“The bottom-up world is to be the great theme of this century.” ~ Matt Ridley

Nobody can know everything, nor do everything well.

Yet you can know someone who does – or know somebody who knows somebody who does.

And that may be the secret to staying sought-after in this increasingly complex and connected world.

In fact, next to honing your top talent your most vital trait to strengthen is probably your capacity to collaborate – especially with those extremely unlike you.  Seven of the ten trends in how we work involve being adept collaborators.

“Collaboration is the new competition.” ~ Pamela Slim and Michele Woodward

The next trick is understanding exactly how to connect so others want to collaborate with you. It starts with speaking to the sweet spot of mutual benefit.

“A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.” ~ David Bollier

For a project on which I am collaborating on with the remarkable Kris Schaeffer, ably assisted by Steven Toy (expect an announcement in December) here’s some books that helped me discover why and how to collaborate:

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky, Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results by Morten T. Hansen,  Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, The Culture of Collaboration by Evan Rosen, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy by Moises Naim, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, The Firefly Effect: Build Teams that Capture Creativity and Catapult Results by Kimberly Douglas, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

See other books on collaboration that I recommend at Listiki and please add your favorites. After all its a collaborative list.  I also tweet about  examples of collaboration here.

“Collaborations are strengthened through appreciative relationships.  You know you’ve got it right when you find yourself in a relationship in which you are listened to, dream together, choose to contribute, act with support, and are positive.” ~ Ben Ziegler

Become an opportunity-maker for the member organization that most matters to you. Imagine that your association or special interest group kept innovating to create more value and meaning for members.

That’s what TED has done and we can too by taking three collaborative steps over time:

1. Offer a single major conference  – as most associations already do, of course. Involve the members in choosing topics, speakers and formats, base on core guidelines, chosen by member vote. Create a format that enables members to participate in reach a single – and singular goal.

2. Encourage the launch of local conferences yet don’t try to control them. Instead create ground rules for local leaders to succeed while maintaining the quality of the “brand.”

3. Co-brand a fresh version of your national conference with another respected organization on vital topic that matters to the members of both organizations. Allow the founders of your local conferences to co-sponsor that new conference by enabling their members to view it together in their area.

The team at the TED conference announced this third step today.  See how you could adapt these steps to the member group that most matters to you.

Step One

The national TED conference has grown increasingly popular throughout the past 22 years, with the biggest community of members becoming those who avidly watch the videos of speakers.

Step Two

Building on the strength of that largely online community, TED launched, just last April, local events dubbed TEDx. Rather, in true collaborative fashion, they announced guidelines for these local events and invited people to co-host, design and run them. In just one year local leaders stepped up and hosted over 600 such events around the globe.

Hint: To encourage local events, the guidelines start with the benefits for the local organizers and provides an easy-to-follow toolkit: “In the spirit of ‘Ideas Worth Spreading,’ TEDx is a program that enables schools, businesses, libraries or just groups of friends to enjoy a TED-like experience through events they themselves organize, design and host.

We’re supporting approved organizers by offering a free toolkit that includes detailed advice, the right to use recorded TEDTalks, promotion on our site, connection to other organizers, and a little piece of our brand in the form of the TEDx label.”

In so doing, local communities bonded, learning together and created other local collaborations.  Imagine! In over 25 languages were spoken at these talks with opportunities for translation to spread the messages farther – and make speakers more well-known, thus spurring participation by great speakers.

Hint: the more popular your events become the more people you attract to donate their services.

This is the path to peace – and savoring your life with others. Diverse individuals meeting to learn and share best ideas with each other – and, in conversations during the event and afterwards, to find ways they can accomplish greater things together, than they can alone.

Step Three

Today the third step was announced. A new event is linking local groups to the mother ship of the national group – around a new topic area, yet connected to the underlying TED brand of innovation, new ideas – and solving a problem together.  Local groups will get to meet and share this new event live – with other local chapters around the world.  The announcement was that “On September 20, 2010, more than 150 of the world’s leading thinkers and doers will come together in New York for TEDxChange, convened by Melinda French Gates … and hosted by TED founder Chris Anderson.”

