243 – Individualism and Collaboration

[00:00:07] Lucie: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove Planel, I’m a social impact scientist and anthropologist, and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

[00:00:17] David: Hi, Lucie. So, what are we discussing today?

[00:00:20] Lucie: Well, it came out of another podcast episode you’ve had, it’s about the tension and the relationship between individualism – we live in a very individualistic society – and IDEMS’ big motivation of encouraging people to be collaborative.

[00:00:36] David: We have a principle, “collaborative by nature”.

[00:00:38] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:00:40] David: It’s an interesting tension.

[00:00:42] Lucie: Absolutely. But another of the principles is “enabling opportunity”, and that’s very much more at the individual level.

[00:00:49] David: It is not just at the individual level, but it does include the fact that we want to enable individuals to excel, to grow, to individually progress and succeed.

[00:00:59] Lucie: I guess there’s a sort of question here of what are the limits of individualism, and how are we defining collaboration.

[00:01:05] David: I think that the interesting thing is that, as you say, in many of our societies, in the UK and many European and American sort of western societies, individualism has really risen in recent years. When I say recent, I’m talking about the last one hundred years or more, relatively recent in the long scale of history.

And in many of the other contexts we work, the African cultures, one of the things that unites many of them is the collaboration and the fact that they are much more community focused, they have much stronger communities, and often that leads to sacrifices or sacrificing elements of the individual for the coherence, for the good of the community. And that’s an interesting tension.

[00:01:56] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:01:57] David: But it doesn’t mean that individuals are always oppressed and cannot succeed. And this is, I think, important to recognise that actually strong communities – there are wonderful examples of this – can support and enable the success of their members. And being part of that community and contributing to the community is all tied into that success.

Even in Europe, this is traced back in many ways where communities succeed or fail based partly on the collaboration within that community, as well as the success of individuals. So there is this, in Italy, cooperatives that are very well known for some of the successes they’ve had in a whole range of different areas, where they’ve successfully grown and promoted themselves. The “Made in Italy” brand became synonymous with quality, but that was a very cooperative process rather than an individual process.

So there’s wonderful examples from within Europe as well, and of course in the US there’s these instances of individual factories, which are community owned or owned by the workers, actually outperforming individual factories, which are more hierarchically structured. So, it is not a fact that collaboration is always in competition with individual success.

This is an interesting concept, certainly not a contradiction, to be collaborative by nature, and yet looking to enable individuals to grow and to succeed within those structures. But it is often about compromise. And that’s, I think, one of the really interesting features, which when we take a really individualistic perspective, we very rarely talk about the importance of compromise. Compromise is seen as a bad thing.

[00:03:57] Lucie: Yeah, for individualism.

[00:03:58] David: For individualism. Whereas actually, from a community perspective, from a collaboration perspective, compromise is a very good thing. Being able to know where it is acceptable to compromise and what are the things you don’t want to compromise on, and being able to have that flexibility of recognising that, in different contexts, you might compromise on different things.

[00:04:22] Lucie: So I’m thinking of some of the researchers we support in West Africa, who, many of them, well, most of them are all working with farmer organisations or with farmers. And so the ideal is that they co-create, that they really collaborate in order to create a research project. And there, I think, there’s definitely the whole compromise situation, which is necessary.

And yet, at the same time, the researcher obviously wants to further their own career and so has those sort of individualistic goals that they need to serve. But of course the farmers or whoever in the communities, the relevant members there, they also have their own perspective, their own needs.

[00:05:00] David: And therefore you are looking for the synergies. If you are taking a collaborative approach, you are actually recognising and trying to cultivate the synergies where this can be synergistic. Whereas, in the individual approach, individualistic approach, everybody should look out for their own interests.

And there’s times when each of these, as with many of our principles, it’s not that one is good and the other is bad, it’s that they both have strengths and weaknesses. And so recognising that tension, and working within it and trying to serve both within it, is a really interesting challenge. But that’s at the heart of what good collaboration is.

[00:05:43] Lucie: Yeah, yeah.

[00:05:46] David: And I think this is something where the simplicity of thinking in an individualistic way sometimes loses that nuance. And that nuance is something which I believe in our societies at the moment in the UK, in the US, in Europe, more broadly, there is a growing recognition of the importance of that nuance, it is something which is needed in our societies to be recognised more, to be nurtured, to be built on.

Maybe not everybody agrees with that, but it is something where there is certainly a community within these societies that are looking to build in these contexts of nuance of collaboration.

