So we all know that collaboration is a pretty good thing. Thing. I talk a lot about collective problem solving. It doesn't really make sense for just an individual to take on a challenge in life. You have to work with a lot of people. Well, you have to work with people. Not necessarily a lot, but you do need a group. You got to share those ideas. You got to have that cross pollination of ideas, like I talked about before on some episodes, collaboration.
I think we all get that that's a good thing to do. Some of us are better at it than others. Some people seem to kind of be naturally good at working with people. Others like to take on things a bit by themselves. But at the end of the day, really, anything we do is collaboratory anyway. Because even if you kind of, let's say you're an introvert and you kind of do your own thing, you're reading books that other people have written.
You're using software that other people have made, other groups have made. You're always sitting on top, right? Just a mountain of contribution from other people. Nobody can disconnect themselves from that intermix of people, of reality. To do anything in this world takes a high degree of collaboration, whether you're doing that explicitly or not. So collaboration is good. Collaboration is reality.
I talk about, intelligence in humanity is not really something that's just housed within an individual skull. It's something that's a social phenomenon and all that kind of stuff. So collaboration is good. It's important. But the way that we usually frame collaboration, as though it's like people getting along, right? And I mean, what do I mean by getting along? I mean kind of like being nice, right? If you're going to go work in a group, then you have to talk to those people.
And obviously, you don't want to be rude, you don't want to be, I don't know, offensive or calling people down. You want to talk to them, get along, and you want them to be nice to you as well. I mean, if there's too much toxicity in that group, if people are arguing, doing all the time, this does not seem like a type of behavior that would be amenable to collaboration.
But at the same time, if you think about it, and you could probably relate to this, sometimes you go in a group and you start working, and maybe you're a little bit, I don't know, intimidated by the group, or some of us are maybe a little bit shy. And then you start to relax. And the more relaxed you get, the more authentic you are, the more of you that you're putting into a group.
And things seem to go better when that's the case, when there's better authenticity, a better ideation, a better level of almost individualism. And that sounds a little bit counterintuitive because we usually make this contrast between individualism and the collective, right? But I would argue, and I'm going to argue in this episode, that the best collections or best collective problem solving happens. The more individualistic people are, the more themselves they are.
And that should, if you think about it, make sense, right? I mean, if I go into a group and I need to collaborate with those people, I'm going to have a better ability to communicate if I'm being really authentic, if I'm being myself, if I'm bringing my unique experience to the table, right? You don't want to kind of just whitewash everything over and everybody kind of acts the same.
You want to be individualistic, because that's my unique experiences coming to the mix that adds to the diversity of the group. I talk about how nature uses the full distribution of talents and experiences that people have, even though we tend to kind of filter, let's say, to the right side of the bell curve and say that's what really smart looks like. The reality is nature is using that full distribution. So we want the variety in there, we want that variation in groups.
And the way that you get that is you allow people to be individuals, right? You allow them to be themselves, bring those unique experiences to the table. And I would argue that this is a reason that you need a good deal of friction in a group in order for collaboration to work well. And what do I mean by friction? I don't necessarily mean all out arguing. And obviously there's a dosage here. You wouldn't want to take it all the way to kind of a toxic level of arguing.
But you do need dissent, you do need the difference of opinion, you need debate, you need argument. No good leader would want to run their ship if nobody ever disagreed with them, right? You need the disagreement, you need the turmoil, you need a good level of friction. So at the beginning, I said, look, we all get that collaboration is good. We want to work with people, we have to work with people. That's very much reality, and that's how we solve problems.
But we typically frame collaboration as all, we're all supposed to get along as though in order to collaborate really well, you have to be a team player. And it's kind of, you get into that group, think, and everybody kind of jumps into the culture, right? And that's not all bad. I mean, at some level you need to have people jumping on board to the same kind of mindset, right? A certain amount of that is obviously true. You need that unity, right?
You need a certain level of unity, but at the same time, you also need that friction, you need that dissent, you need to disagree, you need to argue, you need that kind of stark individualism that's going to b*** heads with other people's individualism, because you're different people. And that's what really allows us to get authentic communication between the members of a group.
And you need that quality information being transferred between the nodes of the network in order for collaboration to go well. You think of some examples you could watch on television. Maybe there's like a big kind of drug distributor, and maybe they're like a gang and they're putting the drugs into the street, but there's this other gang, this rival gang that threatens to take over. And you would imagine that maybe they're just going to try to kill each other, which is sometimes the case.
But sometimes what often happens is they realize they need to form an alliance, right? They kind of have this almost mutually assured destruction, or they realize that this person can threaten my market. There's a lot of friction there. But because of that, if we work together, the solution could be better. It's these situations where just because there's friction does not mean it's bad. It could actually be an opportunity to work together and to do something good.
