I find myself asking "What is the rugby of collaboration?"

Alright, I think we need to rewind.

So, I find myself here in Wellington for just over a year. And what a year it has been.

I feel like I've had a really solid year of re-education - kind of like going back to university to have a veil removed from my eyes, which has enabled me to re-look at the dynamics of our society, economy & environment ~ how they work together, or not as the case may be sometimes.

Well, I already had a pretty good idea of how important the environment is ~ not just to myself for peace, calm & photography jaunts, but the importance of "environment services" to give them the economic term. Bleurgh. Functioning eco-systems such as wetlands, lakes & forests are integral to keeping the flow of clean water and clean air, and a climate which is in balance. I think it's pretty clear we've not done the greatest job of looking after that.

Society as a mass is a hard one to talk about, but largely over the last 60 years, we've seen not only a widening, but an acceleration of the 'haves and the have-nots'. Whilst extreme poverty has reduced, this is juxtaposed with various other problems of access to education, health, employment, gender equality, and global stability & peace have suffered and things aren't looking like they're getting better as quickly as we need.

Then there's the political hot potato of the economy. This has been one which has been getting a lot of global and personal attention recently. Now, I'm a business management graduate, I grew up with an entrepreneurial father, and I've spent probably half my working life in private businesses of some kind. I would say I had a fairly strong faith in capitalism like so many others. But of course this unregulated financial casino which has emerged from unregulated capitalism - guided by the moneyed hands & minds in the US, Europe and of course influencial throughout all other markets... well, lets be honest. #FAIL.
I realised this year that it's just a giant ponzi scheme - a house of cards that has been created to drive unparalleled economic growth to the pockets of the few, rather than the many. I'm not exactly advocating communism, lets be honest. #EPICFAIL.

So what am I advocating? Well, I think we need to take a step back and think about the fundamental building blocks of the capitalist manifesto. 'Economic growth'... sounds nice doesn't it? The economic growth that our economies rely upon, is based on debt - and debt must be repaid, or moved. At the moment, we're moving it; buying more debt for example, insuring against debt, and of course - simply creating more to pay off the interest. Now you see what I mean about a house of cards. TO take another analogy; when the music stops playing, whoever's got the most debt, doesn't have a chair left to sit on ~ America came mighty close this week.

We also have an economic growth paradigm which is not linked to the resources on which it depends. At the moment, the economies around the world are heavily reliant on oil - for transport, fuel, petro-chemical based products, the list goes on. Only problem is, it's not renewable. Once we've sucked all the oil out of the sea beds, it's gone. Then what do we do? How can we feed the growth of the economy without a fundamental lubricant of the system? No avid capitalists have quite given me the answer for this yet. This doesn't just go for oil - it's all the resources we're consuming. Every day. At a frightening rate. Then factor in population increases to around 9-10 billion over the next 20-50 years, and you start to see we're living on a shrinking ark.

Finally, I'd like to also point out the problem of debt in a different light. At the moment, the human race owes a massive debt to the environment for things it has essentially stolen from the earth - oil, gas, metals, clean water, climate make-up, functioning eco-systems, rainforests, coal, you name it - if we could find a use for it, we've taken it. The earth may soon not have more to give (as mentioned above) and when fundamental eco-system services start failing from pollution & the warming effects of our choices ~ we start to find we will be in some serious trouble. The way this unregulated capitalism is working at the moment, actually we're also stealing from ourselves... pushing the cost of our goods either down to workers making the goods (sweat shops take your bow) or to the other end of the scale - where the products are consumed (obesity & diabetes, public health, allergies, housing estates built on toxic landfills - it's time to take your bow too).

Essentially I feel we need a radical rethink of what we think free trade and the 'market system' could really be used for. Is it churning out mass produced food, widgets, and empty meaningless 'things' - or is it for creating authentic value to people & planet? Imagine a future where fuel is clean and transport is guilt-free, where our goods champion the farmers who grow the food, components of our technological devices are bio-engineered, and we're able to enjoy some clean, green, open spaces full of the amazing diversity of life that lived in the forests 1000 years before. Actually, all this technology and possibility exists ~ it just needs us to be conscious consumers and for business to recognise the social & environmental impacts of its work. Positive & negative.

If this even tantalises you a small bit, I would get reading Umair Haque's 'New Capitalist Manifesto'. He's even got a Harvard Business School blog if you're interested; @Umairh on HBR.

Here's also a bit of a prezi I knocked together about the need for social business;

The need for Social Business on Prezi

Collaborative Rugby

Ok, so you might wonder where that tangent was leading, but I felt I needed to take you on a bit of a journey first.

At least now you see we live in a world with resources being depleted, and population & demand spiking. Good.

This is where my other part of my education this year comes in - facilitation & social processes. I have experienced multiple workshops and different facilitated events this year - a few stood out, and they had the art of hosting in common; AoH claims to host & harvest 'conversations that matter'. One of their tools is a social process known as 'Proaction Cafe' - which I have been playing with along with a few friends in the form Collaboration Cafe Wellington.

Part of our kaupapa (agreed vision / values) is the need for collaborative action on social & environmental problems. Certainly with more people & less resource, collaboration is becoming more and more important - efficiencies & effectiveness, reduction in wasted time, effort & resource in re-inventing what is already known etc etc.

That got me to thinking about the society I grew up in - one founded on competitive thinking, consumption & growth, and 'survival of the fittest'. I realised that really we can't be living life striving to 'win' as that's only going to increase the chasm between the haves & have nots. We need new thinking, not 'business as usual' if we're going to thrive and not just survive ~ we're arriving into a new paradigm of human existence where global resources will be restricted for one of the first times in our evolution.

So how do we vision a new society, full of those wonderful utopian ideals we talked about earlier? Certainly the tools of collaborative communication and productivity are getting there with the rapid evolution of the web (check my friend James' article about this).

So what do we need to do offline? How can we create a world where collaboration is championed over competitiveness, or at least a mixture is the every day we grow up with (for there are obvious benefits to competitive abilities too). Collaboration Cafe is a step toward this, but very small & isolated - certainly not the norm.

The question, therefore - really has to be "What is the 'Rugby of Collaboration' and collaborative behaviour?".

Would love your thoughts on this, and any other rabbit holes it takes you down. Do you agree / disagree? What is your experience with collaborative projects? What are the barriers to collaboration? What do you think is 'the rugby of collaboration'?