The Transition
The transition from competition to collaboration is just that, a transition. We begin squarely in an environment of competition with the goal of becoming a civilization able to trust and rely on one another for mutual benefit.
Each of us as individuals progress at our own pace, which collectively sets the pace of our evolution as a civilization. At the same time, the various systems we create progress and evolve differently from each other. Society is complex. No matter how much our intellect tries to compartmentalize, every aspect of society affects, and is affected by, everything else.
This means society is inherently symbiotic. At a fundamental level we are already collaborative. Animals breathe oxygen and expel carbon dioxide; plants breathe carbon dioxide and expel oxygen. These are the parameters of our natural world.
However, the social systems we created, capitalism in particular, had been structured in a non-reciprocal way; every man for himself, as it were. And is reflective of the point of progress of the time it was created – a population who had “leveled up” enough came together to create a system to compete against the monarchy in order to assert its independence from it. The people collaborated, agreeing that society was ready for an alternative to authoritative feudalism, and the alternative created was competitive.
However now, with businesses able to rely on one another – in the grand network of manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, etc. – the business platform (capitalism) created long ago still keeps these individual businesses at odds with one another.
It’s time for another upgrade. Although this time, instead of people collaborating to create competitive systems to assert independence from an outgoing paradigm, businesses collaborate to achieve interdependence with our outgoing paradigm. Much to the frustration of capitalism I’m sure, we are using it to transcend it.
I’m sure we can all relate to this natural progression from dependence, through independence, into interdependence; as children (who depend on their parents’ guidance for survival) become adults (who can survive and guide themselves) who then partner (with other independent adults) for increased mutual benefit. Mismatches and discrepancies happen when one or neither party has reached independence before attempting to partner.
An example of this from a social systems perspective is the dependent nature of today’s governmental systems (mis)matched with a population who can govern themselves yet still allow governments to rule over them. In a time like this, governments need people to actuate society while the people of society don’t, can’t, or haven’t yet asserted their sovereignty. In personal relationships we call this co-dependence.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is a step towards maturity. It is a system of independence where everyone participating has equal opportunity to succeed in the game of business. Fortune is accessible to anyone by sharing one’s innovative ideas with prospective customers.
It can be assumed that both of these examples (capitalism and our current democratic societies) began in earnest – business systems offering a level playing field and social systems where representatives advocate for the wishes of their constituents. However, both of these systems have become corrupt because the parts of civilization practicing them were immature. Over time, individuals with an underdeveloped sense of empathy just couldn’t help themselves from taking that extra marshmallow.
It could even be theorized that communist USSR may have begun as a legitimate attempt at being an interdependent nation but was usurped by a handful of people with lower levels of emotional awareness reverting it to a dependent (co-dependent) society.
By the way, this is why I feel business, not politics, is one of our best pathways to interdependent societies. All of our major governmental systems are dependent, and it would take radical overhauls to mature that environment. Business on the other hand is already independent and therefore closer to our next benchmark of interdependence.
We aren’t circumventing or skipping over capitalism. We are going through it. In the same way we don’t skip over adolescence. Even though today’s business environment is competitive, we must learn it for the purpose of transcending it.
The purpose of this book, therefore, is not necessarily to help you create a killer business, although it may happen as a side-effect should you decide to start one using collaborative, people-centric business practices. Its purpose is to help you comprehend business. To grasp its essence. To understand that business is an activity of human relationships and that it is an activity of its own, linked to, yet still separate from, the passion and expertise you may decide to build a business around, so that it may be incorporated into a larger strategy of transcending competition (and indeed trade) in business altogether.
Entrepreneurial Conundrum
One such example of the responsibility of independence (particular to business) is what I call the Entrepreneurial Conundrum, which I alluded to earlier.
Compared to working for someone else where boundaries are set for you – giving you reference by which to make decisions – the entrepreneur must both set the boundary and abide by them. Policies set by upper management have a certain ease to follow, but as an entrepreneur, knowing you set the policy and that you may change it at any time can create doubt, hesitation, and indecision.
It’s a circular condition I call The Entrepreneurial Conundrum because you are both the boss and worker. It’s a balance between Freedom and Responsibility: “I have to get it done…but I really don’t have to do it…but it needs to be done…”
It reminds me of setting an alarm clock ten minutes ahead. It doesn’t have the same effect because you know you have an extra ten minutes.
As an academic exercise, having to abide by your own guidelines isn’t much of an issue. Where it does get questionable is in real-life, where we have real-time knowledge that those boundaries are not fixed. You set them, and you have the power to change them.