With such member loyalty, interest and clout accumulated by TED it can attract a big-time partner – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Also together they share a Sweet Spot of mutual interest – bringing bright minds together to address a big problem: how to improve health around the world.

Plus smart partners tie their collaboration to as many meaning goals and events as they credibly can.  For example, this conference is tied to the 10th anniversary of the famous Millennium Development Goals.

This is a three- stage template that you could use to grow the value and visibility of your profession association – and make it more meaningful for your members.

In fact any member-based club or special interest group could adapt it to their needs to grow its capacity to make powerful changes while imbuing its members with a sense of meaning in their participation.

Think what the Rotary Clubs have accomplished over 20 years with their single goal, bottom-up approach to wiping out polio.  Imagine local Rotary clubs have rallied around this single cause and have raised about $127.4 million for this cause – plus personally worked on projects to make it happen. That gives their lives meaning and builds extraordinary bonds between members and with those they selflessly serve. That dedication and progress towards a singular goal (key to great collaboration) attracted the Gates foundation as a partner.

Tip: When people bring out each other’s best talents in collaboration around a sweet spot of mutual interest they accomplish greater things together than they ever could on their own – and they savor the experience along the way.

To make your member-based organization a member-attracting tool for major change and a source of meaning in the life of your members what singular goal would you suggest they achieve?  For your organization, how would you adapt this three-step approach that has been wildly successful for TED?

Life is getting better faster. Food is more widely available; we live longer; more people have money and violence, disease and child mortality are down all around the world. Yet there will be turmoil.

“The bottom-up world is to be the great theme of this century,” predicts Matt Ridley in his controversial new book Rational Optimist.

“Doctors are having to get used to well-informed patients who have researched their own illnesses. Journalists are adjusting to readers and viewers who select and assemble their news on demand. Engineers are sharing problems to find solutions…. Politicians are increasingly corks tossed on the waves of public opinion. Dictators are learning that their citizens can organize riots by text message. `Here comes everybody‘ says author Clay Shirky.”

In this bottom-up world individual specialization and free exchange of goods are vital to improving more lives according to Ridley. Human intelligence is becoming collective, not individual – thanks to these two inventions. We can generate more value and options with for each other.

As proof, he recaps the course of economic progress in this way. When humans invented specialization and trade, I could make something and you could make a different object, crafts we each excel at. Each of us trades our best products rather than making them all ourselves.

Then I can focus on making mine better and faster. As others do likewise we trade and sell better products and have more choices, thus spurring further innovation – both in making and trading goods.

Thus consumption could grow more diversified (making life better), while production grew more specialized. William Easterly counters Ridley’s premise: “Specialists often have the most to lose from new technologies that displace the old ones they know so well, and may want to block innovation.” Yet it seems that the power of the marketplace in a networked world to hear about that innovation would eventually push aside such stonewalling specialists’ attempt to block access to the new, new thing.

Our opportunities multiply as human intelligence becomes “collective” and we generate more value with for each other.

Near the end of the book Ridley pulls together many threads of his argument for an optimistic future with these bold forecasts:• “Large corporations, political parties and government bureaucracies will crumble and fragment as central planning agencies did before them.”

• “Monolithic behemoths, whether private or nationalized, are vulnerable as never before to this Lilliputian assault. They are steadily being driven extinct not just by small firms, but ephemeral aggregations of people that form and reform continuously. The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.”

• “People will more and more freely find ways to exchange their specialized production for diversified consumption.”

• “‘The online masses have an incredible willingness to share’ says Kevin Kelly. Instead of money, `peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction and experience.’”

• Among the pitfalls we face, predators and parasites can piggyback on the work of others as freeloaders and worse. They can spark terror or spread a false belief: “The integrated nature of the world means that it may soon be possible to capture the entire world on behalf of a foolish idea, where before you could only capture a country, or perhaps if you were lucky an empire.

