Humans — A Collaborative Species

Humans’ journey through history as a collaborative species

Collaboration is defined in the dictionary as the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing. It’s a simple yet powerful concept that we will explore in this first piece of the series, touching on how the evolution of communication has shaped its form and how it then evolved to advance pretty much any human activity.

The first surprise I confronted when starting this piece came very quickly. If we look at the second definition of the word Collaboration in Cambridge’s dictionary, we’ll find ourselves reading the situation of people working with an enemy who has taken control of their country. My first thought was that this could be a negative connotation made only by that dictionary, but Oxford’s dictionary also provides a second Traitorous cooperation with an enemy meaning, and even Dictionary.com locates the word’s origin from French collaboration, noun of action from Latin collaborare (where this title comes from). In a bad sense, “traitorious cooperation with an occupying enemy,” it is recorded from 1940; earliest references are to the Vichy Government of France. What made collaboration earn this awful reputation?

The lonely genius myth

On the one hand, it’s human culture to adore the “lonely genius”. Da Vinci, Einstein, Jobs; these are people that have traditionally been portrayed as having brilliant ideas on their own that helped change the world for the better. A lonely genius tells a better story than teams of people cooperating together. We want a brilliant, creative hero that inspires, and culture has given it to us many times through this great stories. But there’s two arguments that break the lonely genius myth: I’ve called them the giant argument and the magnetic argument.

The first argument tells us that single inventions always stand on the shoulders of giants. We didn’t go directly from writing letters to sending SMS, nor from discovering the atom to the theory of relativity, and definitely not from walking to flying. Any leap forward in progress takes many attempts, trial and error, small leaps forward and small mistakes. Progress (technological or in any other form) is a long arrow pointing to the future, and any advancement that makes that arrow longer is dependent on all the improvements that helped the arrow get to where you’re standing. This is vertical collaboration spread through history and time, but very meaningful collaboration nonetheless. Individuals with vision working hard towards a goal are very valuable for society, but it’s through collaboration that the greatest achievements come to life.

Trial and error

Even though Jeff Bezos says In my experience, the way invention, innovation and change happen is [through] team effort, he gets the magazine covers and headlines when Amazon launches a great product. Guess who said Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people? Yup, the one and only Steve Jobs. You know your time is limted and your attributes are stronger supported by other people’s attributes. It’s natural to ask for help where you need it, and to be excited to work with others who can help you thrive on whatever goal you’re pursuing. You know that when connecting with other people old ideas might improve and new ones might come up. Talented people are attracted to talented people: that’s the magnetic argument.

NASA estimated that a team of more than 400,000 people put humans on the moon. More than 20,000 people worked at Apple when the iPhone launched. 30 people work at an average three Michelin star restaurant. While the lonely genius myth has not directly harmed collaboration as much as the next cause, it has definitely played its part in driving human perception of what’s needed to drive progress away from collaboration.

Repression

The other factor that has surely contributed to collaboration’s bad reputation are totalitarian regimes. Since freedom of association/assembly recognizes pluralistic sources of power and organization, it has been targeted for repression throughout history.

In the United Kingdom, all forms of “combination” were prohibited and criminal until 1825. With the rise of fascism in Europe in the 20th century, countries like Spain had to wait until 1978 to be able to exercise this right without having to ask permission from the government, and many other countries had to see democratic constitutions rise for this right to be acknowledged.

Through these repressive times, collaboration earned a traitorous reputation since it fell outside the government’s control and was therefore harmful to its interests. This has transcended into culture as we’ve seen through the dictionary examples, a very curious point that probably adds to the case against the creation of collaborative systems we’ll now see develop through history.

Communication->Collaboration->Trade

Human history could be told through the history of commerce. To look at how collaboration evolved through time, we must look at how communication enabled it to happen.

Guy & Rodd Cartoon

Some say the history of communication is mankind’s search for ways to improve upon shouting. The truth is, the oldest symbols created for the purpose of human communication are cave paintings, with the oldest dated to around 30,000 BCE. This is around the same time that the first contact between different cultures is thought to have happened around the Mediterranean (Danube river). These paintings quickly became a way to organize around tasks and people, with the first calendar dating to around 15,000 years ago.

It’s obviously really hard to track prehistoric proof of actual trade. There is evidence of exchange of materials like obsidian or flint from the late Stone Age around Guinea, believed to have first begun in south west Asia and to have developed at distances of 900 kilometers within the Mediterranean. Researchers at New York University have drawn interesting lines between the evolution of farming and trade by studying how societies exchanged and adopted new decorative items.