One solution to reconcile this cycle is to separate yourself into the boss / employee dynamic we’re used to. Wearing your “boss hat”, you can set boundaries based on solid research and vision; and wearing your “employee hat” you settle to work within those boundaries. The “boss” agrees to maintain and revise the boundaries as needed and the “employee” agrees to gather data for the “boss” to apply to those revisions.
Make a pact with yourself. Trust you’ve done a good job setting the boundaries. Trust that the boundaries will be updated as more information is gathered, not before. If you meld the hats together it can easily lead to an endless hamster wheel of second-guessing yourself.
This strategy may already be second nature for some of you. Others may want to literally swap hats (on your head) as you practice.
Anatomy of a Movement
A way to track our shift from competition to collaboration is the “Law of Diffusion of Innovation” as outlined by Simon Sinek. In his TED Talk from 2009 titled “Start With Why”, Sinek describes this psychology very well, identifying the five stages of this progression as being: Initiators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards.
Another popular video demonstrating the evolution of social movements, and which pairs very well with Simon Sinek’s talk, is called “How to Start a Movement” presented by Derek Sivers. Even before continuing reading, I highly recommend watching (and favoriting) both of these quick videos. Both presenters elaborate on their topics, and the perspectives they offer are profound and fundamental to people-centric influences. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to summarize their combined essence.
Picture this: the setting is an outdoor music festival. A guy with an unruly mane starts dancing in a style that would make his hair-do proud. His hands and legs flail about while people around him distance themselves and look on with bewilderment. Soon enough though, a second person joins in with his own version of “dancing”. Within minutes the patch of grass that most people wanted nothing to do with is filled with dozens of (now normal) dancers, with the odd person joining, here and there, over time.
The first guy was the Initiator. The second guy was the Early Adopter. The crowd of dancers were the Early and Late Majorities. And those who joined reluctantly were the Laggards.
From my general interest in the subject of social movements, I estimate we are somewhere in the neighborhood between the end of Early Adopters and the beginning of Early Majority. I come to this conclusion citing three pieces of evidence:
First, we obviously haven’t reached any version of collaborative majority so the furthest along we could be is the leading edge of Early Majority. Second, Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations, mentioned earlier, is a documentation of independent businesses that have already operated with internal collaborative practices in real world settings. So we must be beyond Initiating. And third, Business After Capitalism offers a framework to make collaboration within and among businesses commonplace, though it has not yet been implemented widely.
Therefore, it seems as though the first two dancers have paved the way with the rest of the crowd poised and ready to get up from their blankets.
Past and current “humanitarian” entrepreneurs are the Initiators and Early Adopters of this transition by incorporating more human and humane aspects into their businesses. Features like community engagement and charity donations have been around for a while and are now fairly commonplace, while newer practices like People / Planet / Profit, Multi-Stakeholder, and B-Corp approaches being the latest attempts at humanizing business.
From your eagle’s perch you could probably feel where these business practices fit into our grand evolution; even though they haven’t been collected into a common approach yet and they most certainly haven’t been practiced primarily for the benefit of people. Any human benefit – from working remotely, or allowing workers to set their own schedules, or softening work environments with plants and artwork – have been acceptable side-effects while still for the deeper purpose of increased profits.
Systemically, we still have competitive businesses in a competitive environment. Although now, because of these mavericks, society has accepted the concept and practice of humanizing business.
You can be sure this shift will take time as you would expect of any movement. Collaboration isn’t a walk in the park, it’s tough. Not only because it can be a complex practice on its own, but also because we’ve experienced so little of it through our lifetime.
We’ve all experienced glimpses of what working collaboratively has the potential to be, but usually in short spurts and on projects that may not have direct, integral, or lasting impact on our daily, practical lifestyles. Helping a neighbor cut down a tree or build a fence, carpooling, or considering neighbors, friends and family when stockpiling food for power outages.
It feels good to work together. But as well-intended as today’s collaborative business strategies may be, they still rely on the individual entrepreneur to enact, while the business continues operating competitively.
So, rather than relying on eight billion individuals to take it upon themselves to practice collaboration, Business After Capitalism offers the beginning of a framework for that feeling of helping one’s neighbour, to become our baseline in business too. Bridging the gap between individual people adopting collaborative business practices of their own accord, to an incentivized purpose for businesses existing at all. By running a collaborative, people-centric business, you (we) are now the Early Majority in this transition.