• “It will be hard to snuff out the flame of innovation because it is such an evolutionary, bottom-up phenomenon in such a networked world. However reactionary and cautious Europe and the Islamic world and perhaps even America become, China will surely now keep the torch of catallaxy alight, and India, and maybe Brazil, not to mention a host of smaller free cities and states….”

I’m surprised that Ridley ignored the role that language played in the evolution of human progress especially as it is vital to specialization and trade.

Another area that Ridley does not explore and that Financial Times columnist Samuel Brittan raises is that the rise of the collective brain that Ridely cites may, in fact, be collective brains – people who band together around their common interests.

While the upside is the sense of belonging that engenders, the downside is, as Ridley has suggested is “generally speaking the more cooperative a species is within groups, the more hostility there is between groups.”  If this future scenario does happen then we may have more and more kinds of tribes and more kinds of intense disagreements amongst them – and worse.

Also, while I, like Ridley, think “open” markets aid innovation I have this caveat. To be truly open there must be a level playing field for competition and a true accounting for all costs to the public in the price of that product – that means no hidden subsidies, protections or costs of clean-up, etc. by government. That base line role of government regulation will always be hotly contested and arduous to craft and to enforce yet it is a vital role of a government of the people – for the people.

Three ways you can thrive in a bottom-up world are to be quotable, forge profitable partnerships and turn strangers into allies.

The sum of us can be more powerful (and fun) than one of us… sometimes. The confounding thing is exactly how we make it happen.

Even when we have a strong desire to collaborate, we are  likely bump up against into each other because, as in love,  good intentions don’t always lead to mutually satisfying behavior. Yet, as in love and friendship, the togetherness of collaboration is where our most meaningful moments in life often happen. We have the opportunity to either step away or stay steadfast in creating something greater than we can alone. Sometimes we can even savor the bumpy moments along the way. What’s your favorite quote for collaborating? Here’s some ideas.

“Independence is a political concept, not a biological concept.” ~ Margaret Wheatley

“Maybe we are not here to see each other but to see each other through” ~ anonymous

“We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.” ~ Clay Shirky

“If you want to have great partnerships, be a great partner. Get beyond yourself. Give up the notion that you are well-rounded, and stop expecting your colleagues to be universally proficient. Incorporate someone else’s motivations into your view of the accomplishment. Loosen up.

Put aside your competitive nature, your prepackaged view of how the thing should be done, and your desire not to be inconvenienced with the imperfections of a fellow human being. Focus more on what you do for the partnership than what you get from it. Demonstrate trust and see if they don’t surprise you with their trustworthiness. Be slower to anger and quicker to forgive. And along the way, communicate continuously.” ~ Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller

“A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.” ~ David Bollier

“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.” ~ Oprah Winfrey

“We live in two worlds – order and chaos.  In the world of order, we plan, reflect, and think about what to do next.  In the world of chaos, things happen, we get things done, yet unpredictability persists.   In one world, we like to think we are in control.  In the other, we mingle together with increasing complexity, conflict, and uncertainty.” ~ David Spangler

“How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.” ~ Robert Sapolsky

“I am continually impressed by the inconsistency of sustained attention in relationships.  Partners complain about this all the time, and kids probably would too if they could. ‘We’ have evolved with the capacity to attend to each other, but it’s not exactly dominant in our lives. Imagine a world where it was!” ~ Thomas Bradbury

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” ~ Henry Winkler

“If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.” ~ Lyndon Johnson

“A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.” ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect, the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.” ~ E.M. Forrester

“Daily life is foreplay for relationships.” ~ Kate Feldman

“Structure influences behavior. Design spaces that make you feel “you are welcome here and that you came to the right place.” ~ Peter Block

“Safety is a basic human need.  People with a sense of security and belonging are stabilized for learning, creating, innovating. A group of wonderfully cared for, confident individuals generates great ideas.”  ~ John Sweeney

“Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional.” ~ Max Lucade

“Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that,” she said. “But it turns out that time shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control.” ~ Sherry Turkel

“Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration. Working across organizational values can create tremendous value or destroy it – the hoarding and squabbling endemic in large companies can actually make collaboration more expensive than not attempting it.” ~ Morten T. Hansen

