Richard Sennett on Cooperation

How many strangers have you met today? Did you meet your 5-a-day stranger target? In an orchestra or dance-troup made up of a team of egos, how do they eventually perform to a high standard night after night? Here are some notes from a talk given at the RSA tonight by the renowned sociologist Richard Sennett on complex cooperation. I took many ideas from this in terms of considering teaching techniques and the use of language in the classroom. Richard Sennett was talking about some of the themes in his new book “Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation.”

The meaning of cooperation

Cooperation is something natural to human beings - it means working with other people to accomplish things that we cannot accomplish on our own. Cooperation develops like any other human experience and it becomes more complex in terms of the situations and the challenges we face.

There is an important lesson here for economists, it is limiting and unwise to assume that economic agents are constantly competitive and engaged in an aggressive self-interested approach to maximise their own gains.

As we discover more about the social brain and the evolution of cooperation, we start to see more clearly the ways in which cooperative behaviour within and between businesses and other organisations can bring important positive externalities.

Complex cooperation requires us to work with people who are different, whom we may not understand or like - and this requires a developmental skill and an environment in which we can practice it. Cooperation can be viewed as a craft involving many different skill sets.

Complex cooperation

What helps to build complex cooperation? Sennett focused on three aspects:

1/ Good listening skills so that we better understand what people mean rather than what they say. The best orchestras or stage crews / actors have special listening skills that are honed in rehearsal, they work on their craft.

2/ Avoiding the fetish of assertion - aggressively confronting someone with an idea that demands a response. Tentative and more ambiguous ways of presenting your views invite more participation especially in teamwork activities. It is skill to hold back rather than choose a default of point-scoring in debate. We ought to frame things in a way that invites back-and-forth discussion.

3/ Sympathy is not the same as empathy - i.e. how we acknowledge and recognise other people. Empathy occurs when we find it hard to make a leap of identification - we don’t presume to say “I get what is bugging you” but we send empathic signals to another person that we are attending and recognising what they are doing or thinking. Empathy is a skill that is animated more by curiosity rather than compassion. Dispassionate interest rather than highly-charged emotion encourages empathy.

These informal skills need to be nurtured and require people to spend more time together in a particular context.

Many (but not all) modern forms of work and community tend to disable and inhibit people from learning how to cooperate.

At work, short-term time frames around modern business and in finance means that teams are rarely together more than a few weeks or months at a time. Modern forms of capitalism may have degraded our experience of work and damaged social capital. There is pressure for quick results and targets to be met - consider the rapid pace of reform and re-engineering of the National Health Service and in schools and colleges. The modal employment contract of 3-8 months in many service industries does not offer enough opportunities for cooperation. Teams thrown together for short periods may be more tolerant of the failure of team members especially if they are not around long enough to be blamed for under-performance.

I can see the argument here about shorter-term employment being a possible barrier to cooperation. But if we experience more jobs and in different locations, we broaden our awareness and experience different cultures. As teachers I am sure we have all experienced the colleague who has been in a school for decades for whom cooperation is the last thing on their mind!

Modern urban communities are full of differences but they seldom interact and increasingly they become segregated from each other (watch the short video below by Tim Harford on the ideas of Tom Schelling). But people who live in gated communities are limiting their learning experiences and can become socially impaired. They are sold a vision of security and safety from knife-wielding threatening minorities but ultimately these communities become less innovative and successful.