Environment
Whether the workers of a company are collaborative people or not, today’s businesses still compete against other businesses for sales and market share. Which means the current business environment overall would be considered to be competitive. If all businesses in your town are competitive then the business environment is 100% competitive. If half collaborate and the other half compete then your local business environment is 50 / 50, collaborative / competitive.
As individual businesses begin practicing collaboration – first among the people within their organization then gradually among organizations within their community – the overall environment could then be said to be transitioning towards collaboration.
Using this rationale, the environment is a sum or culmination of all businesses involved, and it would differ by polling different regions. Sampling your local community will give one result; while widening your context to the surrounding area, country or even the whole world will result differently.
The environment’s transition will always lag behind the transition of individual businesses, which will lag behind individual people. When more than half of the people in an organization regularly collaborate as part of their daily work habits, it could be said that that business’ work environment has become (majoritively) collaborative. When more than half of the businesses in a region or industry routinely collaborate for mutually increased benefit, it could be said that that region or industry is collaborative.
And when more than half of the businesses, industries, and regions of the world inherently consider the needs and aspirations of others in their decision-making processes, it could be said we have crossed the threshold to becoming a truly advanced society; a time when competitive workers, businesses, regions, and industries become the minority and on their way to extinction.
Of course, these tipping points aren’t black and white. Depending on how you calculate – quantity of businesses, quantity of workers, impact on the community, essential or non-essential services, etc. – tipping points will more likely be tipping spectrums.
Realization
In any case, as more people become acquainted and comfortable with the realization that a bigger house, faster car, and additional TVs, etc. no longer sufficiently satisfy their internal longing for fulfillment, they may find themselves searching for different ways to fulfill their purpose.
This seeking may expose an early sense of sovereignty; no longer wanting to be told what is meaningful, but are not yet at the point of defining their purpose.
Perhaps you’ve felt this dynamic within yourself where you feel you want change but can’t quite identify what steps to take. And when you do find the actions, something within you (doubt or lack of clarity, perhaps) keeps you from enacting them fully. To my mind this is a great example of the lag mentioned earlier, combined with the point (spectrum) we are in in our transition – spanning Early Adopters and Early Majority.
Internally we feel the next stage of the transition but externally we aren’t quite there. In the larger context of society, we, as people, have moved on but the systems we use haven’t caught up. Like a child outgrowing a certain toy or a feeling of dissonance when your job just doesn’t fit who you are anymore. Like all movements (biological, emotional, or social) it takes sustained effort until inertia is built up.
Opportunity
Knowing this shift is happening offers a terrific opportunity for entrepreneurs to participate in it. If these summations are correct (or even in the ballpark) – that the people of society are ready and available to collaborate, but our systems simply have not yet been developed to the point for the general population to engage – then those of us at the leading edge have a real opportunity on our hands.
Entrepreneurs are inherently driven by challenge and the forging of new territory. We follow an internal force driving us toward previously unattainable levels of accomplishment. Your opportunity, should you choose to accept it, is to participate in the crafting of the next version of human society through the use of business, powered by your innate personal inspiration, while being guided by the consideration of others.
If the majority of a population tend to follow (as described by Simon Sinek’s “Law of Diffusion of Innovation”) then, as leaders emerge, people will follow that leadership.
Whatever your own motivation for shaping the landscape – practicing collaborative, people-centric business more money flowing through your personal balance sheet, leaving a legacy, knowing you will have set up the next generation to really kick this thing into high gear – this personal enthusiasm can be leveraged for collective benefit.
Even though you may be motivated by personal goals – which is reflective of a competitive mindset – those goals can be used to fuel the collective benefit of each person’s independence, en route to interdependence.
Collective benefit is a sum of individuals’ benefit and can no longer be masked by one person’s opinion of what they think is best for everyone else. For others to follow you into this new era of heightened awareness, your efforts need to align with people’s intuitive sense of sovereignty.
There is a slight, yet monumental difference between personal motivation for personal gain and personal motivation for collective gain. It’s this slight internal shift of purpose that would likely set off others’ Spidey-Senses if you are felt to be practicing collaborative business for the sole purpose of personal gain; or worse, at the expense of others.
This is yet another benefit to collaborative, people-centric business practice: achieving what you want by helping others achieve what they want.
Humanity has essentially grown up enough to understand we have a responsibility to each other and our natural world. This stewardship has been felt sufficiently for individuals to infuse empathy into their respective businesses and now BAC offers common tools for entrepreneurs to independently unite as humanity transitions toward an interdependent civilization.
It is possible for everyone to achieve their personal goals, and it is possible to transition from individuals competing against one another to individuals collaborating with each other, and with nature.