Paradox of scarcity: collaboration

Self-sufficiency is power. In organizations, it means the end of collaboration.

Yves Morieux and Pieter Tollman have a pragmatic definition of power.  In a group, “[…] power is the possibility of one person to make a difference in what matters to another.  Power is the influence of managing or influencing uncertainties relevant to others.” ^*

This definition is relevant to understanding collaborative work and team interdependence in large organizations. It also reveals why self-sufficiency is risky for the long-term development of team capability. Powerful individuals or groups have little incentive to collaborate. As they exert more influence on others, they trade and collaborate less. In organizations, these centers of power favor the status quo, impeding progress and learning.

In the context of the above definition, power does not mean hierarchical position. In organizations, power sharing among departments implies interdependence among them. In organizations, the primary source of power is the degree of self-sufficiency people have to carry their duties. The more self-sufficient they are, the more powerful they become relative to whom they interact. Their self-sufficiency means that inputs, demands, or interference from other groups make little or no difference to their routine. There’s little incentive for dialogue, negotiation, or collaboration, in a give-and-take fashion. Self-sufficiency leads to work in isolation.

Let me give you an example of an unsuspected “resource” that led to a project failure. A team of developers had all the tools, budget and time allocated to their project. To build a practical, user-friendly interface for their app, they lacked descriptions of the user’s profile and routine. These developers did not have direct access to final users, and depended on negotiating contacts via the sales department. As the project manager had spare budget, he decided to acquire reports on the social-economic behavior of the target audience. With that, they thought of having all “resources” available, and believed being self-sufficient to move the project faster. The sales team was only asked one “favor”; they merely needed to check if reports described the clients well. The answer was yes, the reports were correct.

Long story short, yes the app was constructed with the look-and-feel, copyright and price point matching the audience. But the sequence of screens, data input and output reflected a stereotype in the developers’s minds. Real clients were only consulted during the piloting phase, when the entire project was almost completed. Low adoption rate and high churn followed. The project team confused their apparent self-sufficiency. Scarcity might have led them to a more collaborative path.

Power sharing is not directly defined by C-suite members, but by the distribution of resources. These resources give individual groups more or less sufficiency to execute their routines. Managers can thus foster collaboration by strategically allocating resources. This encourages the innovative use of assets across diverse, correlated groups of people or departments. Next, when apparent self-sufficiency is noticed, wise managers should question whether the resources for a given task are adequate.

* Morieux, Yves, and Peter Tollman. Six simple rules: How to manage complexity without getting complicated. Harvard Business Review Press, 2014. p. 88.