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One reason my profession is so hard for people to grasp is that the word “collaboration” is a prized piece in the buzzword bingo pile. People use it to mean so many different things that it’s been rendered meaningless. In the early days of my work, I was astute enough to recognize that this was a problem, so I embarked on a little project to figure out what people actually thought it meant.

A common pattern was the belief that “co-” implies that everybody is equal. For some, “collaboration” represented a utopia where everyone contributed equally to and had an equal say in everything. For others, “collaboration” represented a nightmare for exactly the same reasons.

Since first exploring this question, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of groups of all shapes and sizes, and one thing I’ve learned is that, in the most effective groups, everybody is most certainly not equal. If I were stranded on an island with a pilot, and we came across a plane, I would gladly defer to the pilot as to how to fly it off the island. I don’t have equal knowledge, and treating me as if I did wouldn’t help either of us. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t contribute in useful ways.

Everybody has unique, important strengths. Great work comes from bringing those strengths to the surface and playing to them. A world where everybody is the same would be drab, mediocre, and joyless. Furthermore, if you try to design for a system where people are equal when they’re not, your design will most likely fail.

Why do so many people seem to care whether or not we’re equal? I think it boils down to one simple truth: We want to know that we matter. We want to bring our best selves to our work, and we want to be recognized for the contributions we make. But attempting to quantify those contributions isn’t necessarily useful—and may actually undermine our desire to be recognized.

How could this be the case? It helps to understand what happens when we experience great collaboration—when everybody in a group is contributing his or her best self, and something greater than the sum of the individuals emerges as a result. When a group exhibits those characteristics, we say that it has “chemistry.” The end result is not just an amalgam of the individuals, but a new thing entirely.

In Powers of Two, Joshua Wolf Shenk writes: “The closer two people are, the more they will shed singular pronouns in favor of the plural. It’s not a conscious choice … . It’s simply the way couples begin to think.” Shenk cites psychologist Daniel Wegner’s notion of “transactive memory,” where people cue each other toward a collective memory that no one can recall individually. In a powerful partnership, individuals often can’t remember who contributed what, because their brains have physically recorded “we,” not “you” or “me.”

If partners themselves have trouble distinguishing between “you” and “me,” then why do outsiders think it’s so important to do? It’s because we’re lazy. Shenk points out that people generally attribute co-authored papers to the more famous author, regardless of how much that author actually contributed to the work. (I felt overwashed with guilt when I read this, because I do this all the time.)

In 2011, a group of researchers published a study of a tool out of MIT called Scratch that enabled kids to remix games and animations into their own interactive stories. Many of the people who used the tool were unhappy about not being acknowledged when others remixed their content. Because the tool knew what content was coming from where, Scratch’s creators decided to save people time and manners by having the tool automatically send an acknowledgement to the remixed contents’ originators. The researchers found that this automatic acknowledgement did not appease people’s discontent. It didn’t matter that the tool itself acknowledged people. People wanted conscious acknowledgement from living, breathing human beings.

Groups often approach me with questions about governance. They want to figure out ways to divvy up decision-making (and sometimes compensation) fairly. They often want to start with some philosophical premise (for instance, everyone is equal). I generally advise them to hold off on making structural decisions and figuring out who is contributing what, and instead to focus on general acknowledgement.

The simplest form of this is a ritual of appreciation. It’s something I’ve helped many groups adopt, but my biggest “aha” moment about it came when we realized we weren’t doing this ourselves at my old company. Even thought we thought we already had an appreciative culture, our colleague forced us to spend 30 minutes at a quarterly strategy meeting describing everything we appreciated about one another. We ended up taking an hour. It was enlightening and humbling, like a giant weight being lifted off of our collective shoulders. We ended up making it a regular ritual at all of our strategy meetings.

We all appreciated each other, and we had assumed that everybody already knew this, so we almost never expressed it. We were wrong. That regular act of acknowledgement had a huge impact: It increased overall happiness, and it also raised trust. The funny thing about trust is that, when you have it, issues like governance and who deserves how much credit seem magically to disappear.

We overthink collaboration to our detriment. Empowering every individual and recognizing his or her contributions does not have to mean that everyone is equal, nor that we need to quantify everyone’s relative contributions. Powerful groups develop their own unique identities that, in some ways, subsume their individual participants. In order not to feel lost in those groups, we don’t need to be recognized for our exact contributions. We just need to be recognized—plainly, simply, and authentically.

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There have been a handful of successful creative partnerships like theirs—spectacular ones that earned two people fame and linked their names forever: Marie and Pierre Curie. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

What other sorts of collaborations might have happened? What if brilliant minds and artists throughout history had worked together rather than independently? In advance of Joshua Wolf Shenk’s visit to Zócalo, “Is Collaboration the Secret to Creativity?”, we asked writers: Imagine you have the power to bring together two creative greats (living or dead) to collaborate. Who would you choose and why?