Decorative items map from late Paleolithic & early Neolithic times

The oldest-known form of writing is an evolution of pictograms and ideograms, contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age around 4000 BCE. Let’s keep in mind that previous to this age humans communicated with each other with sounds (what we now call speech) we know little about, as they leave no material trace. The studies around the evolution of speech track the start of it by studying anatomical and genetic features, achieving some consensus in the argument that vocal languages begun diversifying in our species at least 100,000 years ago. The transition to written communication through the symbols we just saw presents the first breakthrough necessary for long distance trade to start growing in popularity amongst different cultures, since transmitting a message requiring a trusted voice was much less efficient.

Messages carved on stones and clay were good at communicating across time, even centuries, but faced the problem of communicating across space. You had to travel to read a message. This was a second breakthrough needed for long distance trade: a system that made the message, not the recipient, travel. And so the papyrus was born! Around 2,000 BCE alphabetization of characters begun with Egyptian hieroglyphs, which was followed by a Semitic “alphabet” developed in Egypt too, and from which descend most of today’s alphabets.

Egyptian market scene

Ancient Mediterranean

The Mediterranean was a prominent trading center during the Ancient Age. Materials used for jewelry were traded in Egypt since 3,000 BCE. The Phoenicians were known as great sea traders which travelled this sea in every direction, and whose high point in sea domination is usually placed around 1,200–800 BCE. They transported elements of the late Bronze Age culture to Iron Age Greece and Italy, and also to north-west Africa and Iberia, and spread alphabetic writing.

Through the times that led to the Greek and Phoenician civilization, people relied on tradition, top-down commands and some forms of community cooperation to organize production and distribute goods and services among their population. From the 6th century BCE up to 5th century BCE, many of the Mediterranean was under Persian rule, until their crippling by Macedonia in 4th century BCE. Trade was a very important par of the Persian Empire, so important that they created a new means of collaboration: roads. Building an extensive road system of trade routes in addition to sea born opportunities let the empire trade with other lands and amass great wealth.

Bacino del Mediterraneo by Antonio Millo, 1582. Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the north of Greece (ancient kingdom of Macedonia), Greek civilization forged technological and organizational skills with a long history of cavalry warfare. Trade was also a fundamental part of the civilization, with a network between Egypt, Asia and Greece built around goods like gold, copper and ivory. Within Greece, goods traded between city-states included cereals, wine, cheese and olives, and imports included wheat, grain, wood, papyrus and slaves.

The Roman Empire brought a big change to the scene: a single empire controlled most of this sea (they even called it “Mare Nostrum”, our sea) and imposed the use of a single currency around it. It was the longest period without pirates in the area, too. They traded mainly materials such as beef, corn, leather or silver. The longevity of the Roman Empire was largely due to commercial trade, and Gold coins of Roman emperors forged in the Eastern Mediterranean were found as far as South India and China. The Eastern Roman empire (or Byzantine Empire) enjoyed later domination until the Arabs (and the Turks later) came into the scene while Byzantines weakened from the Roman-Persian wars.

The Caliphate developed numerous advanced techniques in production, investment, finance and property in the fields of value transfer, trust, contracts, notes and bills between the 9th and 14th century. The system of contracts relied upon by Merchants was very effective, with concepts such as commissions, loans and joint investments being commonly used. Trade networks would be formed throughout very large distances, and partnerships and commercial ventures were introduced along other concepts like welfare or pensions. The Arab Agricultural Revolution brought a transformation around ownership, giving individuals of any gender the right to buy, sell, mortgage and inherit land. Early forms of capitalism and free market were present in the Caliphate.

Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, Central Asia was the economic center of the globe. The trade route known as the Silk Road (we know it also inspired some crypto businesses) extended from the Korean peninsula to the Mediterranean Sea, composed by both terrestrial and maritime routes.

Western Europe had established a complex trade network with cargo ships as the key to the movement of goods, making ports one of the main assets in the networks. From the 8th to the 11th century, Vikings traded as they sailed from and to Scandinavia.

Age of Discovery?

The Age of Discovery or Exploration defines the period in history where many countries in Europe take on colonialism and mercantilism as national policies. Portugal, Holland, Britain and Spain all thrive for centuries on the new trade routes established with the Americas and India. Yet, from a collaboration perspective, the most notable innovation that hit the masses could be the rise of slavery, a stain in our history that is worth mentioning as a failure of top-down hierarchies taken to the worst extreme. Maritime exploration and technology did see some great advancements like the compass and the establishment of new, complex trade routes all over the world.

