That’s what I told the Toggle team last Thursday at our weekly staff meeting.  You should have seen the blank stares and raised eyebrows looking back at me.  I know most of the team thinks I’ve already gone off the deep end, but this statement still managed to cause a stir.  Fortunately for them I followed up “Stop Cooperating!” with:

Start Collaborating!

I distinctly remember a half cocked expression smacked across Jered’s face and words uttering from his mouth saying “What’s the difference? They’re the same!”.  Jered was completely justified in his reaction, as any thesaurus will tell you cooperate and collaborate are synonyms of each other.  Sure their definitions in a dictionary are almost identical and both roughly mean “to work with others”.  But this is one of those times when the “real” world definition of certain words has come to mean something quite different.  Not so much for the word “collaborate”, but “cooperate” definitely has a different “real” world meaning when applied to most structured organizations where authority is exercised.  Toggle is no different, and I as its self-appointed leader have been asking people to cooperate with me for the last 6 years.  Think about it for a second…what does cooperate really mean.  How about…”do what I say or you’re fired!”…or…”I told you to cooperate with me!”…etc. 

We are taught how to cooperate when we are very young and I think it’s likely the dictionary’s definition is not consulted in this time honored educational right of passage.  It starts as children with our parents telling us to cooperate with them.  Not optionally I might add.  We are then told to cooperate throughout school by our teachers and parents again.  And finally into the business world as most organizations are structured top down with “cooperation” in mind.

So let’s ask ourselves the question, “What would happen if we stopped ‘cooperating’ and started ‘collaborating’ instead?”.  What does that mean?  What would happen to authoritative power?  Would anarchy ensue?  Will people wander aimlessly through the halls of institutions everywhere?  Well, in our organization for the last 3 business days I am happy to report that Chaos Theory hasn’t taken a hold of Toggle…yet.  We’ll have to see what happens in the coming weeks, but so far the idea of collaborating with one another has created a very positive change in our company.  It has generated a level of leadership, creativity and productivity seconded only to the day before a long weekend.  Which is this Friday I might add.  Who knows what will happen!

I’ll leave you with that for now and if I don’t have a mutiny on my hands in the next few days, maybe someone on the team will collaborate with me and post a blog on what it means to “Start Collaborating”.