“Human beings are wired to care and give and it’s probably our best route to happiness.” ~ Dacher Keltner

“Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say “no”. If we cannot say “no” then our “yes” has no meaning. Each needs the chance to express their doubts and reservations, without having to justify them, or move quickly into problem solving. No is the beginning of the conversation for commitment.” ~ Peter Block

“Groups need both carrot and stick-based rules to remain stable.” ~ Robert Axelrod

“We need to look at front porches as crime fighting tools, treat picnics as public health efforts and see choral groups as occasions of democracy. We will become a better place when assessing social capital impact becomes a standard part of decision-making.” ~ Lew Feldstein

“Consequential strangers help us stretch beyond the relatively rigid boxes that the people who have known us the longest – our family and close friends – often put us into. Through interacting with people who do not know us as well, we are more free to experiment with ourselves, and less likely to have our new behaviors and roles reflected back to us by people who object, ‘But that’s not like you!’” ~ Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman

“Collaboration is more about find that sweet spot of mutual interest and understanding and being understood, than it is about speak well.” ~ Kare Anderson

“From American Idol to The Matrix participatory media – where old and new media converge by involving fans – is influencing our culture by creating new forms of interactive storytelling. Yet by enabling people to participate in such various media they can converge as a crowd to alter the story to create new modes of engagement, some not necessarily endorsed by the creator – or the brands that back them.” ~ Henry Jenkins

“In the long history of humankind…those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” ~ Charles Darwin

“Effective collaboration is about maximizing time, talent and tools to create value. The old way was the pass-along approach. I do my job and then pass along my work product to you. You do your piece of it and pass it along to somebody else.” ~ Evan Rosen

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”  ~ Carl Jung

“Diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving complex problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.” ~ Scott E. Page

“Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork. A fractured team is like a fractured bone; fixing it is always painful and sometimes you have to re-break it to heal it fully – and the re-break always hurts more because it is intentional.” ~ Patrick Lencioni

“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.” ~ Miles Davis

“Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other’s prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.” ~ Cass Sunstein

“Being in a band is always a compromise. Provided that the balance is good, what you lose in compromise, you gain by collaboration.” ~ Mike Rutherford

“Some of the power has shifted from companies to people. Using social media tools (blogs, wikis, tagging, etc.) more individuals are creating semi-spontaneous ‘groundswells’ of opinions to which companies and other institutions are realizing they must respond.  From marketing to consumers organizations are being pulled into engaging with individuals.” ~ Charlene Li

“No idea will work if people don’t trust your intentions toward them.” ~ Marcus Buckingham

“Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn’t conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn’t decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.” ~ Steven Johnson

“Trust is the glue that holds relationships together.” ~ Price Pritchett

“In an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person’s contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that’s more responsive to the changing environment. “ ~ Keith Sawyer

“Human beings are to independent action, what cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but mostly we don’t… Instead, we do what we do because of what those around us are doing (Whatever our minds and our cultures tell us). It is our innate nature as “herd” animals that cause mass movements, not the influence of a handful of influential individuals.” ~ Mark Earls

“Be more interested than interesting.” ~ Mark Goulston

“Hot groups have members who are task-obsessed and full of passion. They share a style which is “intense, sharply focused, and full bore. Members feel engaged in an important, even vital and personally ennobling mission; their task dominates all other considerations; and although such intense teams tend to remain intact only for a relatively short period of time, that time is remembered nostalgically and in considerable detail by its members.” ~ J. Lipman-Blumen and H. Leavitt

“For productive collaboration adopt five principles: involve the relevant stakeholders, build consensus phase by phase, design a process map, designate a process facilitator and harness the power of group memory.” ~ David Straus and Thomas C. Layton

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ~ Plato

“Trafficking organizations these days take the form of decentralized networks that shift continuously, assuming new configurations as opportunities present themselves and then morphing again to meet the needs of the next moment. They don’t specialize in a single commodity like cocaine. Instead, they move whatever goods present an opportunity for profit in the present moment; drugs today, arms tomorrow, people the next day and then knock-off designer handbags after that. Yet government agencies’ understanding of the organizational structure of international trafficking networks is dangerously out of date. They go after the illicit trades as if they had a hierarchical structure with information and power flowing up and down a chain of command.” ~ Moises Naim

