Lessons for Team Building from Rawls & Consequences of Human Self-Generation of Reality
October 19. It’s the weekend. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society as that’s the only kind of society with the possibility to eliminate violence and wars.
To do that, I want to look at the formation of smaller groups like families, circles of friends, teams and workplaces as a society really is an umbrella on top of a pyramid of groups made up of subgroups and so on. What differs between the groups on different levels of the pyramid is the size of the dataset they all share what goes back to the number of motivations to cooperate the members of the group share.
On the lowest level you have groups in which the members share tons of diverse motivations to cooperate with each other. Things like a web of feelings for each other but also how they approach life and what they are drawn to in their daily lives. Tons of shared motivations translate into a very comprehensive dataset that they can all agree on to use in their individual world generation processes to align their models of the world, leaving little diversity between the realities they live in. A group like that can cooperate profoundly because they will be able to formulate a whole host of common goals.
The higher the level a group is on in this pyramid, the more this group will be made up of more diverse people who share less and less motivation to cooperate with each other. Less shared motivations translate into a smaller dataset that they can all agree on to use in their individual world generation processes to align their models of the world. The diversity between the realities they live in increases, what is not a bad thing because it allows for more diverse – more random – searches. But cooperation will be ever more limited because ever fewer shared goals can be formulated.
Until we get to the highest level – society – where only one goal is shared between all members: to increase one’s ability to engage in random searches. Because that is the one and only motivation all humans share by nature to seek out cooperation in the first place. Humans can survive alone, using searches that exploit exiting knowledge. Humans as single individuals cannot execute random searches as the risk of not surviving doing just that is too high. Hence, the definitions, rules and structures in a society – the dataset all members use in their world generation processes to align their models of the world – must be designed in such a way that they guarantee that for every member. And that must be their only motivation.
From that we can infer that the increased ability to engage in random searches must be a shared common goal in all groups no matter on what level of the pyramid they sit. What does this mean? When you don’t want to introduce stress into a group from the onset, you need to offer all members equally the freedom to discover, develop, and apply their natural skills and abilities at every moment as they choose, the freedom to test themselves and ideas without fear that a failure will lead to dismissal, to explore their surroundings and to equally participate in the maintenance and adjustment of the dataset that all members of the group agree to apply in their world generation processes. Why? Because everyone in the group gave something up – their ability to generate models of the world that fit themselves best, that worked best for the material things that a human is made up of, to seek their lowest state of energy while being in equilibrium with their surroundings. They took a step back and put themselves in a worse place than they could be alone. They did it in anticipation of delayed gratification: the more that only cooperation could give them in the quest to achieve the twin goals of all material things. The ‘more’ is the increased ability to execute random searches that promise the highest payoff of all searches; a profit that will benefit the whole group. When the anticipated gratification doesn’t come to each member personally – to their body, not their mind – the arrangement doesn’t make sense as the member remains in a worse place than they could be alone, probably for the benefit of someone else. The affected members will not continue to apply the shared dataset any longer in their world generation processes what makes it impossible to work toward shared goals in the group, unless you force them. Force = stress and a decrease in productivity of the group, something that will continue and multiply up the pyramid.
Furthermore, it must be clear from the very beginning to any potential member of the group what exactly the shared motivations are to cooperate in this group and what exactly the shared goals are therefore that the cooperation aims to accomplish. Only on this basis the dataset can be compiled which every member can agree to apply. Otherwise the dataset will include things not all members of the group can agree to make their own so they will not use it and cooperation becomes impossible.
Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. Since our models of the world change with every new information we gather and the models are only accessible to others when we communicate them, we are part of never-ending negotiations that require constant conversation and debate.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
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