The Most Important Skill We Were Never Taught…

Cooperation seems like a…pretty good thing, right? Like, I grew up on Sesame Street. I know “cooperation makes it happen.” And some of the time Biblical wisdom seems to confirm this general truth. Matthew’s Gospel morphs the rabbinic saying of where two or three are gathered around the Torah the Shekinah rests on them to where two are three are gathered Christ is there. The principle is the same: God shows up when people work together.

Ecclesiastes gives us an early version of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson’s e pluribus unum when the teacher tells us: “Though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one; and a threefold cord will not break.” Ecclesiastes 4:12.

But, although it seems like a no brainer that cooperation is a good thing…it isn’t. The scriptures are decidedly ambivalent when it comes to people working together. Take the episode with the tower of Babel. That has to be the best instance of cooperation imaginable. The whole world was not only speaking as one, but they were working as one as well. This was Kumbaya writ large. You’d think God would be thrilled. But…not so much. After wanting to “make a name for themselves” by building a city with it’s tower in heaven, God looks with alarm, notes this is just the beginning, and then confuses their language and scatters people across the face of the earth.

So, cooperation is awesome…except when it isn’t. (My head hurts.)

Behind this mystery lies one of the most important crucial skills a leader has to develop: learning when (and when not) to cooperate.

Game theorists have also noticed this tension. Robert Axelrod pitted computers against one another playing the itereated prisoner’s dilemma game in which the best outcome for the team is cooperation but the best outcome for the individuals comes through betrayal. While Axelrod assumed the meanest, nastiest, and most complicated strategy for playing the game would win, to his surprise a nice but tough strategy known as TIT FOR TAT (TFT) proved the strongest time and again. TFT always sought cooperation, but TFT will break with cooperation if you betray it. But after defecting once, TFT models forgiveness by moving back to cooperation.

More recently Martin Nowak wondered if the punitive side of TFT was even necessary. Nowak, who teamed up with theologian Sarah Coakley on many occasions, observed people playing a multiple player version of the prisoner’s dilemma known as the public goods game. Like the prisoner’s dilemma it’s best in a public goods game if everyone cooperates with one another, but players individually benefit by not cooperating. Nowak added the twist of allowing players to punish and reward one another during play. His team found that while punishment did create the conditions for cooperation to emerge, groups that cooperated without using punishment flourished in comparison. Because of this Nowak quips: “punish and perish.”

But again we face the same conundrum: sometimes it seems best to cooperate (Nowak’s book is called SuperCooperators) and sometimes it seems important to push back at least a little bit.

Wharton’s Adam Grant helps us solve this riddle wrapped in a mystery and shrouded in confusion. In Give and TakeGrant takes us through the strange phenomenon that generous people, givers, tend to be the least and most successful people in comparison to folks he describes as matchers and takers. https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/04/10/adam-grant-give-and-take/ The key difference between givers on the bottom and givers on the top: givers on the bottom give to everyone whether they behave like givers, matchers, or takers. Givers on the top behave generously towards givers and matchers, but they behave like matchers towards selfish takers. Successful givers, in other words, always want to be generous, but they try to lavish this kindness on people who will carry it forward to others, too. When they realize they are dealing with someone who will take advantage of them, wise givers pull back and behave more like matchers.

And this is actually what happens in scripture as well. Why did God crush the cooperative spirit of the builders of Babel? The most important line in that story: “Let us make a name for ourselves.” The spirit of these tower builders isn’t communally focused but inwardly focused. They are behaving like selfish takers rather than generous givers.

Compare this to the book of Acts when the early church is living together and, with the exception of Ananias and Sapphira, holding everything in common. Luke lifts up this selfless generosity as a paradigm for good cooperation.

Cooperation itself is neutral. It’s the end of cooperation, the telos, the goal that counts.

And figuring out whether you are living in Babel or Jerusalem is one of the most crucial leadership skills we were never taught. I suspect many leaders who last figure out intuitively when they are working with generous, giving or matching communities and when they are dealing with people behaving like more self-interested takers. But anyone can learn how to do this. The hardest part may be in becoming honest about the kind of behaviors you are seeing in your community.