“If your friend’s friend’s friend (whom you may not have even met) is obese, a smoker or a zealot of some kind then it is a lot more likely that you will be too.” ~ James H. Fowler

“Hackman’s paradox: Groups have natural advantages: they have more resources than individuals; greater diversity of resources; more flexibility in deploying the resources; many opportunities for collective learning; and, the potential for synergy. Yet studies show that their actual performance often is subpar relative to “nominal” groups (i.e. individuals given the same task but their results are pooled.) The two most common reasons: groups are assigned work that is better done by individuals or are structured in ways that cap their full potential.” ~ Richard Hackman

“The best advice for parents is not to shelter their children from the suffering in the world, and to engage them in doing something to get involved.” ~ Marc Keilburger

“Some of us cry when we watch sad movies or wince when we see athletes fall. This sense of shared experience is at the core of human experience. Because our brain has mirror neurons, we are capable of interpreting facial expressions of pain or joy, the first step towards feeling empathy, which causes an instinctively imitative response – the chameleon effect. That ‘mirroring’ response enables two people to literally see they are more alike in that moment.  That similarity evokes familiarity and thus a feeling of comfort that can lead to mutual trust with others.  When these mirror neurons do not work an individual may not be aware of another’s feelings and thus act in socially incorrect ways.” ~ Marco Iacoboni

“All for one, one for all.” ~ Alexander Dumas

“There are three stages of organizational development in this networked era. 1. Fortress – an organization where there are insiders and outsiders, and the two rarely meet or interact; 2. Transactional – an organization that is engaged with their community, but with the sole focus of transactions, such as getting people to sign up for an event or make a donation; and 3. Transparent – an organization that fully engages and empowers their community to accomplished shared goals.” ~ Beth Kanter and Allison Fine

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“The world you inhabit is the world you make. Your reputation precedes you, biasing the way new colleagues deal with you. Your first moves, friendly or hostile, tip the balance for future interactions. When you exhibit trust, you will most often find trustworthiness. When you are selfish, you will most often find selfishness. When you compete, others must resort to competition. If you choose to play the game strictly for your own advantage, your attempts at collaboration will indeed be, (as Thomas Hobbes said), ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’” ~ Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller

“Let all humanity be your sect.” ~ Sikh saying

While happiness books are all the rage, none begin by showing us the inescapable first step to connecting with others.   Yet having social ties is the single best predictor of a longer, healthier, more satisfying life. 

That seemingly mundane step? Attention.

When hired by Disney to observe what infants and toddlers paid the most attention to at their Orlando theme park and hotels I was surprised to discover that it was not the colorful, lively rides, friendly staff nor the snacks.  It was their parents’ cell phones. That phone was the action center of their world as they observed it. When parents were using their phones to talk or take pictures they were not paying direct, complete attention to their children.

Whatever you pay attention to – or not – determines your world. Isolated or connected.

 It is impossible to communicate, much less bond, with someone who can’t or won’t focus on you.  Giving attention is the first and most basic ingredient in any relationship, from a casual friendship to an enduring marriage. 

Giving and receiving undivided attention, however briefly, is the least that one individual can do for another and sometimes the most.  Multitasking not only reduces performance it also removes us from deepening connection with others.

“A developmental psychologist showed three pictures to children – a cow, a chicken and some grass,” wrote John Hagel. “He asked children from America which two of the pictures belonged together.  Most of them grouped the cow and chicken together because they were both objects in the same category of animals. 

Chinese children on the other hand tended to group the cow and grass together because “cows eat grass” – they focused on the relationship between two objects rather than the objects themselves.”

How does this happen? Some fault our individualistic, Western upbringing, focused on improving ourselves and bent on improving our children, from birth on.  We put our infants in strollers, high chairs and car seats whilst more of the world’s mothers hold babies to their bodies and share care amongst friends and families. As Rapt author, Winifred Gallagher found, “Even before they can talk these tots are primed to attend to what others are doing and feeling.”

