One of my recently favourite quotes is:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In my mind, a good agile team works in this fashion. The team has a shared vision, a goal and everyone is empowered to make choices they feel contributes to progress to the shared goal.

With my recent post on collaboration, I have been thinking about how a concept like this applies within a truly collaborative environment. In the quote, there is clearly a group of people and one of them wants to build a ship. We do not know what the rest of the group desires. In the context of traditional leadership, what the rest of the group wants is importance mainly in the context of understanding how their wants and needs align with those of the ones in leadership.

Within this context, collaboration is often seen as something the team does for the purpose of achieving the goals or the vision set forth by leadership.

Having been through the gauntlet of various levels of company ownership and levels of leadership, the only thing I feel I have ascertained is that I don’t really like any of it. In positions of leadership, the amount of responsibility and pressure is immense and the higher up the ladder you go, the lonelier the job is.

Being a team member with no leadership responsibilities is liberating. There is a great deal of joy in being able to physically and metaphorically shut the computer down at the end of the day and be done with the job. The rest of your life is yours. The downside, on the other hand, is that I disagreed with (at least) half the decisions made. With little power to improve the quality of life of myself or my fellow team members — mainly because ultimately what was important was the bottom line, not quality of life.

Which brings me to the question: how do you build a collaborative environment where the traditional boundaries of leaders and members are dissolved?

I find the first challenge here is finding like minded people. Having the motivation to build a highly collaborative team is only half the challenge if the people in it are trapped in traditional team roles of member or leader — or even worse, manager!

How easy is it to find someone able to see the possibility of a different way of working when we have all been stuck in the rut of us vs them, infinite growth and shareholder value? How easy is it to then learn to put aside our differences, our childhood traumas and our baggage to be able to express our authentic thoughts and desires without triggering our defence mechanisms or letting our emotional baggage leak out? How much does it matter?

Hurt people hurt people, and humanity struggles to cooperate and collaborate mainly because of our hurts — the ones we are unable to heal and recover from. Because our hurts, particularly from childhood, are so strongly seared in us, we see danger when anything close to our hurts presents itself. Like a soldier who ducks and covers when they hear a car backfire — we all go into defensive mode when something familiarly scary comes into our vicinity. Unfortunately for a lot of us, we live in a world full of little triggers — some of which may be so small that they are undetectable — but it impacts our mood and our ability to reason.