Teresa Hawkes, an artist and doctoral candidate in Neuroscience, has this to say about how she looks at the brain and the body,
'Well, after all this training I see them as groups of specialized cells that cooperate to sustain and create the experience of our lives. Further, cells are cities built by intelligent molecules, so at all levels of our being we are the result of cooperating entities.'
Which begs the question, if we are made through collaboration, then does it not follow that collaboration be our natural state?
Silos can be the opposite of collaboration, and the silos we have created for the left and the right serve only to slow or even prevent progress. No, this is not in reference to politics (though it very well could be). This is about the human brain and how we've compartmentalized worlds and created silos that hinder interdisciplinary collaboration.
Who says psychology doesn't play a role in marketing? Who ever said ethics and business were not inherently intertwined? Who says the creative and the analytical can't play nice? When did we decide that the left-brain was intended for business and the right for less 'practical' things like the arts? What other worlds have we segregated and at what cost? Who says dance has no place in issues of public health?
Here's a great example from India:
The World Health Organization agrees that filtering water by folding a cloth 8 times can be just as effective at reducing bacteria in water and saving lives as expensive, cumbersome imported equipment difficult to distribute to places at high risk of waterborne disease. Without a clear return on investment for any corporate entity, it was not government, ad agencies nor global health organizations who succeeded at spreading this simple message to millions of rural citizens in India. In fact, it was artists, singers and dancers, driving a campaign to bring educational songs and dances to places that needed this information most.
Check out Mallika Sarabhai's Ted Talk to hear this story from the horse's mouth.
Another example, this time from one of the top US business schools with a focus on global business:
In the aftermath of the Enron debacle in the early 2000's, Ángel Cabrera -the president of Thunderbird's School of Global Management- led an effort to develop a kind of Hippocratic oath for business professionals, which only now, in response to the global financial crisis, is really starting to gain widespread attention. In fact, the Harvard Business School and others around the globe adopted the oath (called the "MBA Oath"). In a recent speaking tour, Dr. Cabrera expressed his view of the changing world of business and especially, collaboration and integration of business and social change and the growing role of emerging markets.
Collaboration is at the heart of any cross-disciplinary effort. And stories like Cabrera's and Sarabhai's are starting to sound familiar in talks about the future of social media, crowdsourcing, cloud development and other collaboration-driven platforms. The question during these difficult times of business and environmental distress, is whether this 'trendy' arena of collaboration is leaning increasingly farther away from trend and instead falling more heavily on the side of global social imperative.
What say you about this now-ubiquitous idea of collaboration? Trend, new social order or something in between?
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