That’s why quotes such as these have strong appeal for us independent-minded Americans: 

“Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

 ”Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.”  ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes 

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” ~ Robert Frost

Yes, they reflect important traits of self-reliance and identity.  They focus on self-discovery, learning and achievement as the highest value rather than rather than on learning with others and caring for each other. In this ever more connected world, those who will live the fullest lives may shift their mindset to see the strengths of both approaches.

Most motivational speakers, self-help writers, therapists and pharmacologists encourage us to focus on “me”.  They suggest that we  look inward to understand and improve ourselves for a happier, better life.  That’s not wrong; just incomplete.  We are most likely to learn more about ourselves, to grow and to be happy, when in relationship with others. Further, in this connected world, we have they capacity to create something greater – with others, if we pay attention to the sweet spot of mutual benefit. As every well-matched tennis or chess player and happy book club member or spouse knows, simply socializing with others enables us to bond, build community – and self-confidence.

That’s not all. Research shows that paying attention to the other guy often helps you more than him. Attending to others also evokes responses that can help us feel cared for, useful and connected to the larger world.

Paying attention is an individual effort, but it’s also a kind of social cement that holds groups together and helps them feel part of something greater than themselves.

That may be one of the reasons why the Dalai Lama, rooted in the other-directed, interdependent Asian village life, believes that “my religion is kindness.”

Psychologist Thomas Bradbury says, “I am continually impressed by the inconsistency of sustained attention in relationships.  Partners complain about this all the time, and kids probably would too if they could.  We’ have evolved with the capacity to attend to each other, but it’s not exactly dominant in our lives. Imagine a world where it was!”

Positive Illusions

There are tempting rewards for spouses who pay attention positively, ones that would seem to hold true for all enduring relationships. Research shows that:

• The most important difference between happy and unhappy couples is whether their focus is on the positive or the negative.

•  Contented spouses see each other through rose-colored glasses, holding an even more favorable view than their partners have of themselves.

• Over time, each person actually becomes more like the mate’s rosy vision. So discovered psychologist Sandra Murray.

One Takeaway to Practice

Next to honing your top talent your key to having more options in a life you can savor is to strengthen your capacity to connect  and collaborate with people extremely unlike you.

Focus on the sweet spot of common interest or mutual benefit even and especially if you don’t feel that you understand or even like that other person at first.  In so doing, like practicing yoga, you become increasingly flexible and open to new ideas, thus more relevant and able to resonate with others. Inevitably that leads a richer, more meaningful life.

Along the way of your shared experiences, you may even become friends with some of those individuals with whom you interact – even though they don’t act right, like you.  

At least this is the path I am stumbling along and mostly enjoying.  I’d love hearing how your path forward is similar or different than this.

Thank you Guy Kawasaki & team for placing two of my blogs on the top of your Alltop category – Collaboration - How We Partner and this blog.  In celebration of this recognition I finally updated my blog roll here on Moving From Me to We.

Unfortunately, whilst I posted these valuable collaboration-related links I cannot yet get them to appear. I have appealed to my blog design hero Cody McKibben for help) so let me share then with you here right now because, well we can be smarter together. 

