Leading in the Digital World by Amit S. Mukherjee

Author:Amit S. Mukherjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adaptive leadership; Collaboration; Creativity; Digital transformation; Distributed teams; Leadership in business; Networked organizations; Organizational development and change; Performance management; Talent management
Publisher: The MIT Press

Compare this with the core attribute of scientific management—what does an individual do?—or even the core attribute of the quality movement—working collaboratively (primarily) with colocated colleagues. Not only must you collaborate, but you also must collaborate well at a distance—or you can’t be a high performer.

Second, recognize true collaboration is a strategic choice, not an inviolable ethical norm. The prisoner’s dilemma, a game-theory model, elegantly captures the concept of win-win collaboration.12 Two people suspected of a crime are kept apart by the police. In exchange for a lighter—or no—sentence, if either blames the other, the police get the evidence to imprison the latter for a long period (“win-lose”). If neither breaks, they both get a light sentence or none at all (“win-win”). If both break, both get longer sentences than if they had kept quiet (“lose-lose”). A lose-lose outcome usually materializes because unless they talk with and/or trust each other, win-lose is the best option for each prisoner. If they are habitual (inept!) criminals who expect to partner indefinitely, the dynamics change. The likelihood of repeatedly facing the same choices makes keeping quiet—win-win—the optimal decision for both.

Win-win, the prisoner’s dilemma suggests, happens under very specific conditions—communication, trust, and repeated interactions. Its pursuit can be valuable because working collaboratively, the parties to a negotiation may be able to identify benefits they hadn’t foreseen initially. Expanding the set of possible outcomes with these unforeseen benefits could allow both sides to give up something the other party wanted while gaining something they valued.

Win-win has become a buzzword, however. People constantly announce their intentions to seek it even when there isn’t any reason to do so. In the process, they ignore the critically important nuances mentioned above. Perhaps they believe that win-win is an ethical norm, wrongly conflating it with the common moral stricture to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This creates another problem: Reciprocating a win-lose move with a win-lose move (i.e., a tit-for-tat) is more likely to ensure long-term cooperation than repeatedly responding to repeated win-lose moves with hopeful win-win ones. Stated differently, while “an eye for an eye” could “make the world blind,” it could also prod people to collaborate.

Casual overuse of the term win-win makes true win-wins hard to achieve—for example, by precluding the tit-for-tat strategy. More importantly, overuse sharply drains the term’s meaning. The concept of ethical fading (discussed in detail in chapter 9) essentially says that virtues professed abstractly from a distance become hard to maintain in the face of precise knowledge of real stakes. Baril metaphorically described this reality: “Most people collaborate like the kings of old, to show they are magnanimous. But the very first time their interests are threatened, they revert to being kings, doing what is best for them.”

Worse, because of ethical fading, the human mind reinterprets actual behavior and wrongly remembers it as being consistent with the espoused virtue. Over time, as win/no-lose outcomes—personal victories that don’t excessively annoy others—get called win-win, true win-wins become hard to distinguish.

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