243 – Individualism and Collaboration

0:00Hi and welcome to the item is Quadcast. My name is Lucy he's a group plan L. I'm a social impact scientist and anthropologist and I'm here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of items. Hi Lucy, so what are we discussing today? Well again it came out of another podcast episode you've had but the tension and the relationship between individualism we live in a very individualistic society and items is big motivation of encouraging people to be collaborative. We have a principle collaborative by nature. Yeah it's an interesting tension. Absolutely but another of the principles is enabling opportunity and that's very much more at the individual level. It is not just at the individual level but it does include the fact that we want to enable individuals to excel to grow, to individually progress and succeed. I guess there's a sort of question here of what are the limits of individualism and how are we

1:03defining collaboration? I think the interesting thing is that as you say many of our societies in the UK and many European and American sort of Western societies individualism has really risen in recent years. When I say recent I'm talking about the last 100 years or more relatively recent in the long scale of history and in many of the other contexts we work the African cultures, one of the things that unites many of them is the fact the collaboration and the fact that they are much more community focused. They have much stronger communities and often that leads to sacrifices or sacrificing elements of the individual for the coherence for the good of the community. And that's an interesting tension but it doesn't mean that individuals are always oppressed and cannot succeed. And this is I think important to recognise that actually strong communities

2:08there are wonderful examples of this can support and enable the success of their members of their community and being part of that community and contributing to the community is all tied in to that success. Even in Europe this is traced back in many ways where communities succeed or fail based partly on the collaboration within that community as well as success of individuals. So there is this in Italy, cooperatives are very well known for some of the successes they've had in a whole range of different areas where they've successfully grown and promoted themselves and made an Italy brand became synonymous with quality but that was a very cooperative process rather than individual process. So there's wonderful examples from within Europe as well and of course in the US there's these instances of individual factories which are community owned or

3:09by the workers actually outperforming individual factories which are more structured. So it is not a fact that collaboration is always in competition with individual success. This is an interesting certainly not a contradiction to the collaborative by nature and yet looking to enable individuals to grow and to succeed within those structures but it is often about compromise and that's I think one of the really interesting features which when we take a really individualistic perspective we very rarely talk about the importance of compromise compromises seen as a bad thing. Yes for individualism. For individualism where I was actually from a community perspective, from a collaboration perspective compromise is a very good thing being able to know where

4:10it is acceptable to compromise and one of the things you don't want to compromise on and being able to have that flexibility of recognizing that in different contexts you might compromise on different things. So I'm thinking of some of the researchers we support in West Africa who many of them well most of them are all working with farmer organisations or with farmers and so the ideal is that they co-create that they really collaborate in order to create a research project and I think they're definitely there's the whole compromise situation which is necessary and yet at the same time the researcher obviously wants to further their own career and so has those sort of individualistic goals that they need to serve but of course the farmers or whoever in the communities the relevant member there they also have their own perspective their own needs and therefore you're looking for the synergies if you're taking collaborative approach you're actually recognizing and trying to cultivate the synergies where this can be synergistic where I was

5:11in the individual approach individualistic approach everybody should look out for their own interests and there's times when each of these it's not as with many of our principles it's not that one is good and the other is bad it's that they both have strengths and weaknesses and so recognizing that tension and working within it and trying to serve both within it is a really interesting challenge but that's at the heart of what good collaboration is yeah yeah and I think this is something where the simplicity of thinking in an individualistic way sometimes loses that nuance and that nuance is something which I believe in our societies at the moment in the UK in the US in Europe more broadly there is a growing recognition of the importance of that nuance it is something which is needed in our societies to be recognized more to be nurtured to

6:16be built on and maybe not everybody agrees with that but it is something where there is certainly a community within these societies that are looking to build in these contexts of nuance of collaboration and I guess within that collaboration term yeah in order to successfully collaborate basically you have to recognize what everyone's needs are how they are individualistic whether that's an individual as an actual sole person or whether it's them as an individual community or something yeah because if you don't recognize this then it's very difficult to get these synergistic relationships which means you often get sort of relationships which exploit or which extract and that's something we're seeing more and more particularly recognition around the technologies which are created which are extractive and are creating these exploitative relationships yep a historic way if you go back in these more developed environments there is this

7:18continual tension between you know your unions which is sort of representing a collective and your employers if you want to represent in the individual interests and that's tension which is well known which is framed in European and American history in different ways it's also an oversimplification of the broader I guess the broader societal structures around collaboration versus competition and the advantage of not seeing it in black and white one is good the other is bad maybe one of the last things that I think would be interesting for us to discuss on this is we came into this discussion partly from a general perspective and looking at it within the context where we work but I think that there's a very interesting perspective related to the technologies and the roles that technologies play within supporting individual or collaboration and how we see

8:24technology interacting with this yeah okay tell me more well one of the discussions which happens a lot is what jobs would be lost because of let's say the new AI technologies large language models being able to do things which otherwise were the tasks of maybe junior employees there's this sort of step work that actually a lot of companies who employing a lot less junior employees because they're using AI for those tasks yeah and if we look at that and we think about technology replacing individuals then you're sort of actually setting up this competition between the technology and the individuals for the work and there are a lot of what I hear in the news is framed in that sense whereas if you frame the technology and the human effort as a collaborative

9:28process each individual can achieve more because of the advances in technology yeah it should be an enabler rather than a competitor or something exactly and that means that the work that can be done could be more so we as a society could be more ambitious in our goals in what we're trying to achieve in how we're trying to achieve it then we could have been without technology enablers but that requires us to think about how we're creating technologies and using technologies maybe differently and what role they play in society and where do we see ourselves actually you know where do we see funding going in in which ways I'd give a very simple example of this but it comes up with a lot education if we think about school education there's a huge expense at the moment to have all the teachers what do we see five ten fifteen twenty fifty years down the line do we see

10:30that expense going up going down staying constant as a society what do we want these are really interesting questions for us to think about we certainly I don't believe anyone would like to just bury their head in the sand and say the technology should not be impacting education no so the question is are we looking at technology to say oh we can make education more cost efficient and reduce that education burden to society because of technology and there are people who talk like that and that's not what I hope what I hope is that at least we see the education the human element as being a constant and where we're then enhancing the quality of the education where we're enabling ourselves to do more with that investment and in the ideal well what if there

11:32are other areas of society where we could say when we as society at a societal level could be actually putting more into education because it's actually a really foundational piece of a successful society and so maybe it's something where you know despite the fact that the technology is enhancing the education if we as society also invested more human effort into that that could really be symbiotic with the advancing technology and actually enable us to achieve much better outcomes which then serve society in other ways so these are the big picture discussions which do relate to as societies deciding of course each teacher is an individual who may lose their job who may have their job change and so on but that thinking about the collective what can we decide as a society related to how we frame the use of technology I think it's really related to this broader discussion on individualism versus collaboration and just to give you a completely

12:39different example of this and because I work in agro college I'm allowed to I was thinking also in terms of personhood and I know in some countries they've legalized what legally defined as persons sort of rivers and things like that and that's exactly the same sort of idea of how can it be how can we think through the use of the river or something differently so that it can be more a collaborative thing rather than just an extractive well this person's going to take that this is the thing that is a really really powerful other way of thinking about this because the recognitions of our natural resources and how these relate to society and ownership you know these really interesting and difficult questions do you own the river because it's on your land these are really wonderful questions and if you own the river that's on your land and someone diverts the water to go across different piece of land what does that mean are these are so

13:40interesting it is yeah interesting conversations and interesting thoughts so thank you very much David no thank you it's a really interesting topic and I mean a nice discussion you