Alltop/Collaboration

Beth Kanter

Bioteams

Center for Citizen Media 

Collaborate

Collaboration 2.0

Collective Intelligence

Cognitive Daily

Communities Dominate Brands

The Community Roundtable

Connect NESTA 

Cooperation/Berkman Center/Harvard

Consumer Generated Media 

Conversation Agent

Converstations

Creating WE / Judith Glaser

Creative Class

The Culture of Collaboration

Danah Boyd / Zephoria

Don Tapscott 

Full Circle / Nancy White

Herd 

How We Partner

Idea Architects / Jeffrey Cufaude

Interpersonal Skills Lab

Kolabora

Logic + Emotion / David Armano

Made by Many

mashable

Mass Customization 

Mastermind Group Resources

MIT Convergence Culture Consortium

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence 

Networked Performance

Network Weaving

Ning

Nudge

OpenCongress

P2P Foundation

Public Journalism Network

Putting People First

Resonance Partnership

Shel Holtz

The Situationist

Skoll Foundation

Smart Mobs

Social Customer

The Social Age

Social Edge

Social Media Biz

Social Psychology Network

Social Science Statistics

Society for Industrial & Org. Psych

Trends in the Living Networks

Ugluu

Vizthink

Wikinomics

Winning by Sharing

Wired to Care

To jumpstart your new year in these roiling times, consider this: ”When the economy tanks it’s natural to think of yourself first. You have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business. It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money, but most important generous with our art.” ~ Seth Godin 

Here’s my three-step approach to put that notion into practice in this ever more Connected Age (please tell me what you think):

1. Discover your main talent (Marcus Buckingham) and re-design your work and life to use it more often.

2. Constantly keep an eye out for problems and opportunities in your profession, market  - or in your life.

3. Recruit the mix of people who can collectively seize that opportunity or provide the solution to that problem.

In short: We’ll get better at methods that create more value, working together  – as a satisfying way of helping each other. That may be the most efficient and satisfying way to generate more value for our work and more meaning in our lives.

With the right team we can accomplish something greater with others than you can alone.  

Reminder: To be most helpful when being generous, adopt the Golden Golden Rule: Do unto others, not as you would have done unto you, but rather as they would have done unto them.

Two Predictions: 2010 will be the year of…

 1. Vastly increased collaboration everywhere. We may stumble but we will pick ourselves up, be more daring, supportive of strong partners -  and we will try more often, experimenting until we get it right: Right methods + right team.  Look for Peter Sims’ next book, Little Bets.

 2. Quickly-formed project teams.  Some teams will bond and seek more projects. Others will go bust, most likely because of the power of the weakest link.  (Motivation to participate dissipates when one person does not pull his weight and Rules of Engagement were not in place, upfront, to include the rule for graciously booting non-performers off the island.)

Oh and you may want to download What Matters Now, Seth’s free 82-page e-book with contributions from some 70 bright contributors, from Wired editor, Chris Anderson to Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and Dan and Chip Heath, authors of Made to Stick. Then learn how to lead online communities (with pithy advice from those who are) in another e-book created by J.C. Hutchins – Nick of Time.

You don’t have to be religious to have a deep faith in the power of compassion. With it people who act and believe differently can not only work and live together in harmony they can enjoy a richer, more adventuresome life.

They can collaborate. They can accomplish greater things together than they could if they just share time with people like them. And they’d be much less likely to kill each other.

“It doesn’t really matter what you believe as long as it leads you to practical compassion.”  ~ Karen Armstrong

In fact, the more diverse a community, group or team the greater the likelihood that misunderstanding and conflict will happen. 

“We are living cheek by jowl with people of other faiths, our world has shrunk to a global village…for a long time and in a most unsung way people have been spontaneously  reaching out to other faiths. More Christians read Martin Buber than Jews. Jews read Paul Tillich and Harvey Cox. And Jesuits have long been learning meditation from Buddhist monks.” ~ Karen Armstrong

Yet, when friction happens, if individuals look to each other’s positive intent, listen fully and speak candidly, they are most likely to experience breakthroughs – both personally and collectively. That shared experience enables everyone to feel safer in the group. 

We spiral up to greater trust, bring out the best in each other, creating a mutually-reinforcing behavioral loop that enables us to become happier and higher-performing together. That’s when the Golden Rule happens naturally.

Yet that rarely happens.  Even more difficult than defending oneself or attacking others, facing another with compassion takes “stepping into their shoes” practice. 

“The act of compassion begins with full attention, just as rapport does. You have to really see the person. If you see the person, then naturally, empathy arises. If you tune into the other person, you feel with them. If empathy arises, and if that person is in dire need, then empathic concern can come. You want to help them, and then that begins a compassionate act. So I’d say that compassion begins with attention.” ~ Daniel Goleman

That’s why TED talk speaker, Karen Armstrong asked, as her wish, for support in spreading the idea of the Charter for Compassion, and the collective practice of its central tenet.  That is “the core shared value of every world religion and moral code, the Golden Rule.”

