“THE MIRACULOUS OPTION IS THAT WE WORK THINGS THROUGH TOGETHER”

I first became interested in the potential of collaboration as the result of an inspiring experience I had in 1991 in South Africa. At the time, I was working at the London headquarters of the energy company Royal Dutch Shell, where I was responsible for developing global social-political-economic scenarios: alternative stories about what could happen in the company’s future business environment. One year earlier, the white government of F. W. de Klerk had released Nelson Mandela from prison and began negotiations to end apartheid and to move to democracy. Two professors at the University of the Western Cape, Pieter le Roux and Vincent Maphai, had the idea of using the Shell scenario methodology to think through how South Africans could effect their national transition. They invited me to provide methodological guidance to this effort. This is how I came to facilitate the Mont Fleur Scenario Exercise.

Le Roux and Maphai decided to do this scenario work not with a team made up only of their colleagues (as we did at Shell) but also with leaders from across the whole segregated society: politicians, businesspeople, trade unionists, community leaders, and academics; black and white; opposition and establishment; from the left and right. I worked with this team over four weekends in 1991 and 1992. I was amazed at how, in spite of their profound differences, they were able to collaborate happily and creatively and to make an important contribution to South Africans achieving a successful transition.

My experience at Mont Fleur upended my understanding of what was possible in the world and in my own life. On my first trip to Cape Town, I heard a joke that exemplified what I was witnessing. “Faced with our country’s overwhelming problems,” it went, “we have two options: a practical option and a miraculous option. The practical option is for all of us to get down on our knees and pray for a band of angels to come down from heaven and solve our problems for us. The miraculous option is that we work things through together.” I loved this joke and repeated it many times over the years that followed. I could see that through collaborating with their enemies, South Africans had succeeding in enacting the miraculous option.

I was so enthusiastic about what I had experienced at Mont Fleur that I quit my job at Shell and emigrated to Cape Town to devote myself to following the thread that I had picked up there. I was certain that collaborating was the best way to address complex challenges. Over the subsequent decades, I led tens of large collaborations all over the world, cofounded a social enterprise to support this work, and wrote three books on the principles and practices that my colleagues and I were discovering.

From time to time over these years, however, I had experiences that raised questions in my mind about the collaborative option. For example, in 2003, agricultural activist Hal Hamilton and I initiated a large-scale collaboration called the Sustainable Food Lab. This effort, which is still going strong, brings together companies such as Unilever, Walmart, and Starbucks, and nongovernmental organizations such as WWF, Oxfam, and the Rainforest Alliance, plus farmers and researchers and government agencies, to accelerate progress toward a more sustainable global food system.

During our first months of convening the initial members of the Sustainable Food Lab, Hamilton and I talked with many food system leaders about whether they would be interested in participating in such an undertaking. Many of them thought it would enable them to make better progress on their own sustainability objectives, and by mid-2004 we had a large and diverse enough team that we could launch the lab.

But one aspect of our convening work struck me: the thoughtful arguments made by three organizations that we invited to join but that declined. One global company said they would prefer to pursue sustainability on their own as a way to obtain a competitive advantage. An international workers’ organization said they would be interested in being part of such a group but not until they had built up their power and could engage with the participating corporations as equals. And a government agency said they saw their role as working apart from other organizations so that they could make and enforce regulations without being accused of bias. All three of these actors had reasons why collaboration was not their best option.

Meanwhile, on and off from 2000 to 2012, I tried to help some Venezuelan colleagues organize a broad multistakeholder collaboration to address the severe economic, social, and political challenges facing their country. But time after time, our efforts ran up against the unwillingness of Hugo Chávez’s revolutionary socialist government to participate in our project, so it never got off the ground.

In 2011, a congressman from a Venezuelan opposition party told me a story about the extraordinary level of political non-collaboration. “The government and the opposition members of Congress used to be able to work together in certain committees,” he said, “but now the government refuses to talk with us at all. The only conversation I have had recently with a Chavista was in the privacy of a men’s room in the Congress, where one of them standing at the adjacent urinal whispered to me, ‘If you guys get into power, don’t forget that we’re friends, right?’”

What I eventually understood was that the refusal of the Chávez government to participate in our project was not because they didn’t understand the principles or opportunities of collaboration. We didn’t need to explain it again, more carefully and convincingly. They refused because their strategy was based in part on an opposite logical premise: that demonizing their political opponents as treasonous capitalist elites helped them retain the support of their popular base. In this case, then, from the perspective of the Chavistas (like other politicians in other countries), collaboration was not their best option.

And over this period, while I was trying to help other people with their collaborations, I was having problems in my own. I had lots of difficulties getting along with people, and long, quiet, sad estrangements. Three times I had a drawn-out conflict with a different one of my business partners. In each case, we had disagreements that become more harsh and sour, and which we were not able to resolve. These experiences left me puzzled and embarrassed: I was worried that my inability to work out my ordinary conflicts meant that I was a fraud in guiding others to work out their extraordinary ones.