Collaborate, Don't Delegate: The 48 Laws of Peace

No. 7. The Timeless Wisdom of Joint Endeavor

Lukas Tennie

Why is it that I always get a whole person when what I really want is a pair of hands?
—attributed to Henry Ford

The world is complex. I don’t mean complicated. I mean complex. That’s because, in the frame of complexity theory, "complicated" and "complex" are distinct concepts.

A complicated system is one where the components and their causal interactions can be described and delineated clearly. Given enough technical expertise, it's possible to predict the behavior of a complicated system, because it operates in a deterministic, predictable fashion (e.g., a jet engine.).

A complex system features multiple interconnecting, sometimes fluid, elements, but the interconnections are difficult, if not impossible, to limn—making their behaviors unpredictable. Simple rules can give rise to complex, emergent phenomena in these systems. (Yet complicated rules hinder complexity.) Complex systems adapt or evolve over time and are sensitive to initial conditions. (e.g., an ecosystem or economy.)

Today’s society is complex, so it demands more ingenuity and adaptability. Yet, in a simultaneous quest for efficiency, it’s easy to get caught in the mindset of delegation over collaboration.

Delegation is a holdover from a paradigm that views organizations as complicated. There is an allure to the idea that one can compartmentalize tasks in an organization ‘run’ or ‘designed’ by managers. The idea, thanks in part to Frederick Winslow Taylor, is to direct workers through scientific management—which is more or less technocracy applied to an organization.

In this way, delegation is like setting up a line of dominoes. It works under predictable circumstances, but a single point of failure can collapse the entire endeavor or make adaptation difficult. So delegation makes it harder to address increasing complexity.

But if done right, though, collaboration does address complexity. Doing it right means first making the mission the manager. Then it means ceasing to treat people like dominoes (or chess pieces or cogs). It means accepting shared responsibility, improving collective intelligence, and enabling more agentic behavior for everyone on the team to serve the mission.