22 – The Collaborative by Nature Principle

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. I’m Lucie Hazelgrove Planel, a Social Impact Scientist, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS. Hi, David.

[00:00:16] David: Hi, Lucie. Another Principle podcast. I’m looking forward to this. What are we discussing?

[00:00:22] Lucie: So, we’re going to be discussing the Principle Collaborative by Nature.

A lot of my work is all to do with collaborating with researchers, it’s collaborating with other colleagues. There’s a lot of collaboration going on in all sorts of directions! So I’d like to hear more. If we start off with the little description of Collaborative by Nature, the principle, just to set us on this, on the right footing.

“This principle forces the company to always look beyond itself. It encourages people to think beyond themselves within the company and about building partnerships for the company.” Encourages people to think beyond themselves within the company. Is there an internal looking and an external looking within that?

[00:01:02] David: Absolutely. It’s collaboration within the organisation and collaboration beyond the organisation. There’s two elements to this in terms of thinking about, it’s good to think of the principles in terms of opposition of what, what else would be natural.

Some companies and particularly startups, tech startups, are seen as being competitive by nature and, you know, competition is central. And so you could compare collaborative by nature to competitive by nature. And being competitive by nature doesn’t exclude you from being collaborative in certain ways, but if your nature is to be competitive, you’d expect people to be within the institution competing for jobs, for promotion, for advancement.

[00:01:43] Lucie: Exactly. I was going to ask, so do you think that most companies, if they’re competitive, externally, they also tend to have an internal competitive aspect?

[00:01:51] David: I don’t know. I mean, this is the point. There are good well known instances of companies which have highly competitive structures internally that have found success.

You know, there’s the whole ethos about companies being externally competitive with one another and so on. And so this is a very natural, very natural position for a company to take is, is its competitive edge. You know, people talk about that. And so actually, for a company to be trying to say no, we want to be collaborative by nature, this is challenging and this is a very challenging principle for a company to take.

But there’s also research which has sort of shown if you’re interested in sort of gender and inclusion, there’s negatives that come from prioritising competition that you actually lose certain skill sets, you, you undervalue certain skill sets in different ways.

[00:02:52] Lucie: Do you know which ones?

[00:02:54] David: Well, I mean, even if you just go back to maths education, which is something that we know, the mathematics education at schools is often seen as being sort of competitive in different ways. And it’s been shown that this leads to gender problems, because actually girls have been shown to thrive much more in a mastery sort of context than a competitive context where they’re not competing with their peers and so on.

So there’s elements there and I, I remember this as a sort of student myself. I, I did the French baccalaureate and I was choosing between French and British sort of systems for the next level of my education. And the next natural step for me might have been to go into what called these prépas in France, which are a competition.

This just seemed so alien to me that, you know, you weren’t being judged on how good you were as an individual, you were being judged in terms of were you part of the top certain percentage, you know, because there were fixed number of places, and so you were competing for those fixed number of places with your peers.

And this is something which changes, therefore, the stories that come out of how people work together. I was very fortunate, in the way I worked as an undergraduate. My particular degree that I went into and chose at Warwick University wasn’t competitive. And so that suited me very well because I was dyslexic and so I couldn’t take notes.

And so after my, somewhere around my first year I stopped ever taking notes. And my way of revising was, well all my friends had notes, but they didn’t understand them. So I made sure I listened really hard in the lecture, so I understood the content. And then I would spend a lot of time collaborating with my colleagues, with my friends who had notes, but who didn’t understand them.

And so it worked very well. And we both gained, you know, we all gained from that. We gained a deeper understanding and I played a role for them and they played a role for me because I sometimes forgot what we’d actually done, but then when I saw it, I’d understood it. And so it was sort of, there was a very good collaboration which came.

And so I’ve taken that with me since my studies. But I guess this is the sort of nature of even education systems. Are education systems designed to be competitive or collaborative? And most have an element of both. But I really valued, from a relatively young age, that actually good collaboration can be a win win, that it’s sort of everybody can win and gain from collaboration.

[00:05:25] Lucie: So, I was going to ask you then, what does it mean to be collaborative?

[00:05:30] David: I think one of the things, and it’s a good question, I, I don’t know in general, it’s a hard question, I mean you’d think this is simple to answer, but I, I find it very hard. But what I can say is, internally, in terms of our, you know, encouraging people to be collaborative, and you, I hope, have felt this, that there is an expectation almost, that people look out others to help them where others are strong and where you might be weak. I know you and Lily have been quite a strong bond over the fact that you, you compliment each other’s skills in very positive ways and work collaboratively very well together and so on. That wasn’t forced upon you, but it happened quite naturally as you were encouraged to find people to work with in different ways and build different collaborations with different people.