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“Everybody in principle is for communal cooperation,” said sociologist Richard Sennett, winner of the 2012 Zócalo Book Prize for his book Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation. Yet cooperation in America today–in politics, in neighborhoods, in the workplace, and even in schools–is diminishing. Why is something we all agree on so difficult to accomplish? After accepting his award at MOCA Grand Avenue, Sennett, a professor at the London School of Economics, New York University, and the University of Cambridge, explored why people in our diverse society have so much difficulty working together–and how we might solve this pervasive problem.

Sennett has a long-standing interest in cooperation, which he defines as “working with other people to do what you can’t do for yourself.” As a young classical musician, he noted that one of the great traumas for “little hotshots” comes when they enter an orchestra or group setting for the first time. They think that if they can belt out their part individually, everything will be fine. “It brings them up short to have to play with other people and learn how to listen to them and cooperate,” he said. Almost all of us have the same experience in some walk of life, from team sports to the military, where “cooperation is a requisite for survival in the battlefield.” Cooperation is also a survival mechanism for infants, who begin to cooperate with their caretakers in the earliest moments of life.

In modern society, however, we don’t consider cooperation something needed; we look upon it as a “moral gift that we make to others”–and that’s where our problems begin.

A study by UNICEF of children in 22 developed countries found American students between the ages of 8 and 10 to be among the world’s least cooperative with their peers–and among the most consistent in practicing bullying behavior. “Our institutions early in life predispose people to withdraw from one another, to look at cooperation as a form of weakness, and to see aggression as a more durable way of relating to other kids,” said Sennett. Adults today are also less inclined to cooperate, thanks in part to modern technology. People have always tended to silo themselves, and e-mail has made it even easier not to share or communicate. Informal cooperation has diminished in the workplace as a result.

In our home life, Sennett has found that we trust our neighbors less than ever before. We don’t believe they would come to our assistance in the event of an emergency, and so we’re less likely to help them out in turn. This diminution of trust is toxic to cooperation. So how can we get people to trust–and cooperate with–not just their neighbors but also strangers, or even people they don’t like? In the past, when people lived in communities where everyone shared a background, they could draw on shared values, or the idea that “we’re all in this together.” But today, particularly in urban communities, people are mixed by race, class, ethnicity, and lifestyle. This diversity demands the most difficult form of cooperation, one that requires three skills: dialogical skill, the use of the subjunctive expression, and the practice of empathy.

Dialogical skill means good listening–trying to understand what someone is saying beneath their words. It’s different from dialectical expression, where people negotiate verbally–one person says “x,” the other person says “y,” and so on, until agreement is reached. And although dialogics doesn’t offer the same closure as dialectics, it is crucial to dealing with people who are different from us. Dialogical skill asks us to listen and try to understand where someone is coming from. “You can’t take things at face value, or else you won’t get very far in interaction,” said Sennett.

We also need to change the way we express ourselves if we want to cooperate better. We think of speaking in the declarative voice as a virtue: it’s how one makes a forceful argument with precision and clarity. But the subjunctive voice–which is more hesitant–opens up “a space of ambiguity” for conversation to continue. When I use the subjunctive, said Sennett, “I’m allowing room for us to interact.” Watching the news today, Sennett sees “not a conversation but a kind of opera in which one kind of person goes forward and does a solo, then the next one. There’s no exchange.” The subjunctive voice is also less aggressive and impassioned than the declarative, which means it can keep hostilities from flaring. As a labor arbitrator, Sennett found that when both sides were locked into clear positions, negotiations failed. But once the clarity on positions was muddied, a conversation could begin.

Our society places a premium on sympathy, said Sennett–whereby we feel someone else’s pain as our own and thus reach out to help. It’s a deep Judeo-Christian moral value as well–the notion that I’ve got to be able to feel what you’re feeling. Identification is at the root of sympathy. But “empathy is something a little cooler and a little tougher,” he said–and thus more useful in our society. It’s not about feeling someone else’s pain but being curious about what another person is going through–and then trying to figure out how best to help. “Empathy is a skill that we need when we’re dealing with people who we don’t understand, who are really different from ourselves,” he said.

Getting along today, and mobilizing a community, is no longer a question of solidarity but of cooperation. “We want to practice ways of cooperating across these barriers of difference rather than scrubbing them out in the name of solidarity,” said Sennett.

Early in the evening, Sennett noted that America “is a country whose political system has broken down by the inability of people to cooperate politically.” At the end of his talk, Sennett zeroed in on President Obama–whose strategies he called “an interesting case of one way not to practice cooperation.” In negotiations, Obama takes a dialectical rather than a dialogical approach. This restricts his ability to negotiate, as does his aloof personality. It’s not that Obama lacks conviction but that he is “too far removed from his enemies to find motives for diplomacy,” said Sennett. “Good negotiators don’t get themselves in the trap of thinking they can give and give until they reach agreement.”

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s.
Read about what small-scale examples of human cooperation can teach us here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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