Collaborating or Cooperating?
I had the opportunity to attend a workshop last week, and this question came out in the discussion during one of the days.
Do we collaborate, or cooperate, with others on our teams, and with other teams?
It got me thinking. First of all, I wasn’t sure there was really a significant difference. But the more we talked about it, the more I realized that there is a difference. And it’s not a trivial difference. One isn’t better than the other. They’re just different, and they each offer something.
When we cooperate, we agree to work together, but on our own things.
I know how to do something, and you know how to do something. But we both need to complete our work in order to deliver whatever it is that we’re doing. So we each work on what we know, put it together, and volià! We do our own work, and we make sure it fits in with the work the others I’m cooperating with.
When we collaborate, we work together, on the same thing.
This likely sounds a bit odd. I know how to do something, and I’m pretty good at it. You also know how to do that same something, but you’re not as good as me. And, there’s something else that needs to get done. Why on Earth would we collaborate, when we could just cooperate?
The more I thought and reflected on this, the more I came to this conclusion:
When the type of work is so simple that I know how to do it myself, or it’s straight forward in the solution, I can do it myself. And I can cooperate with others who are also working on simple items. We can work together to make sure whatever it is we’re doing goes together neatly.
When the type of work doesn’t have a simple, straightforward, or obvious solution, I benefit by collaborating with others to come up with a potential solution. It’s likely a potential solution because it’s not simple, it’s not obvious, and we can’t be sure our solution will work.
In this case, it’s not about getting the most out of us, but rather getting the best out of our combined knowledge, skills, and experience.
When I cook with my wife, Kathy, and we’re following a recipe, we cooperate. I chop the onions and garlic, while she melts the butter in the saucepan. Once I’m done the onions, I go on to grilling the steak, while she sautés the onions & onions I’ve just cut in the pan with the melted butter, and adds in a bit of salt and pepper. See? That’s us cooperating.
When we’re planning a family vacation, we collaborate. For us, it’s as much about where we go, as how we get there. So while Kathy typically picks the destination on her own (or proposes a couple of ideas), we figure out how we’re going to get there together. That means we look at the map together, and think about how far we can drive before our kids drive us nuts. We look at landmarks, parks, shops, and other sights along the road and talk about which we’re going to stop at, and which we’re going to skip (which is important, because my wife would have us stopping at all of the shops). We figure out how each decision we make impacts where we’re going to spend each night, and how we can optimize the number of things we get to see and do so everyone in the family gets to see and do things that are of interest to them. This isn’t always simple. And often results in a bit of negotiating, but we do it by collaborating with each other.
Sometimes, we’ll want to research something that we’re going to pass along the way. In the context of collaborating, we’ll jump into coordinating. I’ll research the various nature walks in the park we’re going to be driving through so I can see as many waterfalls as possible. Kathy will look into the shops in the town just outside the park. We’ll have boundaries – I have to find the walks & waterfalls that we can do within three hours, while Kathy finds the three most important shops she wants to see (which typically means she picks seven or eight, and we end up stopping at ten to twelve).
While we’re cooperating, we’re leveraging our individual interests and experiences.
We keep each other, and our children, in mind – I don’t pick the crazy hard walk since our 7-year-old daughter won’t be able to keep up, while she considers the shops our fourteen-year-old son might be interested in.
While we’re collaborating, we’re building our combined understanding of what our experience will involve. We build a shared understanding of what it is we’re going to do on our vacation.
We need to do both.
When I think of how this applies to work, there are times when I need to cooperate with others, and there are times I need to collaborate with others. There are times when my work is simple enough that I can do it on my own, making sure it aligns and integrates with what my colleagues are working on. There are also times at work when I need to collaborate with others because we work in a complex environment, and I don’t have all the skills and expertise to arrive at the hypothesis that’s most likely to result in a great result.
I’d suggest that cooperating allows us to get the most out of everyone, and collaborating allows us to get the best from everyone. I believe we need both.