[00:06:19] Lucie: It’s helped by both wanting to work towards the same thing, by having the same aim, basically.

[00:06:25] David: Exactly. In that particular collaboration, which has formed quite naturally, you were both put onto a project together where you had complementary skills when neither of you could probably have done it on your own. And you both valued the skills that the other brought. And, you know, In that particular case, Lily really didn’t want to do the work that you took on and did and you really didn’t want to do the work that Lily took on and did, but you found that together you could actually take responsibility for the whole in a way which meant that actually you both had ownership. And that was really valued and appreciated in that sort of way.

And that sort of, internally, I think you can see those examples of how that works, that it’s not about sort of, nobody’s trying to sort of ask, well, who did more? Who, you know, who was it who really drove the process? And, and who was it who, you know, took leadership? You know, that, that question never came up.

This was never framed as a competition between you in terms of the evaluations you’re receiving or sort of how you’re doing it. No one would have gained any brownie points for standing up and saying, you know, okay, I’ve got this, they, they helped and I value their collaboration, but this is what I’ve been able to deliver.

Whereas in other contexts, that might be valued. You know, taking leadership on that is something where that would then lead to promotion and this sort of thing. Whereas with us, that’s not tied in, in that way.

[00:07:48] Lucie: But sometimes taking leadership on something can be an act of good collaboration, potentially.

[00:07:53] David: Absolutely. Of course, I’m not saying leadership isn’t valued, but there’s different types of leadership in this.

[00:07:59] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:07:59] David: Whole literature on the different types of leadership. And it’s again about this aspect that we’re looking to build and to support and to engage these, if you want, servitude leadership, leadership of servitude, where a leader serves others to advance rather than serving themselves.

And there’s elements there again of different sorts of leadership around that. And there’s ways we think about that. That’s a whole nother podcast, I’m sure. But within this, this element of internal collaboration of really encouraging people to reach out for help, to get support, you know, and it’s essential to how people work within the organisation.

[00:08:38] Lucie: When I was just thinking, when you were giving your example about not taking notes and I think there’s also an aspect of honesty in there, or sort of it’s not transparency, awareness of differences, perhaps.

[00:08:48] David: And yourself, where your strengths and weaknesses lie. You know, I’m dyslexic. When I did take notes, you know, I did for the first six months or so. When I did take notes, they were awful notes. I was really bad at it. And it distracted me from understanding the content. Whereas actually I could bring value by concentrating hard and making sure I understood the content.

Where I didn’t understand things, where something was being presented which was complex or whatever. Being in that moment and understanding it in the moment, many of my colleagues found they didn’t do that. They actually understood it better by taking the notes. And so it’s about recognising those differences in skill and the value each of us can bring.

[00:09:31] Lucie: Which also, in terms of the principle, it’s called Collaborative by Nature. So why by nature? What does the nature add? As an anthropologist also, is this saying that, you know, it’s, it’s innate or is it learnt?

[00:09:43] David: No, no, you’re absolutely right. And this is a very careful choice as often it has been. And maybe really to understand this, it is about understanding the external collaboration and also understanding how this sort of differs in some sense from other, well from some of our other principles. I mean one of the other principles is consciously ethical and actually in that principle when we discussed it, one of the things that comes out is that we are not ethical by nature. And so in some sense to be ethical by nature would be to say that you know this is instinctive, whereas actually we’re saying for us to be ethical it needs to be very conscious, it needs to be explicit.

[00:10:30] Lucie: Because it’s hard.

[00:10:31] David: I mean I value people who are ethical by nature and I know people like that. But as an organisation, I think there’s real risks in us trying to do that and trying to build that into our structures, who we employ, what if we get it wrong with somebody and so on.

And so looking for that, I think is the wrong approach. Whereas being consciously ethical is the right approach for us. Whereas I think, Collaborative by Nature, this is right for us. If we have somebody who is inherently competitive, we probably shouldn’t be recruiting them, unless they’re wanting to learn how to be collaborative, unless they’re wanting to engage in that. This should affect who we recruit, how we recruit them, because we need the collaboration to be built in.

Somebody who thinks that we shouldn’t be collaborating with them because we could be competing with them in the future. And if we collaborate with them, then they’re going to be better than us or they’re going to receive something over us in the future. That is inherently against this principle. We need people who are going to be collaborative by nature.