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution introduced new manufacturing processes in society in late 18th and early 19th century. This transition meant going from hand production methods to machines and the rise of the factory system. It’s a turning point in the early modern history of cooperation and labor, and it lets us dive into the next big point: the history of organizations.

From Charlie Chaplin to Thomas Middleditch

Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and Thomas Middleditch in HBO’s Silicon Valley

The precursors of modern corporations were chartered companies, like the Dutch East India Company and others created to lead colonial European ventures in the 17th century. The revolution in economics led by Adam Smith led to the abandonment of mercantilism and the rise of laissez-faire, promoting private entrepreneurship. The factory was born.

As the Industrial Revolution picked up pace, deregulatory change was pushed. Incorporation in Britain, home of the Industrial Revolution, was only possible through a royal charter owing to Parliament’s protections of the privileges granted. This made many businesses to start operating as unincorporated associations, sometimes reaching the thousands of members. In 1844 came the Joint Stock companies act, regarded the first modern piece of company law, and later came the Limited Liability Act of 1855.

Since then, organizational structures have developed from more centralized models to more collaborative ones, but maintaining a certain hierarchy in its structure nonetheless. The open source movement around the birth of the Internet is one example of the latter, yet companies (even the most modern startups) have for now mostly stuck to more traditional structures.

Organizational Structure

From hunter-gatherers to startups, organizational structure has gone through many phases to get to where it’s at today. In post-industrial society, some forms of organization design have become more popular than others. Let’s look at some examples.

One of the classical forms of organization is a Hierarchical organization; every entity is subordinate to a single other entity. This would resemble the working mechanism of an absolute monarchy, like those of traditional Spain or England, or the current one in Saudi Arabia.

Further down the line towards decentralization lies the Functional organization structure, which is still hierarchical but wherein people are grouped by their area of specialization. These people are supervised by functional managers with expertise in the same fields in order to achieve business objectives.

Divisional structure consists of people collaborating in self-contained divisions, which are collections of functions that produce a product. Its advantage relies on delegated authority, so performance can be measured within each group.

Cross functional organization design (product+function) can be implemented through matrix organizational structure. A more complex form of this structure could be seen in multinational structures, as it maintains coordination among products, functions and geographies.

Horizontal organizations are those with few or no levels of middle management between staff and executives. It’s a structure that has been tried in some smaller companies with success, such as Github, decentralizing the decision-making process while elevating the level of responsibility of each employee.

Of Mafia, Church and Sports

Organizational structure theory can get a bit monotone, so let’s look at three concrete cases of modern collaboration that evolve from years of experiences, trials and errors.

Cosa Nostra is the frequently referred name of the Sicilian Mafia. It’s bigger picture would resemble that of a federal government, with a loose confederation of hundreds of families/clans who are sovereign over a territory of their claim. Inside a single clan, the structure is very hierarchical, where every individual has other individuals under her responsibility and answers to a single boss, who also answers to another single boss, following this procedure all the way up to the Capofamiglia or Boss. Many traditional family businesses in southern Europe still resemble an organizational structure of this sort, in a less violent form but still very hierarchical.

The Catholic Church represents a curious contradiction in its organizational structure. Religion is by definition decentralized, since anyone can (at least in theory) opt in or out of it any time. Yet the Catholic religion’s main operational body, the Catholic Church, is one of the most traditional, centralized and hierarchical organizations in the world. It follows a top-down management structure where every priest operates under a bishop’s supervision and that is followed up the structure until it reaches the Pope (Bishop of Rome). I think it’s very interesting that a decentralized concept like a Religion, which is simply a set of beliefs that may transcend time, can have its main governance so strictly defined. Thousands of years after its inception, most people associate the Church with the Catholic religion by default. We could even agree that the Church has, throughout history, reshaped the religion at its will. Could the same happen over time to a crypto-protocol with its most popular network?

A sports team can be divided into many kinds of organizational structure. Players have specific roles (functional) based on their abilities. They’re also organized through the field (defense-mid-attack/1–2–3–4–5…), which can be considered divisional. Although by definition team players are organized horizontally, with all having the same accountability and answering directly to the coach, it would be naive to say that there aren’t hierarchies amongst players based on leadership or experience. Sports teams are constantly evolving networks that produce constantly changing results.