After all, “TED is about ideas worth spreading — please help us spread compassion, ‘the best idea humanity has ever had.’”

My version of the Golden Rule is to do unto others as they would have done to them.

Would you join us in this global conversation and in sharing the charter with others? I’ve started by:

•  Watching six people share their insights on compassion – an inman, a rabbi, a tenzin, a swami, a reverend and some with a secular voice of compassion.

• Learning about the activities funded by the Fetzer Institute, a partner in this campaign.

Imagine my delight in discovering that Fetzer is sponsoring a conference next spring at which Daniel Siegel will be speaking on From Me to We: A New Look at Resilience and Well-Being.

“The Golden Rule is of no use to you whatever unless you realize it is your move.” ~ Frank Crane

When you first glimpse someone (or something) new your brain reacts instantly, but you knew that. What’s destructive is that when you instinctively feel danger – or simply irritation –  you respond quicker, longer and more intensely than if you feel safe or another positive emotion.

Your negative reaction to “the new” affects you much more than a positive response. Knowing that you can understand the power of choosing how to respond to what you don’t like – and the need to practice making that choice. You may set in motion a spiral up of negative reactions between you and the other person until you both get stuck against each other. 

That’s one reason why the carrot and stick approach to rewarding and penalizing employees, family members or friends actually harms relationships and collective performance. So suggests Dave Rock in Your Brain at Work and Dan Pink at the TED conference and in his forthcoming book, Drive: The Surprizing Truth About What Motivates Us.  

Keep cool while under fire

The most effective way to avoid being the victim of one’s reactions to stress-appearing

event, suggests Jeffrey Schwartz, co-author of The Mind and the Brain, is to establish regular routines in which you watch the patterns of your thoughts and feelings to become more self-aware in the moment.  Schwartz believes that the collective practice of such mindfulness is the only way an organization can change.

And collaborationis difficult, ironically, because without self-awareness we can’t see beyond ourselves.

That’s why mindfulness can also be a powerful bonding practice, as well, for a family or circle of friends to collectively adopt. 

Don’t let somebody else determine your behavior

The more mindful you are the more aware you become of your unconscious processes. That way you have more cognitive control, found Kirk Brown, meaning you have a greater ability to shape what you do and what say, than people lower on the mindfulness scale.

Hint: We tend to like people who act like they like us.   

Here’s six steps to living in the moment from Jay Dixit. 

One of the most pleasurable ways to practice staying in the moment is doing something playful or creative like dancing – with others. 

Want to be in the book, The Obama Time Capsule: World History in the Making?

Any of us could be a co-author, thanks to a partnership between fellow Sausalitan, photographer and editor of “Day in the Life of…” big theme books Rick Smolan and Hewlett-Packard and Amazon.

Together they enable you to place yourself (your photo, writing, video) in a point in history.  More plainly in a book of photos, maps, election results and essays from Joe Klein, Colin Powell and other notables. I like the collective approach, think the product is pricey and believe we’ll see imaginative variations of this approach, perhaps instigated by you.

At a much more humble level I partnered with three women CEOs in India who inserted their examples, quotes and advice in my book, Resolving Conflict Sooner, thus becoming co-authors in that book published in India, promoted by them, giving each a new facet to their public face, enabling me to learn from them and providing us all with a new profit center.

As an expert on something (you certainly are!) you, too, could turn your content into an online multimedia book or scrapbook, providing places where complementary experts could insert their relevant tips, video and audio to:

• Increase the value of the collectively-created book.

• Generate more visibility as all contributors tell their friends and clients about it.

• Enable co-authors to learn from each other via their blended contribution.

Via social media you can spur involvement.

Start simple by creating a Scrapblog covering your favorite subject or event, then invite convivial colleagues to contribute their words, images and photos, then tell the world of people who care about that topic.  With each new contributor “our” scrapbook can become more interesting, valuable and talked about.

Or, even simpler, start a group at Posterous, set the stage with your narrative of text, photos and video.