When making collaborative decisions, think about the sea, Ancient Greece, and microbiomes

Collaborative decision-making maintains the strength of the individual while utilizing the power of the collective.

Ancient Greece understood this in the 5th century B.C. During this era, they operated individually as city-states which were frequently in conflict with each other, but this temporarily changed when a massive Persian army sought revenge against Athens.

As the Persians were traveling towards Athens, Sparta and 29 other Greek city-states, formed a military coalition. Instead of Athens leading the battle, they allowed Sparta because of their formidable hoplite army.

Nature is also a great collaborative decision-maker. Microbiomes and regenerative agriculture are great examples. The more diverse your diet is → the more diverse your microbiome is → the stronger your immune system and protection from disease are. The more diverse your agriculture is→the more resilient, nutrient-dense, and better yields it produces.

Your body is a profound collaborative decision-maker. In your collective microbiome, there are an estimated 380 trillion viruses, 38 trillion bacteria, 300 species of parasitic worms, and 100 species of fungi. Our body thrives when this diversity is maintained and when it isn’t we experience auto-immune disease, anxiety, stress, and depression.

Then, there’s the business world. When you hear talks about the importance of diversity, what companies usually are aiming for are diversity in perspective, skills, personality, and creativity. Generally speaking, this can be achieved when we focus on gender, ethnicity, and race because different people have different perspectives.

But, even when we go beyond group identities like race and gender, and break it down to the individual level, differences remain. Ask any parent with multiple children and they’ll tell you.

Or, don’t ask them, you can look at the intriguing differences within families based on a child’s birth order. For example, children born third and fourth in order (instead of first or second) are 10–18% less likely to graduate high school. Of, the 29 astronauts at Apollo, 22 of them were firstborn. And, those who are born first have three points higher IQ compared to their siblings. Three points may seem trivial but it could mean the difference between a managerial career or not.

What can we do tomorrow to improve our collaborative decision-making?

Pixar founder Ed Catmull, and other creative folks, have been devoting their entire careers to answering this question. In Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc., he contemplates:

“This tension between the individual’s personal creative contribution and the leverage of the group is a dynamic that exists in all creative environments. On one end of the spectrum, we had the genius who seemed to do amazing work on their own; on the other end, we had the group that excelled precisely because of its multiplicity of views. How, then, should we balance these two extremes, I wondered.”

Ed goes on to share methods that Pixar uses, like a Braintrust (a group of trusted advisors), and principles like candor. He equates this Braintrust group to a scientific peer review — “We believe that ideas only become great when they are challenged and tested.”

He goes on to say,

“People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. The Braintrust is valuable because it broadens your perspective, allowing you to peer-at least briefly-through others’ eyes.”

After Toy Story’s unprecedented success, Catmull found a renewed purpose for figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture. One that would enable the talents of their people, keep them happy, and not let the inevitable complexities that come with any collaborative endeavor undo them along the way.

Creativity, Inc., is Ed’s story of how he and Pixar accomplished this.

You don’t have to wait to read the book of course. You can deploy the Braintrust yourself or explore other methods like Design Thinking which has become very popular because of its ability to facilitate collaboration and creative problem-solving. Even if you are not in the traditional creative environment, I encourage you to add these methods to your repertoire.

The Design Thinking methods of Brainwriting, Brainsketching, and Dot Voting, I’ve found most useful.

These methods allow individuals to work alone first, to enrich individual creativity, then bring the group together to evolve their ideas as a collective. They help alleviate impediments to creativity like groupthink and the HIPPO effect.

The more I practice these methods, the less surprised I am when creativity doesn’t come from our designer, the boss, or the creative genius. What happens, more often than not, is that there is a spark of creativity that emerges from someone unexpected. Then, this emergent idea evolves with the help of the team.

Even if a person’s idea “sucks” it may be what’s needed for creativity to emerge. This is because, according to Catmull, all ideas suck at first:

“Creativity has to start somewhere… [and] early on, all of our movies suck. We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so — to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.”

This is a big principle to try to incorporate. Creating an environment that facilitates sharing bad ideas, and encouraging vulnerability are difficult. We are social creatures who don’t want to fall into the outgroup.

As a leader, we can be an influencer by encouraging bad ideas. This may sound weird but bad ideas can be good ideas in disguise. Recently, I heard John Vanderveen, a Product Design Lead, talk about this on a podcast. He was advocating for sharing ideas early, then told a story of how a good idea emerged from a “bad idea” about bears climbing telephone poles.

Or, there’s the story of Fred Hoyle by Carl Sagan. In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl explains how Fred’s bad ideas helped progress science:

“One of the most productive astrophysicists of our time has been Fred Hoyle. Sometimes he’s succeeded by being right before anyone else even understood that there was something that needed explaining. Sometimes he’s succeeded by being wrong-by being so provocative, by suggesting such outrageous alternatives that the observers and experimentalists feel obliged to check it out. But in many instances, what is “wrong” is partly right, or stimulates others to find out what’s right.”

Even if you get all of this right, the timing and environment need to be right. Nature takes all of this into consideration. It maintains the strength of the individual, utilizes the power of the collective, and is deeply influenced by the environment and time.

I’ll leave you with an exquisite video of this collaborative decision-making in action. It begins with a sea lion and you’ll want to see how it ends.