Collective Solutions To Collective Needs
“Information is abundant, skills are not. Knowing about something rarely means knowing how to do it. There is a huge difference between learning for knowledge and learning for skills. The latter requires practice. A lot of practice. (Just think if you could learn to ride a bike by reading a book about how to ride a bike.)” Maxim Dedushkov, founder of Holis, prepares for a major challenge by considering the craftmanship of deep collaboration.
By Maxim Dedushkov, founder of Holis
Photo: Annie Spratt/Unsplash
When I talk about collaboration, I often bring in carpentry as an analogy. Carpentry, in my view, is the art of joinery. You can join 2 pieces of wood in many ways. Some of those will last just a couple of hours, some forever. Some are rude, some are beautiful. The art of collaboration is the art of connecting people and creating clear rules of how we work together.
In theory, collaboration brings new perspectives and new knowledge, it brings more capacity to solve challenges. As Yuval Harari describes in his book Sapiens, large-scale human cooperation is basically our superpower as a species, and as we became better at it, we became the most successful (or dangerous) species on Earth. Fostering collaboration in any project working on complicated or complex challenges promises to yield better solutions. In theory.
By contrast, the practice of collaboration is a human affair, complicated by all the disorderly but marvelous psychology that makes us human. It can become messy and even unpleasant quickly. In collaboration, there will always be tension between individual ideas and collective needs. And as we move forward in the project, they become stronger. Unless there is some counter-force, individuals will move towards the path of least resistance, i.e. doing what they think is right, not what the collective requires. This is not a problem situation with a solution. It is a paradoxical situation that will always exist.
The only "solution" is to create a force that counterbalances the individual and helps make it as easy as possible to contribute to the collective needs. This means constant work throughout the project. The aim is to increase the capacity of the individual and the team to work together and to be able to live with the contradictions and tensions that arise, rather than trying to resolve them immediately or divide them into factions.
What’s the difference between a job well done and a job done like meh? What’s the difference between a team mood of curious and energetic excitement and of anxious just_get_away_with_it? What’s the difference between having ideas based on real insights and just a canvas full of sticky notes?
There is no simple answer to these questions but I’m pretty sure it’s not the latest canvas, playbook, toolkit, framework either. These tools can be useful, but they don’t make the difference. The answer is rather to be found in individual intention and the dynamics of the team.
I’m sure you can find scientific papers that will prove my point. And I’m pretty sure you can also find others that will confute it. For the sake of the clarity of my thoughts, I will avoid this rabbit hole. At least for now. I’m speaking from my own 17-year experience of founding and running projects/teams and designing/running workshops.
People make the difference. It sounds trite, I know. Nevertheless, when it comes to real teams and projects this obvious fact disappears like toilet paper during the first wave of covid. Choosing the people you work or learn with is probably the most powerful way to make an impact on the end result. This is why we have an application and selection procedure at Holis. Of course, it would be easier to grant access for anyone to our courses. Less work for us, more participants, more money.
Teams are even more important than people. Even people with the best intentions will underperform in a bad team and vica versa. Set and setting seem to be as important in the case of work/learning as when your drop your acid/shrooms. Yet I see people rushing to a project’s tasks as teenagers to the free booze at a wedding. It rarely ends up well. Setting up teams and working out the rules that will govern them is something I’m personally obsessed with. There are just a few things that are more powerful than a team with the right intention.
Information is abundant skills are not. Knowing about something rarely means knowing how to do it. There is a huge difference between learning for knowledge and learning for skills. The latter requires practice. A lot of practice. (Just think if you could learn to ride a bike by reading a book about how to ride a bike.) At Holis participants are always learning by doing. And by doing I mean projects that have real challenges, clients, stakeholders, budgets and all the messy and complex parts of real life.
And since at Holis we hate waste, we channel the cognitive energy that is released during our courses to help communities in need.
General information
Holis is a series of summer schools across Europe. It’s a learning experience that develops soft skills while the participants work on real social challenges. This way they funnel the cognitive capacity and motivation of the participants to help rural communities. The outcomes of the summer schools are implemented by their local partners in different parts of Europe. A felt factory saved from decay by a new strategy, scenarios to keep senior citizens economically and socially active, and the rebranding of a whole region through food and agricultural products are the most recent success stories of the Holis School.
This year you can join them by applying to the Holis Summer School in the Visegrad region by the 8th of June. The main topic is early childhood development, as a part of a bigger project called Places to Grow, where ECD organizations from Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are currently collectively working on potential solutions that might cause real changes.
More info here.
Holis Summer School/Photo: Holis