setting and the people are going to automatically begin arguing. Reasoning take on a negative perception. The context motivates them to argue—so people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth, but after arguments that support their own views.
So, bear with me. A person's views—their conclusions--are simply old inferences, mental representations based on a lot of other ideas. Here’s how it works in architecture. Let's suppose, for example, that you're a school superintendent who's brought in an architect to build a new elementary school. In order for the planning to move forward, architects have to collaborate with the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers to put together their proposal.
As soon as the architect sits down with the teachers, the architects find themselves dealing openly with some "conclusions," reasoning that can make collaboration very difficult. What comes up are statements like, "we don't want a Taj Mahal," "you're just in this for the money," "you don't understand education, why should we trust you," or "you guys always build what you want, not what we need." Their inferences surrounding architects are nothing about collaboration. That's a setup for a breakdown and argument, not a collaboration.
Similarly, architects have to work with the contractors, the construction people--and their reasoning can be just as difficult. Contractors are especially difficult because they get to talk to the school's representatives nearly every day. They can easily sabotage the relationship for the architect with reasoning that sounds like this: "architects just draw lines on paper," and "you guys don't know anything about building a building." How's that for collaborative reasoning?
The same stuff happens in most any collaborative effort in law, medicine--and business. Get into any collaborative team setting, and the same kind of stuff starts surfacing in ten minutes, making collaboration a very difficult exercise.
Why reasoning?
Mercier and Sperber assume, like all of us, that reasoning is the best way to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Yet, plenty of evidence shows that reasoning often leads to off-base distortions and poor decisions. So they decided to take a different tack. Rather than look at how people reason, they wanted to know why people reason.
There was one very important clue. When a team is trying to come up with a decision, they noticed that everyone was mostly interested in arguments for themselves and against the other people. The confirmation bias is always a feature of collaboration. So group reasoning becomes debate, not dialog.
Their conclusion is very important. Why do people reason? To win. The entire history of reasoning since Socrates is not tied to improving knowledge and making better decisions, but focused on winning. Winning is in the genes, but not collaboration. The researchers are in the business of shifting the thinking about collaboration. It’s not about “typical” or “normal” reasoning.
So how can we collaborate successfully?
As some of my clients have laughingly told me, I tend to play dirty when facilitating. I explain the problem. Then I'll ask permission to intervene anytime I think someone has switched his/her model to winning. And I wait until everyone agrees to my intervention. As you can guess, sometimes there's a bit of silence before I get assent. Then whenever I think the conversational model needs to change from winning to collaborating, I intervene. I make this a lot of fun and stay away from being "serious Dr. Dan."
As a facilitator, I've learned to get all the undiscussables on the table. And do it throughout the meeting. I keep pushing for information that’s missing. “What aren’t we talking about? What else should be included? What’s the question behind that question? What’s the experience behind that belief? What’s really difficult to talk about? There are usually a lot of politics under the table. Help me surface them.” For example, I'll repeat something like, Hey guys. This is not an argument to win. That sounds like a ‘win agenda’. As soon as you start looking to confirm your own beliefs, we're going to be in trouble. I know it's tough, but let's get all the stuff on the table for a better decision.”
Analyze your inferences
Then I push to look at our inferences. Marcus Aurelius wrote centuries ago that “everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact, everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” So I ask what have we heard and seen that helped us draw our conclusions and interests. Typically, we have to spend some time surfacing these very intuitive inferences.
Uniquely, Mercier and Sperber point out that all these “intuitive inferences” are nothing more than “reflective beliefs.” They are unconsciously held beliefs that come from a source we trusted at some time in our past—like parents, teachers, college faculty, politicians, physicians, priests or ministers. We have to dig into these inferences, find their sources, question the sources, and question their truthfulness and relevance. That is very difficult for all of us. But it’s necessary for effective decisioning and collaboration. I can’t emphasize this strong enough. The successes I’ve had in my life inevitably come from questioning my inferences and rejecting many of them. The best insights typically come from that questioning, often rejecting common beliefs (inferences).
Obviously. you’re going to have to build a lot trust—and humor, especially the ability to laugh at yourself, is one the best way to build trust. Along with that, admitting you’re wrong about something goes a long way for building trust and collaboration. Often, just talking about transparency can be useful.
The task of identifying and questioning all our inferences basic to growing up. And I believe it’s made even more difficult by technology and the web. Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize winner point out that while “the way to wisdom leads through knowledge—there is no path to wisdom through information.” So real collaboration is not oriented to winning, but dialogic reasoning.