Now, obviously the good thing would not be selling drugs on the street, because that's just an example from stuff you do. But the point is, that's a real social dynamic, right? I think you see this in enterprise as well, right? If there's an incumbent, a top player who owns the market, and then there's a startup that's coming up and they're going to threaten that market. It's not necessarily all battle. There's a way to work together too, but it's because of the friction.
It's because someone can actually replace you in the market that you might then buy that startup or form a partnership or do something. The point is that friction is a very authentic type of communication between two people, and it breeds new opportunity. You think about two nations both having nuclear weapons and there's a mutually assured destruction there. Right now, there's a lot of negativity there. We're talking about nuclear weapons.
We're talking about enough power to wipe out the other nation. But in that is a solution right. And arguably, mutually assured destruction has led to a longer period of peace for nations. Right. There's also the economic version of that, right. Mutually assured economic destruction. If you think about United States and China, China is up and coming and they have this economic, well, their gdp is, depending on how you calculate, almost on par with the.
So there's kind of this intertwining of economies that if you were to go to war, let's say, that would be very bad for the nations. So it kind of guarantees that maybe you won't go to war. Not necessarily guarantees, but there's an argument to be made there that mutually assured destruction or mutually assured economic destruction could be a good thing.
So the point is that you take things that on the surface maybe just look bad or toxic or friction, and yet they can actually have solutions baked into them because there is a very real conversation happening. Right. Mutually assured destruction is a real conversation to have. We know we could actually destroy each other. So let's get on the debate table and have this conversation. Someone threatening your place in the market, you can have a real conversation there. It's not all bad.
Let's talk about it. Maybe it's a partnership, maybe there's a solution there. The real point is that when you get collaboration works largely by a good deal of friction, by having those real authentic conversations, because the quality of information is far higher between the nodes of the network. Right. Sometimes I talk about thinking about a group as a network, and you got the nodes. Those could be the individuals or the companies, whatever scale you want to talk about.
And you have to have a good deal of information flow between those nodes. So the kind of take home message in this episode is that collaboration doesn't really mean being nice. Right? Now, I'm not saying it doesn't mean never being nice. Of course that's not what I mean. I just mean it doesn't equate to being nice. Right. In order to collaborate. Well, I think a lot of us kind of. It always gets framed.
We're kind of inundated with that message of, well, it means everyone's got to get along and we have to have unity and we've got to be part of the same culture and everything. And some of that is true. Yes, but you have to have the dissent as well. You have to have those individualistic personalities being brought to the table where people are different.
There's a difference in experience, a difference in culture, and there's going to be a bit of fighting, there's going to be some friction, and that's not a bad thing. That is a good thing. That is necessary to have effective collaboration. Give a more specific example. I would argue that, let's say you go into a group and things are going well and you're getting along, and then maybe somebody says something.
I don't know, maybe it's a bit offensive or maybe it goes directly against your kind of philosophy in life, and so you take issue with it and then it kind of comes to a head a little bit. And sometimes you get a little bit p***** off, right? Maybe you get a little bit mad, but there is energy in that anger, right? It's not all bad that you're mad, right?
It's not like we don't want to be mad, obviously, and we don't want to be fighting, but a little bit of that can actually spark a bit of energy in you. And I think a lot of you could probably relate to this, that sometimes the only way to really be yourself is when you're a bit angry. I mean, I think that there is some truth to that because when we're a little bit angry or a lot angry, I guess we kind of drop those filters. We stop caring so much about the social niceties. You know, we.
We dispel with the pleasantries. And now I'm really going to tell you what I think, because in a way, you kind of don't care anymore, right? You're kind of angry. And obviously, if you take that too far, that's not going to be a great thing. But a little bit of that, I think is there for a reason. I think it's there for an evolutionary reason.
I think there's a reason that sometimes we get a little bit mad in groups and maybe we do get a little bit offended and our philosophies do get misaligned, and then we kind of stop caring, at least momentarily, for a little bit. And then that lack of caring just makes us talk in a very authentic fashion. I'm going to really tell you what I think now. And there's a real quality to that information. There's a real power to doing that. Again, everything's a dose.
You wouldn't want to be angry all the time. That would be toxic. You won't want people fighting all the time. But stripping away the pleasantries once in a while can be really, really effective. And I think it's critical to problem solving in a group. So I think it's okay to go through life. And sometimes you get offended or sometimes you might offend someone else.
There's disagreement you have to be yourself and let yourself get a little bit p***** off once in a while, let yourself get a little bit mad, because I think you can use that energy to increase the authenticity of your communication and to maybe punch through with something that you wouldn't have punched through with otherwise. A lot of times I think we hold back. We don't want to offend people and we don't want to kind of stir the pot, so to speak. And to some extent that's good.
We want, obviously, a certain level of filtering in life. We don't want to be yelling at each other all the time. But sometimes we get a little bit mad and we dispel with the pleasantries, and we can use that energy to kind of punch through. And sometimes we need to punch through, right? Sometimes we need to be rational, we need to talk about things, but sometimes we just need to punch through with our opinion. Here's what I think.