[00:06:31] Lucie: And I guess, within that collaboration too. I mean, in order to successfully collaborate, basically you have to recognise what everyone’s needs are, how they are individualistic, whether that’s an individual as a natural sole person, or whether it’s them as an individual community or something.

[00:06:48] David: Yeah, because if you don’t recognise this, then it’s very difficult to get these synergistic relationships.Which means that you often get sort of relationships which exploit or which extract. And that’s something we are seeing more and more, particularly recognition around the technologies which are created, which are extractive and are creating these exploitative relationships.

[00:07:12] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:07:13] David: And historically, if you go back in these more developed environments, there is this continual tension between, you know, your unions, which is sort of representing a collective, and your employers, if you want, who are representing the individual interests. And that’s a tension which is well known and which is framed in European and American history in different ways.

It’s also an oversimplification of the broader societal structures around collaboration versus competition, and the advantage of not seeing it in black and white, one is good, the other is bad.

Maybe one of the last things that I think would be interesting for us to discuss on this is: we came into this discussion partly from a general perspective and looking at it within the context where we work. But I think that there’s a very interesting perspective related to the technologies and the roles that technologies play within supporting individuals or collaboration, and how we see technology interacting with this.

[00:08:27] Lucie: Yeah. Okay, tell me more.

[00:08:29] David: Well, one of the discussions which happens a lot is: what jobs will be lost because of, let’s say, the new AI technologies, Large Language Models being able to do things which otherwise were the tasks of maybe junior employees? There’s this sort of statement that actually a lot of companies are employing a lot less junior employees because they’re using AI for those tasks.

[00:08:54] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:08:55] David: And if we look at that and we think about technology replacing individuals, then you are sort of actually setting up this competition between the technology and the individuals for the work. And a lot of what I hear in the news is framed in that sense. Whereas, if you frame the technology and the human effort as a collaborative process, each individual can achieve more because of the advances in technology.

[00:09:35] Lucie: Yeah, it should be an enabler rather than a competitor or something.

[00:09:39] David: Exactly. And that means that the work that can be done could be more. So, we, as a society, could be more ambitious in our goals and what we’re trying to achieve, and how we’re trying to achieve it, than we could have been without the technology enablers.

But that requires us to think about how we’re creating technologies and using technologies maybe differently and what role they play in society, and where do we see ourselves actually, you know, where do we see funding going and in which ways?

I’ll give a very simple example of this, but it comes up a lot: education. If we think about school education, there’s a huge expense at the moment to have all the teachers. What do we see 5, 10, 15, 20, 50 years down the line? Do we see that expense going up, going down, staying constant? As a society, what do we want? These are really interesting questions for us to think about. Certainly, I don’t believe anyone would like to just bury their head in the sand and say technology should not be impacting education. No.

And so the question is, are we looking at technology to say, “oh, we can make education more cost efficient, and reduce that education burden to society because of technology”? And there are people who talk like that. And that’s not what I hope. What I hope is that, at least, we see the education, the human element, as being a constant and where we are then enhancing the quality of the education, where we’re enabling ourselves to do more with that investment.

And what if there are other areas of society where we could say when we, as society, at a societal level, could be actually putting more into education because it’s actually a really foundational piece of a successful society?

And so maybe it’s something where, despite the fact that the technology is enhancing education, if we, as society, also invested more human effort into that, that could really be symbiotic with the advancing technology and actually enable us to achieve much better outcomes, which then serves society in other ways.

So these are the big picture discussions, which do relate to, as societies deciding, of course, each teacher is an individual who may lose their job, who may have their job changed and so on. But that thinking about the collective, what can we decide as a society related to how we frame the use of technology, I think is really related to this broader discussion on individualism versus collaboration.

[00:12:37] Lucie: And just to give you a completely different example of this, and because I work in agroecology, I’m allowed to. I was also thinking in terms of personhood, and I know in some countries they’ve legalised or legally defined as “persons” sort of rivers and things like that. And that’s exactly the same sort of idea. How can we think through the use of the river differently, so that it can be more of a collaborative thing rather than just an extractive, this-person’s-gonna-take-that sort of thing.

[00:13:10] David: That is a really, really powerful other way of thinking about this because the recognition of our natural resources and how these relate to society ownership, you know, these are really interesting and difficult questions. Do you own the river because it’s on your land? These are really wonderful questions. And if you own the river that’s on your land and someone diverts the water to go across a different piece of land, what does that mean? These are so interesting.

[00:13:41] Lucie: It is, yeah, interesting conversations and interesting thoughts, so thank you very much, David.

[00:13:47] David: No, no, thank you. It is a really interesting topic and has been a nice discussion.