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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Collaborative pairs

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The campaign season started a few days ago, with the presidentiables as well as the vice-presidentiables roughed it out on stage addressing a crowd and raising both their arms as a sign of unity, partnership and indomitability. But whoever wins in the May elections, it’s optimal that both come from the same party to ensure collaboration and cooperation for the betterment of our nation. Look at what happened with President Aquino and Vice Prescient Binay who, coming from different parties, manifested their divergent interests in the end.

There is wisdom in a pair collaborating and working with each other towards a common purpose. In fact, in the landmark book Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, author Michael Farrel shows that collaborative pairs have been the cornerstone of many masterpieces and breakthroughs in art and society.  He argues that pairs together engenders an environment of “instrumental intimacy”, wherein both can constructively criticize each other.

Successful pairs

Examples of successful pairs Farrel cited are the first daring experiments in impressionism -Claude Monet and Frederic Bazille and Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, and later by Monet and Renoir. Another example is authors J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings) and C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) who discovered that they shared an interest in what Lewis called “Northernness.”

Other examples I can cite are Francis Crick and research fellow James Watson who described the structure of DNA in 1953; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who created “scientific socialism”; and more recently John Lennon and Paul McCartney who composed beautiful timeless music; and Vin Diesel and Paul Walker who, with their inimitable chemistry, filmed one the most successful movie franchises of all time.

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Legendary pairs

Even in business, creative and collaborative pairs have become a formidable force to reckon with. As cited by Professor Roberto Verganti in his Harvard Business Review article, The Innovative Power of Criticism, former Apple colleagues Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers started with a shared vision, contemplated on some rough ideas, criticized each other but with mutual trust and respect, until they founded Nest Labs, a home automation technology start up in 2010, which was later bought by Google for $3.2 billion in 2014.

As cited by Verganti, recent history is rife with successful pairs who created legendary companies: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to name a few.

Sparring partners

Pairs can also play a role in the innovation process at established organizations by finding a sparring partner. Verganti succinctly prescribes the necessary elements to make this successful: “Trust and respect between the two individuals is a must. A prior working relationship often helps, because that provides a foundation of interpersonal trust and understanding. Some degree of difference in background and perspective can be helpful, in that it generates cognitive diversity. A thick skin is crucial. You don’t want someone who has a hard time taking criticism. You want someone who isn’t going to play it safe, afraid to hurt your feelings. Finally, you are looking for someone who has similar motivations and objectives. Are you on the same page in terms of what you are trying to accomplish?”

One example of an organization who adopted a similar tack is the MFO Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in Germany which is running a program called “Research in Pairs”  with the objective of bringing together small groups of researchers, usually in pairs, to carry out joint research in the stimulating atmosphere. This resulted in productive and innovative research outputs in the field of mathematics.

Collaborative pairs are a new way of working that can bring innovative and creative outputs, may it be in personal life, like a husband and wife team, or in business, science, arts and other endeavors.

The author is a senior executive in a technology firm. He also teaches strategy, management and marketing courses in the MBA Program of the Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business, De La Salle University.

The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty, and its administrators.

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