Speaker 2
Hey, welcome back to Wisdom from the Top. I'm Guy Roz. Today I'm speaking with entrepreneur and business leadership author Margaret Heffernan. And one of the things Margaret's written a lot about drawing on her own management experience is the idea that incentivizing collaboration within organizations is almost always more effective than rewarding competition. I mean, it's very clear, and there's a gigantic kind of history of this, that
Speaker 1
you solve problems when you bring together people who are very different from each other and who really know and trust each other. think what's so interesting is that people don't really understand that collaboration requires more finesse than just putting a bunch of people in a room together. It doesn't just mean we've got six people on the problem instead of one. For collaboration really to deliver its rewards, you have to have different kinds of people who are allowed to invest time in getting to know each other and who can really share an ambition for the project rather than just for themselves. where actually there's a deep sense that, well, if you do well, you'll make me look smaller, that it is a zero-sum game. That creates a culture in which it's impossible really to get the benefits of collaboration. So how
Speaker 2
do you think organizations can encourage that kind of culture?
Speaker 1
Well, it's a really hard muscle to develop. And like most muscles, it takes quite a lot of practice and a lot of self-monitoring in terms of noticing when is my competitive instinct going to get in my own way. what point is my snappy response or my kind of put down or my distancing from somebody who may be better at something than I am. At what point is that actually harming me? And you know, I've done this talk about super chickens and how, you know, very- Tell
Speaker 2
the story, because this is the William Muir research,
Speaker 1
right? Yeah. So the super chicken story, which is what has come to be known as, is about an evolutionary biologist at Purdue University. Really wanted to understand productivity. And he studied chickens. And so he did a very simple, very beautiful experiment where he put an averagely productive flock of very healthy chickens to one side in his sort of farm yard laboratory and let them do whatever chickens do all day long for six generations. but then he specially designed a different flock of the individually most productive chickens. So you could say he selected the super chickens to construct a super flock, and with each generation he selected the most productive for breeding. And at the end of the six generations, of course, the whole gist of the experiment was to compare them. Well, the average flock was now more productive than ever before, and all the chickens were really healthy and plump and fully feathered and happy. The super flock was a completely different story because all but three were dead.
Speaker 2
These were the best performing chickens, but they killed
Speaker 1
each other. And Mio's conclusion was that the productivity of the few had been achieved by suppressing the productivity of the rest. Yeah.
Speaker 1
we see this everywhere. You know, this sense that, well, if you do well, I lose something. And I think, to be honest, we all have a little bit of super chicken in us. And I notice it myself sometimes. And noticing it allows me to restrain it. But at work, of course, there are lots of external pressures that kind of keep rousing the inner super chicken, if you like. competition for promotion, competition for project, competition for bonuses, forest ranking, that kind of thing. And what it does is it means that for me to contribute to the whole generously feels like self sacrifice. Yeah. And very few people are up for that. Yeah.
Speaker 2
But the research and the evidence is clear that collaborative organizations function better. I remember I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was an incredible chef. He's telling me about his early days working in kitchens where other cooks would literally sabotage your work. They would throw more salt in your sauce or when you were looking. And that, to me, is not a failure of individuals. It's a failure of management.
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's absolutely true. And I've heard very similar stories from some of my friends who work in advertising. You know, that very often ad agencies will put three teams together to come up with separate pitches for a client. And those three teams will try to subvert each other. You know, they'll steal each other's materials or they won't, crucially, they won't share information, which might help the other team in the kind of design that they're doing. And the agency as a whole doesn't win the pitch. So now everybody's lost because nobody wants anybody else to win. And so, you know, this focus on individualism, rather than the good of the whole department, or the good of the whole company, you know, this becomes a very big problem. And it's one reason why I think we've seen a little bit more emphasis on purpose, people talking about the North Star, and so on. It's also why we've seen a little bit more realistic conversation about employee ownership.
Speaker 1
Because certainly some of the most collaborative organizations that I know and have worked with and written about are ones where people understand. actually, if we win this pitch since we all own the company, it doesn't really matter who because we all share in the success of it. I think this is quite important that you have to think about structurally, what is the organization doing to amp up collaboration and to make people understand that to the degree they help each other and share information, everybody wins. It's
Speaker 2
very hard to do, right? So if you want to create a collaborative environment where one doesn't exist, where competition has been rewarded, how do you begin to make that transition?
Speaker 1
Well, I certainly think that how you reward people is really crucial. I certainly think having a stake in the business helps people think that way. I think what's also very striking is that when you have one or two people in leadership positions who are clearly generous, trustworthy, good at calling out the success and achievement of others, that can be very contagious. And most crucial of all, I think, is just the sense that, you know, the company isn't a war zone. You don't go into work every day for a fight for survival. And it's been really striking to me watching the enormous cultural change, for example, in Microsoft, such as Nadella became CEO. Prior to that, you had to deeply, deeply, deeply competitive human beings that I'm not saying Nadella isn't competitive. But you know, I knew a lot, I with Microsoft, I knew a lot of people in those earlier days. And there was a sort of sense that your triumph is my loss. And I'm going to get you for it. And the consequence of that became kind of painfully obvious. I mean, when Netscape went public, Microsoft didn't even have a browser in development. How could they have missed the Internet? Right. They never developed really robust database technology, although the whole of the Internet runs on databases. They came late to mobile. They came late to games. You know, and so these were really big, important misses for the most important software company in the world. And a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it was attributable to the fact that people would not share ideas. And I think what's been really stunning is how profoundly the culture of Microsoft has changed. I think what's been so impressive is it wasn't just a thin, let's all be nice to each other kind of strategy. It was a very deep working through of, if we orient ourselves differently to the world and to each other what benefits derived from that. I think the incredible success of Microsoft in the last five years has a huge lesson in it for the companies that could dare to pay attention.
Speaker 2
probably five to 10 to 15 years ahead of their time and are now. So you were sort of predicting the future 20 years ago, and then I guess it made sense for you to write a book about navigating the future, which is your new book called Uncharted. And I guess, I mean, I don't want to speak for you, but basically you open the book by saying that we are obsessed with trying to predict the future and the way we think you can predict the future is actually wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1
and it's, I think there are lots and lots of reasons that we think about the future incorrectly. One is we have this mantra that history repeats itself. And it really doesn't. And you only have to talk to a serious historian to learn this. What we do when we look at history is we are drawn to the similarities, but it's actually the differences that matter. Beautiful example of this was, you know, during the so-called Arab Spring when Americans and Europeans looked at this as being like the Prague Spring, for example. Like the fall of the
Speaker 2
Berlin Wall or something.
Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. And so this was the dawn of democracy. So they were very drawn to their own kind of favorite myths or historical events, ideologically, kind of events. It was a deeply, deeply misleading analogy. In particular, calling it the Arab Spring, blinded people to the degree to which in each country something very different was happening. Tunisia was not Egypt, which was not Libya, which was not Syria. And it is a fantastic failure of foreign policy to have been so drawn by an analogy. Forecasters do their best, but models, of course, let us down because models are simplified views of the universe. But as Paul Krugman once said, often what gets left out of models is more important than what's in them. And so again, the issue of willful blindness comes up because models are based on the working assumptions, which of course are drawn from the past. And this is as true of economic models as the models on which AI work, which is you're dealing with a historical data set and correlating to historical patterns. But therefore, what they're not good at is change. And what is the future all about? The future is all about change. And so our problem in thinking about the future is we tend to ignore what we don't want to see. We tend to simplify it. And in all of that, what we blind ourselves to is the complexity and the contingencies, which really drive what will happen next.