And let me take an extreme example of this. INNODEMS is our Kenyan partner. We work with them, we train them up, we capacity build them, another one of our principles, central. And in the future, I expect them to out compete us for work. In fact, I would see that as a success. If they are able to out compete us for work, then this is great. This means they’ve risen to a level where they have the skills to deliver it, they’ll be able to do it more cost effectively, I hope, than us. So they should be trying to and able to out compete us in the future for work.

I am not threatened by that because I believe we’ll be able to change and evolve. We’re continually evolving as an organisation. If we no longer get that work, we would need to evolve to get other work or to sort of shrink or to whatever. Our structures are set up to allow that. And this is what we mean by being collaborative by nature.

It’s not consciously collaborative. That’s sort of a different process. And that would be an alternative principle. Just like being consciously ethical, sort of actually saying in which ways we’re being ethical and trying to be able to, you know, be conscious about. It’s not about being consciously collaborative. It’s about being collaborative by nature, that this is unquestionably our instinct.

We need to build this into everyone who works for IDEMS, that their instinct is collaboration. It goes back to actually the very first IDEMS podcast, which described the fact that what we’re trying to support is a more collaborative society.

[00:13:14] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:13:14] David: And this is something which is central to what we envisage as a positive long term outcome that actually societies which are built on collaboration we believe would be much more sustainable, I think there’ll be, I believe they will out compete. I think there’s actually good evidence towards that, that actually more collaborative societies will out compete more competitive societies.

If you think about the internal collaboration being much more impactful and effective than internal competition. Now there are times at which competition is good. I’m competitive in many ways. I like being competitive. I love sport because it allowed me to be competitive and to sort of focus on figuring out how to win and actually you always had that sort of element of trying to win. But the sport I loved was volleyball and volleyball is a fantastic sport to learn about collaboration.

[00:14:10] Lucie: Yes and we’re not talking beach volleyball, I think we’re talking much more group…

[00:14:13] David: Even beach volleyball, you know, even beach volleyball it’s two people but it is the collaboration of those two people and understanding your strengths and weaknesses, you can’t do it as an individual. It doesn’t matter how good you are as an individual, the collaboration between those two is much better. Some of the top beach volleyball pairs are very different. You know, they have one person who’s very tall and is a great blocker and the other person who’s very agile and covers and defends the court.

You know, so even in that context, collaboration and understanding how you can bring different skill sets together to be able to achieve more. Now of course once you get to volleyball with six a side, now there’s real specialisation which comes in. And that level of collaboration of understanding the teamwork element and how that brings together and how you need to get the best out of everyone. Again, I learned a lot about collaboration from a competitive sport.

So, being collaborative is not in contradiction with being competitive. But that’s exactly why we need to focus on and be collaborative in nature, and that’s hard for me, you know, instinctively, I have to confess, my instinct is I’m slightly competitive by nature. Ask my cousin, ask my sisters, you know, this is something which does come out a little bit. I, I loved playing games as a kid and I liked to win them.

[00:15:39] Lucie: Yeah, I was just thinking of like board games and things because as a company we, we have played sort of card games.

[00:15:44] David: And understanding how, when you’re playing, actually you sort of quite quickly see that actually the mathematical minds are incredibly competitive by nature. So this is actually a really important element that by nature, in many ways, mathematical minds, which are central to IDEMS as an organisation, have a tendency to be competitive. But even in the maths, there is really good evidence that collaboration can out compete competitiveness in certain contexts.

There’s beautiful books about this, The Selfish Gene is one of the oldest, and so on. A really wonderful case where, as mathematicians who we recruit, or as mathematical scientists who get recruited into IDEMS, one of the criteria of understanding whether they would be a good fit is to understand their perspectives and their reflections on collaboration.

[00:16:43] Lucie: Is that sort of part of the job interview?

[00:16:45] David: It comes out very naturally, you know, sort of understanding and, you know, somebody who’s really brilliant but just doesn’t get the value of collaboration probably wouldn’t get recruited. And that’s why we need people who can value collaboration by nature, in some sense, as a principle.

It has to be both how we work internally and how we work externally. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be times where we are competitive and where we do out compete. This is important, but almost always the way we’ll do so will be by valuing the collaboration.

[00:17:19] Lucie: That leads me on to asking how can we ensure that as an organisation we are more collaborative? So you’ve mentioned sort of in terms of the people that you hire, sort of making sure that they have that eagerness to collaborate.

[00:17:31] David: Yeah. More than this, it’s when we go for work, there is an element of, well, do you try to maximise the amount you get as an organisation? Or how much do you bring in partners? Which partners do you bring in? How do you work with others? And so a big part of what we have to do is to try and actually keep ourselves in check, to actually have those checks and balances in place that make sure that when we’re looking for work, we are not only looking for work for ourselves, but we’re also looking to make sure that we’re bringing others along with us and integrating them in.

