Social Edge discussion on competition and collaboration: 48 hour check in

Over on Social Edge, Peter's hosting a discussion about competition and collaboration. The introduction, cross-posted on My Social Actions here, draws attention to the relationship between All for Good and Social Actions as a case study and invitation to jump into a broad consideration of these themes for the entire social entrepreneurship sector.

I hope you get a chance to hop over, browse through, and join in. Lots of room to go broader and deeper.

My contribution to date, with more to come:

In a way I see collaboration and competition as a false dichotomy [or], more precisely, as short-hand for different ways to approach and describe a relationship or intent (working with, and working against, ARE distinct). But placing them on either ends of some kind of metaphorical stick, dualistically, doesn't make much sense to me. There are myriad opportunities, at myriad levels of participation and organization, to be simultaneously engaged in both collaborative and competitive practices. The question then immediately jumps to exactly the point you're making: "We need both and the wisdom to know which is the most likely to succeed at what task or, as an alternative, how to sequence them correctly."

But for me a second question immediately comes to mind, and this ties closely with Hildy Gottlieb's contributions to this discussion: "In addition to choosing what is most likely to succeed at this particular moment, which is most likely to generate the kind of environment/context/system/etc. that will best serve your mission in the future?" In other words, a competitive stance today may be exactly what your organization needs in order to accomplish X. However if that competitive stance doesn't contribute to, or worse detracts from, a cultural norm that would significantly lift the sector as a whole, that would be extremely unfortunate.

To my mind collaboration -- working with -- is one of the key principles of social innovation, betterment, well-being, whatever we choose to call "being kind to each other." Competition or collaboration in this environment is more than a "what's best for a particular organization here?" kind of question. There's the larger question of consistency with the principles that inform the entire sector.

While the introduction to this discussion described two organizations, what it really presents as a case study for all of us to learn from are two different approaches to HOW we're each drawing attention and resources to similar issues. Should it matter that we're considering volunteer and other types of engagement as the outcome here, rather than types of tires, or tax structures, or t-shirts? In addition to checking the appropriateness of our method to the impact we want to have, I hope the discussion here recognizes the importance of checking whether our methods and mission are equally aligned. Should competition have less of a role to play in this environment than in others, and if it doesn't, what long-term opportunities to truly enrich our capacity to care about and for one another are being lost?