The magic of Cooperation

‘How too many rules at work keep you from getting things done’, by Yves Morieux of Boston Consulting Group, is one of my favourite TED Talks ever.

Through the example of a relay race, he shows:

• how cooperation - the multiplier of energy and intelligence in human efforts, which creates a whole that is more than the sum of individual parts - works and how it is necessary in order to deliver superior results in the complex business context in which we operate nowadays
• and how the ‘holy trinity of efficiency’ - clarity, measurement, accountability - that we strive for in our organisations actually hinders cooperation instead of unlocking it, and, in the end, harms productivity instead of supporting it.

When you cooperate you put your energy not in your objectively measurable individual performance (your legs), but in improving the performance of the whole group (passing the baton), where there are people with whom you are compared: it is not easy, because it goes against self preservation!

If we want to create a context beneficial for human efforts, we need to make cooperation individually profitable for people: we need to create organisations in which the performance management processes and the reward systems

• embrace fuzziness - were responsibilities overlap - instead of clarity
• what gets measured is the how instead of the what
• and accountability is not a tool to be sure to know who to blame when things go wrong.