And doing that is hard, that balance, because we need funds, you know, we have to be fundamentally profitable, otherwise we don’t exist as an organisation, we have no core funding at this point in time, and we probably never will. Maybe if we’re really lucky we might somehow get some in the future at some point, but I don’t see how that’s going to happen, it’s not really part of our business model.

So we have to think about ourselves, and how we can be fundamentally profitable as an organisation. But in doing so, we also have to be generous to others and to include others in our work in ways which are, which are genuinely mutually beneficial and really value that collaboration as sort of the role we play, and recognize that our role in this is quite often one of capacity building.

This is another principle that we have and recognizing that actually where we have an equal power dynamics with our partners, that we have a capacity building role to play in that collaboration. We need to be careful not to be exploitative, but to be enabling others to build their capacity, and doing so in ways which value equity .

There’s elements there which I find very hard, maybe others find easier, but I find very hard to balance. Balancing our internal needs with our external when we apply funding and when we’re part of collaborations. I should say that actually one of the things which sort of characterises our work to date has been we’re a really good second partner.

[00:19:46] Lucie: I was just going to ask about the collaboration recently with CASAS Global then.

[00:19:51] David: Oh, and with CASAS, that’s an interesting one. That was not the one I was thinking of in this point, but there’s an example where this is an established method and approach. This is a professor from Berkeley.

[00:20:02] Lucie: Really brilliant.

[00:20:03] David: Brilliant, and doing amazing work over a long career, coming towards the end of his career now. He’s in his mid 80s. And one of the things which is so fascinating about that, in terms of the way we’ve sort of collaborating now, is that actually, this collaboration and the way we can build this collaboration, we see ourselves as serving their needs and actually understanding how to serve their needs, to sort of elevate them, to enable them to do more, rather than to take over or to sort of build our part of it more.

And that balance of how to do that, that’s the role we play really well, but it’s a role which very few people want to play. Most people actually want to build themselves, and they have to, if they’re in academic circles, you have to think about this. In fact, in that, they were wanting to hand over more to us, and we were trying to say, no, you shouldn’t hand over, you need to keep that. That’s your value, we can support you, but we don’t want to take that over. And that’s important, and I think that’s the role we play extremely well.

[00:21:08] Lucie: And it was recognised by Andrew Gutierrez.

[00:21:10] David: Yes.

[00:21:12] Lucie: And it was a different way of collaborating than what they were used to.

[00:21:15] David: Well, than any that he’s experienced at any point in, you know, his long career, that this element of collaborating, this way of collaborating, he can see how it can bring different results, and how it’s different from the collaborations which he’s really valued and had in the past.

And that’s where, It’s difficult. We are finding we’re having to reinvent quite a lot of this because, as I say, academic structures are set up around competition, much more. The business structures tend to be set up around competition. International development, although you’d expect it to be really centred on collaboration, and in some ways foundations and international development spaces are more collaborative, there is a surprising amount of competition, which has taken root and which is central to it. Applying for grants is a competitive process. Building collaboration within that is something which is difficult and is not always valued as we think maybe it should be.

So really this element of collaboration being the nature we’re trying to support is something which is not central to the society we’re living in and therefore, well, what we find is it is both our greatest strength and it is potentially a weakness. It is a great strength because it means that actually almost all our partners have always been long term partners.

Since we started, and there’s literally one or two collaborations that didn’t come to fruition, but pretty much every other partnership we’ve had, we’ve still got. It’s an ongoing relationship and collaboration which continues from one project to the next into a different form, it changes, it evolves over time, but we build those long term collaborations and those long term partners.

And that has sort of enabled us to grow in really interesting ways. And that approach is one which has been valued and which has brought us value. That’s important that actually by differentiating ourselves because of our collaborative nature, we have gained from it, but we’ve also sometimes come at an extreme cost.

Collaborating with UNICEF has been extremely expensive to us in all sorts of different ways. That’s a whole other podcast, possibly. It’s something we value, but it’s something where it doesn’t fit into their structures. And we’ve had long discussions with the people who value it, but who say, look, we can’t, you’re not competitive in this.

And it’s true, we don’t sometimes compete in those sort of like for like in certain ways because of the way we present ourselves, because of the way we work. And so, you know, there are contexts within which competition has been valued over collaboration in ways which are difficult to measure, difficult to put in context, and we suffer because of that.

