cooperation for the network era

by

Clark Quinn recently asked, as have many others, the difference between collaboration and cooperation, and why it is important.

“collaboration means ‘working together’. That’s why you see it in market economies. markets are based on quantity and mass.

cooperation means ’sharing’. That’s why you see it in networks. In networks, the nature of the connection is important; it is not simply about quantity and mass …

You and I are in a network – but we do not collaborate (we do not align ourselves to the same goal, subscribe to the same vision statement, etc), we *cooperate*” —Stephen Downes

Cooperation makes more sense as the term to describe working together in a networked and non-directed relationship. This is an important distinction from collaboration. For example, Jérôme Delacroix also sees cooperation as the suitable term for what we do in networks [in French]. Jérôme explains why his site is called Coopératique and not Collaboratique – collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. He also says that cooperation, not collaboration, is a driver of creativity. It is difficult to be creative while collaborating, because the objective has already been established.

Read more

adapting to perpetual beta e-book

by

New! Purchase the latest in the perpetual beta series.

The third volume in the perpetual beta series is now ready. Adapting to Perpetual Beta continues to explore the network era and its effects on society, business, and education. It follows seeking perpetual beta and finding perpetual beta published in 2014. This volume is focused on leadership and adapting to perpetual beta: dealing with constant change while still getting things done.

All of the ideas discussed here have been explored initially on my blog, established in 2004. I describe my blog as a place to post ‘half-baked ideas’, and often build upon one post after another. Discussing these ideas in public lets me test them before committing them to my professional practice. I have written over 2,700 posts on my blog, so this book series provides a concise synthesis of the various themes posted here.

Read more

transparency sets the stage for trust to develop

by

Business value increases with transparency.

‘In 2006, restauranteur Jay Porter banned tipping in his San Diego restaurant, the Linkery. Instead, he implemented a service charge, and split it—transparently—amongst staff. Porter also ran a second restaurant that still allowed tipping, and this made for a useful comparison.

“Once established, the tipless/service charge model made us more successful in every dimension,” he said. The staff worked as a team, instead of selfishly trying to maximize their own tips. Servers and chefs enjoyed equal status, and staffed turnover dropped. The policy was so successful, says Porter, that it “gave us a huge competitive advantage in the marketplace; this in turn allowed us to serve a much higher quality of food and take lower margins on it.”‘ —FastCoExist

Read more

mastering complexity

by

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. This is the 250th in the series.

“I think it’s a discovery all artists make: the most interesting and bravest work is likely the hardest to make a living from.” – @berkun

“Our most successful clients have cross-flowing knowledge networks to handle the complexity/variety of their marketplace.” – @orgnet

“In a sense, cooperation is the temporary alignment of multiple, occasionally contradictory, purposes.” – @indalogenesis

Read more

open and connected leadership

by

What happens when reputation-based networked leadership comes up against hierarchical institutions and competitive market forces? In the short-term, it looks like it loses, as was the case of Greece’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis.

“So what Varoufakis is doing here is harnessing the capacities of communication technologies to support transparency and genuinely intelligent policy debate, and thus empower the polity. Alas, the opposite of both of those trends is the dominant norm in the political use of the mass media and communication technologies.” – Open Democracy

But it may be the winning strategy for the long-term.

Read more

seek, sense, share globally

by

When I started writing this blog almost a dozen years ago, I was pretty excited to connect with people in other countries. Just over a year ago I launched the first ‘PKM in 40 days‘ online workshop. The idea was hatched in the Netherlands, inspired by my friends at Link2Learn. Now, after only six workshops, the global audience of PKM practitioners is growing. We have had individual participants from 21 countries, in addition to an international audience through UCLG who participated in a custom, private workshop this year.

Read more

engineering our own serendipity

by

An article in Time magazine on engineering serendipity discusses ways to create better physical environments as well as the push for software that will improve innovation by increasing the potential for serendipitous encounters. The author, Greg Lindsay, concludes that social networks are the key.

“Serendipity is the process through which we discover unknown unknowns. Understanding it as an emergent property of social networks, instead of sheer luck, enables us to treat it as a viable strategy for organizing people and sharing ideas, rather than writing it off as magic. And that, in turn, has potentially huge ramifications for everything from how we work to how we learn to where we live by leading to a shift away from efficiency — doing the same thing over and over, only a little bit better — toward novelty and discovery.” —Greg Lindsay, The Aspen Institute

Read more

connected democracy

by

As networks become the dominant organizational form, disciplines like personal knowledge mastery will be essential for all knowledge workers.

“By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.” – End of Capitalism

Being educated is not enough. Effective citizens in a post-job, creative economy will also have to be connected. As objects get connected, the platform owners will aggregate more power and control.  Smart cities without smart citizens will result in the tyranny of the platform capitalists.

Read more