I don't care what other people think, and I think it's good to do that once in a while. So, so, just as a quick recap, look, we know collaboration is good. We know we got to get together with a bunch of people to solve problems in some sense, if we do that by default anyway, because we're always standing on the shoulders of many, many giants. Or really, there are no giants, there are only shoulders, like my other episode right from a few years back. But it's not all.
Collaboration is not all about just getting along and being nice and unifying the message and getting on board to a culture, a lot of it. The other side of the story is the friction that's needed, the authenticity. Good ideation comes from individualism. I think the best collective problem solving happens when the individuals are really being themselves and bringing their unique experiences to the table. And that's how nature kind of uses that full distribution.
There's situations where maybe you're going to get replaced, or maybe there's mutually assured destruction or economic destruction, or maybe it's just differences in philosophies, differences in experiences, cultures, whatever. Somebody offends you, you offend someone, you need a certain dosage of that to increase the quality of information that's being shared between the nodes of a network, right? So collaboration can involve being nice, which it should, but it doesn't mean being nice.
It's not the same thing as just always getting along and never being offended. I think that we can get a lot of the energy that we need to punch through with true, authentic ideas by being p***** off once in a while. I think it's okay that we disagree and that we get each other a little bit angry once in a while. Again, you don't want too much of that, but you do need some of it. Collaboration doesn't mean being nice, it means being real.
And if you're real and if you're authentic, that's probably going to mean you are nice most of the time because most of us don't go through life trying to be mad at other people, right? So I think 70, 80% of the time we're probably still going to be nice anyways. But that 20% of the time we are going to have some friction there and we're going to disagree and maybe get each other mad.
But there's energy in that anger, there's energy in that raw authenticity where we strip away the niceties and really just punch through with some really high quality information. And that's really what it's about, right? Sometimes you need to get a little bit angry or just a little bit of friction there to really strip away kind of the superfluous kind of opacity. We kind of COVID ourselves with the pleasantries of life because we want to get along.
And again, some of that's good, but when you strip that away, that's when you get the real raw information and there needs to be a level of that. So I think what this comes down to kind of what's the lever you can pull in life to make collaboration go better is don't try to engineer collaboration. Okay? Let it be real. Let it happen. Get into group and be yourself. Don't equate collaboration to being nice. Equate collaboration to just a group of people getting together that are themselves.
Most of the time they're probably pretty pleasant. But sometimes there is friction, sometimes there is debate, and be able to leverage that anger. Leverage the times where you're not agreeing or you're getting a little bit mad about something, use that energy and direct it in a positive way. State your opinion. Go build something. Go slap, I don't know, a slide deck together even though you weren't asked to do it, and go present it to people. Or maybe you're just tweeting out a message.
I don't know what the group is, right? But you're punching through with your message because for that moment in time when you maybe got a little bit of anger on you, you kind of don't care. It's good to not care sometimes, right? Of course, ultimately you want to care about what you're doing and the people that you're working with, but sometimes you got to drop that. So don't try to engineer collaboration. And I think that's what a lot of companies do nowadays, right? Or just groups in general.
They get together and it's kind of like, okay, we're here as a group, we're here as a team, and now we've got to really be a good team that solves problems. So what does that mean? What do you do and what do you do? And let's make sure we're all nice and let's be pleasant, let's not offend each other and we kind of engineer the collaboration. I talked about this in another episode where the pattern is not the path.
A lot of the things that you observe in life as being good, like collaboration, does not mean that's how you make it, right? So you might say, oh, collaboration is when people get together and they talk to each other when they solve problems. Correct. Okay, so let's try to engineer that.
Well, no, if you try to engineer that, you try to explicitly put in place environments where this is going to happen or people where this is going to happen, you're going to try to select people that always get along. You're going to try to define a culture really specifically. And if anyone deviates from that culture or that mindset or that unified kind of way of thinking, then that must be a problem.
And this is where you're going to run into a lot of the issues, is you're trying to just almost socially engineer the group into what you think good collaboration is, when really good collaboration is a byproduct of people being quite individualistic, being themselves, allowing people to sometimes get offended and have that friction.
And out of that, out of that energy comes the best ideas, the highest quality of information content between the nodes of the network and just overall good collaboration. Okay, so let's not equate collaboration to being nice. Let's, more to the point, not try to engineer collaboration. Allow people to come together as individuals, understand that there's going to be a decent amount of dissent and disagreement and friction, and let's use that energy to be real, to be authentic.
Increase the quality of information between the nodes, and I think you'll see that you'll solve all problems far more effectively as a group. And of course, this has broader comments about society in general. Today's day and age, we have a lot of people that complain about being offended. We know we've got kind of cancel culture and all this kind of stuff. I'm sure we all have different opinions about to what extent that is true and to what it's happening, but that's good.
We should have different opinions as long as we can keep talking about it. But I would encourage people to embrace a bit of that anger, a bit of that energy to improve collaboration writ large. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until the next one. Take care. Om it.