So I guess, what I really want to make sure I communicate in this, and maybe I’ll take one more instance of the collaborative approach, where we’re a second partner. This is so often for us that we have a lead partner who is, let’s say a subject area in their domain, our parenting work with Oxford University, the PLH team, Parenting for Lifelong Health, are incredible and they’re fantastic. And we’ve come in as a second partner on quite a lot of their work, where we support them in their digitization of their programs and the digital innovation that they’re doing. And, the collaborative approach that we take means that we could never compete with them and we would never want to compete with them in terms of the actual work that this is doing.

We couldn’t apply for the grants, the opportunities that they, they get, and we would never want to. But we can build a team which has value, which they they can, they do, and they should value beyond what they could get from anyone else, because we’re able to have it evolve with them in terms of their needs.

It goes beyond what they define, what they know, they often don’t know what they want, and what we’re able to do is evolve what they need over time. And often it’s quite circular, things that we tried to do with them a number of years ago and we suggested would be good, well, they weren’t right for them then, but they are right for them now.

And so we’re now going round into another cycle. And we’re able to sort of support that process in a way which, a less collaborative partner couldn’t. Because it’s not necessarily cost effective for us to do so, to play that role in that collaboration approach. But it is what they need.

And that’s where we tend to really excel in terms of our collaborations, is by being able to provide partners what they need rather than what they ask for, you know, we can be argumentative. I’m saying, you know, that really will not help you. We won’t do it, it won’t work. But part of that process is sort of really useful about actually trying to help them get to what they need.

[00:26:34] Lucie: I think it’s been very common that people aren’t always actually that aware of what they need themselves. It needs someone else to sort of encourage it and elicit it through a discussion.

[00:26:45] David: And often to our detriment, often what they ask for would be cheaper, more cost effective, more profitable for us to do. So to argue against our commercial interests in favour of their need, that’s Collaborative by Nature. And that’s the essence, that’s the essence of what makes us a different, and what turns us into a long term partner. We have done that on many occasions. We’ve argued against our personal, our institutional interests in favour of the needs of our partner, because we recognise that the long term value that will be created is going to come from their success.

[00:27:29] Lucie: This might come back to impact here, yeah.

[00:27:31] David: And again, we can only do that because of our nature as a social enterprise. If we needed to maximise our profit, we couldn’t do that. As long as we are still fundamentally profitable, we can argue against our interests, as long as we remain profitable.

And that’s the key point. We don’t need to maximise profit. And so Collaborative by Nature is another principle which is only made possible through, if you want, our approach as a social enterprise. And it’s really liberating sometimes to argue against your own personal interests because you can see why it is in the collective benefit.

And that’s the heart of Collaborative by Nature. It’s not about being, as we said, consciously collaborative, or it’s not against being competitive. We can be competitive and we are competitive in many contexts, but it is about being able to prioritise and just sort of be collaborative at our own expense, because it’s to the benefit of collaboration.

[00:28:43] Lucie: In terms of the, the systems that IDEMS builds like the apps. So I think the structures there are built so that they can be collaborative and we use tools like online tools which allow multiple people to work on them at the same time.

[00:28:59] David: This relates to many of our other principles, you know, Open by Default is an obvious one. But more than that, Local Innovation, again, it’s this ability to then enable the collaboration to happen at different levels, to enable people to innovate locally, rather than us owning that innovation and so on.

A lot of our principles tie into Collaborative by Nature and are affected by Collaborative by Nature. And I suppose, you know, maybe the thing to finish on is really this aspect that, you know, internally it’s central, you know, there’s this internal collaboration which is central to many of our other principles, but this external collaboration, to be able to value the collaborations which are built over the organisational maximisation of interest is a really important element of collaborative by nature.

And those two elements of internal collaboration, external collaboration, this is one of the reasons that IDEMS exists as an organisation, is because I believe in it very strongly. I believe this is what’s needed more widely and I don’t see it within other organisations. I wish there were more organisations that were collaborative by nature but it’s very difficult within our society.

We are fighting the trend here and I would argue, I’ve said this before when I’ve talked about IDEMS as a company, we don’t make our life easy. Collaborative by nature, you know, as mathematical scientists, we are not afraid of doing things which others perceive as being hard. Collaborative by nature is hard.

In our communities, in our societies, for an organisation to be collaborative by nature, it is hard. I hope that in the future we can demonstrate that it can out compete and that therefore it should be supported and enabled and others should be able to grow in that, in that vein. But it’s a difficult principle. It’s a very, very difficult principle for us as an organisation.

[00:31:12] Lucie: Yeah, I, had taken it much more narrowly before so it’s, it’s been interesting.

[00:31:16] David: Well, thanks for the discussion. This has been fun.