In the past month I've had the pleasure to attend 3 different gatherings all focused on social change. One was coming at the issue from a faith based perspective, one was using arts and cultural districts as the platform, and one was a "global forum" on Social entrepreneurship. All good stuff. Inspiring speakers, great workshops, and a whole fistful of new contacts. Personally and professionally a very invigorating time. But as someone who is also interested in larger themes and the movement of society, the experience left me less than fulfilled. The problem? Despite a compete alignment on goals and desires, there was very little cross population between these gatherings.
Shortly before the first conference, i was able to gather a meeting of a few thought leaders from various innovation efforts here in Baltimore. Great minds, great leaders, and a truly shared focus. My intent was to ask them to combine their focus on an issue that I saw developing on the horizon. We spent 90 minutes talking and never got to my ask. Why? Because they had never met.
They spent the entire time on introductions and descriptions of their programs. And at the end, they were amazed to find that there was much synergy and many opportunities for collaboration. And while that's great and good, it's also a bit concerning, particularly when you understand just how small a town Baltimore really is.
Now I'm no sociologist, so I won't try to explain all the human psychology issues about why we as people don't want to share our toys and play well together. And I'm certainly not going to go into the whole mess that is the debate on trust and faith that is at the core of many turf wars. Most certainly, I'm not going to step on the third rail of entrenched bureaucracies. But the folks I'm talking about at these conferences and meetings are brilliant and motivated and pure in intent, so they should be past all that anyway.
And yet, we're not. And I'll be darned if I can figure out why. What I can say is that the reasons that collaboration makes sense are so strong that whatever it is that's holding us back must be pretty big.
Collaboration is certainly energizing. The extensive energy around coworking, collaborative software development, scientific communities and artist colonies all speak to the the human desire to share and interact.
Even more compelling, it's also a lot cheaper. This notion is no more complex than what your parents always told you - two can live as cheaply as one. When each project has its own budget, it's own project manager, and it's own fundraising efforts, there is a lot of money going to overhead that is simply duplicative and does nothing to move an effort forward. When we link arms, we can do a a whole lot e more with a whole lot less, without having to skimp on all the vitally important back office functions that any successful enterprise must have to be able to meet its mission.
Last, but far from least, it produces a better output. Any student of the process of innovation will tell you that a well focused team will always outperform a single visionary. The entire body of knowledge in product development supports notions like rapid prototyping and crowd sourcing as proven ways to test an idea and get solid feedback.
A friend of mine theorizes that the real issue is bandwidth. That we're all just so damned busy that we just don't have time to build the bridges that we should. And I know that there are days that feel that way.
But if we really care about building communities, about economic development, about social empowerment, about reducing poverty and improving the human condition; we need to do better. We just do.
