We Need To Speak About Cooperation

There’s so much talk about change. Quite understandably. We need change, lots of it, and quite urgently. With a whole generation grappling with climate despair because governments can’t find a path to action and businesses continue to lag, calls for change become cries for help. Add on the many other ills plaguing humanity and change is needed at scale across many fronts.

Yet change remains elusive.

Part of the reason is that we rarely pause to study how change unfolds. We don’t seem to be very good, beyond academic studies that seldom inform day-to-day practice, at learning what works and what fails. We just keep banging on about the need for change like a hammer hitting a nail. There’s violence in it. If we yell loud enough, that will get us there, right? Sadly not. We focus on the destination we hope to arrive at without fathoming how the journey to get there might unfold, about how we could support it rather than hinder. Change seldom happens with the flick of a switch. Change processes are typically long and difficult with many opportunities for derailment. They often founder crossing streams of invective and anger long before ever reaching a desired endpoint where, looking back, we can pause and say, “We got there.”

People only change when they’re uncomfortable. Yelling at them and publicly shaming them does make them uncomfortable, but alone seldom brings the change we need. That’s because change, like all natural phenomena, must follow the laws of physics. Newton’s third law, of action and reaction, states that when two bodies interact, they apply equal and opposite forces to each other. When we push someone to change, they push back. This is the opposite of what’s needed. We can sometimes change our own behavior alone, but change only happens in the broader world when people cooperate. For cooperation to emerge, we need to bring people together, not push them apart.

How do we do that?

Ultimately, it comes down to how we treat each other. That determines whether trusting relationships can evolve between people engaged in a change process. Yelling and expressing our emotions isn’t of itself a bad thing. It gets people’s attention that someone’s unhappy with them and does make them uncomfortable, but if that’s your only play, say goodbye to change. Once you’ve gotten their attention, you need to build relationship and you do that by giving time and space to the process, by genuinely listening, acknowledging views, history, culture, emotions; ultimately, by recognizing them as human beings.

Having been involved in numerous large, complex change processes over the past more than two decades, I’ve witnessed how sitting quietly with people who aren’t cooperating can support cooperation to emerge. When people feel they’re being acknowledged, they become more open. Ideas and aspirations are shared, and common ground can emerge from the darkness. With common ground, change processes can go large, true change becomes possible, and the sorts of grand transformations we desperately need can follow.

The past years have seen the language of separation take root and flourish. Social media rewards indignation and witty put downs and traditional media loves to report a good fight. In this context, we revert to tribalism where our role in life regresses to throwing spears across the divide to injure ‘the other.’ Political deadlock around the world is anchored in tribalism and is why we can’t make progress on issues, like climate change, that matter. The world is moving at a rapid pace, changing around us every moment. We can’t keep pace with that change, nor ever get ahead of it, if we’re locked in battle.

Getting to cooperation is how we’ll get to change and our task in 2022 and beyond, must be to explore and grow our collective understanding of how we get to cooperation. As that grows, we can apply our learnings to a great diversity of contexts and, fingers crossed, take change to greater scale. If we’re finally able to put down our swords and reach our hand across the divide, we could make progress on the existential issues that plague us. We must leave behind our language of separation and find the courage to risk trusting the other.

That’s easier said than done. Much of the trust we put into these tense relationships will, at first, be thrown back in our faces. In response, we can either rail against the injustice, and spread anger and vitriol or stay true to who we are as humans – I remain positive that deep down, we’re all good souls - and continue to chance our arm in the hope that eventually, those we’re trusting will finally tire of trying to chop it off.

Only then, as cooperation emerges, for it will if we persevere, might we get somewhere.