By now I had hoped to have a publishable version of my paper “collaborability: a theory on human collaboration”. I feel pressed to get it out of the way before the summer holidays. This morning I was reading through and editing my latest draft – almost final! – when I suddenly realised how I could improve my theory by relating collaborability to “competition”. Immediately I realised that this addition would set me back in getting my paper published the coming days.
At first sight competition and collaboration are opposites. But with a closer look competition and collaboration blur all the time. Just a run-of-the-mill example: a football league is a competition but can only be played with the collaboration of the teams/clubs involved (i.e. not even taken into account the countless others that will be involved to have the grounds available, controlling the crowds etc. in analogy with my traffic jam example). In my consultancy practice I have had to deal with multiple situations were competitors need to cooperate to create joined standards and technology as to be able to have a common environment on which these parties can create services competing with each other for the appreciation of customers.
Competition is often based on collaborability and within the boundaries set by politics, or in the above examples the football association or the applicable standards bodies. Companies use the same infrastructure to reach their respective customers; nobody in their right minds think it necessary for companies to create their own (e.g.) roads to reach these customers, we collaborate to create the common infrastructure or organise markets to do so and all companies can benefit of the reservoir of collaborability build this way to compete amongst each other.
Competition is at the hart of our evolution: adapting to scarcity and to changing and differing circumstances. Competition implies “adversaries” but it is much to simple to oversee the interdependence of these adversaries, how they rely on collaborability and how they are “governed” by the mechanisms of collaboration involved.
“Competition” is not a simple concept but can help explain important aspects of collaborability, not a simple concept itself either. I need some additional days to see how I can neatly address competition within the confines of my theory and hence the paper in development. (see also: “Competition” is only one part of our evolutionary narrative (at most)
Below the latest graphic versions of the collaborability model, including Evolution / competition:
