243 – Individualism and Collaboration

Hi and welcome to the item is Quadcast. My name is Lucy he's a group plan L. I'm a

social impact scientist and anthropologist and I'm here today with David Stern, one of

the founding directors of items. Hi Lucy, so what are we discussing today?

Well again it came out of another podcast episode you've had but the tension and the relationship

between individualism we live in a very individualistic society and items is big motivation of

encouraging people to be collaborative. We have a principle collaborative by nature. Yeah it's

an interesting tension. Absolutely but another of the principles is enabling opportunity and that's

very much more at the individual level. 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.

I guess there's a sort of question here of what are the limits of individualism and how are we

defining collaboration? I think the interesting thing is that as you say 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 100 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 fact 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 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 of their

community and being part of that community and contributing to the community is all tied in to

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 success of individuals.

So there is this in Italy, cooperatives 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

and made an Italy brand became synonymous with quality but that was a very cooperative process

rather than 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

by the workers actually outperforming individual factories which are more structured. So it is not

a fact that collaboration is always in competition with individual success. This is an interesting

certainly not a contradiction to the 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 compromises seen as a bad thing.

Yes for individualism. For individualism where I was 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 one of the things you don't want to compromise on and being

able to have that flexibility of recognizing that in different contexts you might compromise

on different things. 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 I think they're definitely there's 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 member there they also have their own perspective their own needs

and therefore you're looking for the synergies if you're taking collaborative approach you're

actually recognizing and trying to cultivate the synergies where this can be synergistic where I was

in the individual approach individualistic approach everybody should look out for their own interests

and there's times when each of these it's not 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 recognizing

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 yeah yeah 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 recognized more to be nurtured to

be built on and 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 and I guess within that collaboration term yeah in order to successfully collaborate

basically you have to recognize what everyone's needs are how they are individualistic whether that's

an individual as an actual sole person or whether it's them as an individual community or

something yeah because if you don't recognize this then it's very difficult to get these synergistic

relationships which means you often get sort of relationships which exploit or which extract and

that's something we're seeing more and more particularly recognition around the technologies

which are created which are extractive and are creating these exploitative relationships

yep a historic way 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 to represent in the individual interests and that's tension which is

well known which is framed in European and American history in different ways it's also an

oversimplification of the broader I guess 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 individual or collaboration and how we see

technology interacting with this yeah okay tell me more well one of the discussions which happens

a lot is what jobs would 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 step work that actually a lot of companies who employing a lot less junior

employees because they're using AI for those tasks yeah and if we look at that and we think about

technology replacing individuals then you're sort of actually setting up this competition between

the technology and the individuals for the work and there are 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 yeah it should be

an enabler rather than a competitor or something 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 in what we're trying to

achieve in how we're trying to achieve it then we could have been without 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 in in which ways I'd give a very simple example of this but it comes up

with 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 five ten fifteen twenty fifty 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 we certainly I don't believe anyone would like to

just bury their head in the sand and say the technology should not be impacting education no

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're then enhancing the quality of the education where

we're enabling ourselves to do more with that investment and in the ideal well 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 you know despite the fact that the technology is

enhancing the 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 serve 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 change 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 it's really related to

this broader discussion on individualism versus collaboration and just to give you a completely

different example of this and because I work in agro college I'm allowed to I was thinking also

in terms of personhood and I know in some countries they've legalized what legally defined as

persons sort of rivers and things like that and that's exactly the same sort of idea of how can it be

how can we think through the use of the river or something differently so that it can be more

a collaborative thing rather than just an extractive well this person's going to take that

this is the thing that is a really really powerful other way of thinking about this because

the recognitions of our natural resources and how these relate to society and ownership you know

these 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 different piece of land what does that mean are these are so

interesting it is yeah interesting conversations and interesting thoughts so thank you very much David

no thank you it's a really interesting topic and I mean a nice discussion

you