Welcome The Decade Of Cooperation

“Cooperation is the science and art of dancing with others.”

We hear a lot about change and the desperate need for it but there’s precious little help available to bring it to pass. Instead, there’s a lot of behaviour – if only we could see it - that stands in the way of progress.

I’d like to change that.

For the last more than two decades, I’ve been involved in many change processes. Some have been minor affairs, anchored in the local community. Some have failed to launch. Others have led to grand transformations of entire industries, affecting tens of millions of hectares of land and millions of people. I’ve seen how change happens, or fails, up close.

The key lesson I’ve learned from all these processes is that we can’t get to change and for sure not to the grand transformations we so urgently need unless we first get to cooperation. Cooperation is the gateway to change. We achieve nothing on our own.

This shouldn’t surprise. Human society if founded on cooperation.

Harvard University Professor of Biology and Mathematics Martin Nowak, in his fantastic publication, Super Cooperators, describes how life itself came about in the vast primordial soup of millennia past, because molecules cooperated. From there, compounds formed and cooperated further and the path to evolution, to all the biodiversity that graces the planet today, began. Professor Nowak makes the case so completely that all of life, all of society, is founded on cooperation, that it’s obvious that without cooperation, we cannot live.

Yet humans struggle with cooperation. This seems particularly so right now when we need cooperation most of all. Climate change and other ills are upon us and our path to grappling with them lies in sitting down with people to find a way forward, in cooperation. Sadly, it’s just not happening. Well, perhaps I should rephrase that. People do come together, as we’ve seen recently in Glasgow at COP26, and there are pockets of cooperation emerging to give us hope. Yet, we don’t seem able to cooperate sufficiently to agree and then implement the bold actions needed to extricate ourselves from the mess we’ve created. COP1 may have been a better moment to start.

Professor Nowak’s Super Cooperators makes the case for cooperation but neither he, nor precious few others, describe how we might get there. To address that, I’ve created a “Getting To Cooperation” Workbook to start the process of sharing my experience supporting people find a path, often through challenging emotional terrain, to cooperation. It’s always a difficult journey but on the many roads and often indistinct winding paths I’ve travelled, it’s been beyond gruelling as combatants – some of the world’s largest companies and NGOs – launched wave after wave of stinging attacks at each other.

The attacks helped. People never change unless they’re uncomfortable. In those cases, the NGOs were agents of great discomfort, and their attacks were the disruption that kicked off the journey to change. Moving beyond the attack phase to get to cooperation is where so many processes fail. We get stuck in our hate, our judgement of ‘the other.’ We get lost in what I describe as the “Great Fog Of The Unknown,” and it’s so often been in that moment, when people feel totally lost, that I’ve come in to support them to find a way out, a way forward through the gates of cooperation.

Getting to cooperation must be a critical objective for everyone striving to bring change in the world. Yet people struggle to see it. “X will NEVER change!” “They’re all evil!” “I hate them!” It’s true that kind approaches designed to inspire cooperation often fall on deaf ears and bad things do continue to happen in the world. It may be that we’re doomed to epic failure, to extinction. I’d prefer to believe that we can inspire a different future and it’s with that end in mind that, starting January 1st, 2022, I’m dedicating myself to ushering in the “Decade of Cooperation.”

If we don’t cooperate, we die. Not in the next ten years, well, maybe not. There are those who think we’ll not make it past 2026. If we don’t start cooperating soon, we’ll for sure lock in an unhappy future. We have already passed critical thresholds that may doom us. We don’t know but we can be sure that if we don’t cooperate, even or especially with those we hate, that we will cross threshold after critical threshold and that opportunities for the cooperation we need on the global scale will be lost. It’s now or never.

Cooperation starts with me and you. With everyone on the planet. “But what can I do?” people ask, despairing, lost in the fog of planet-wide existential threats. My experience, having grown up, somewhat disadvantaged, in a nondescript rural Australian town, is that we can each do something. If we start a journey with a single step, a single effort to cooperate with the person in front us, to achieve something together, who knows where it might lead and what change in the world we might engender?

One of my most wonderful career moments was participating in the opening ceremony of the first ever Pygmy language radio station in the Congo Basin. That moment happened because I’d helped people come together to cooperate in a partnership that had been unimaginable a few short years earlier. As a young lad of 15, setting out on a career to protect the world’s forests, I never imagined ever meeting a Pygmy let alone supporting the opening of a community radio that has since done so much to help the people there.

I’ve written “Getting To Cooperation” to help you on your own journey to cooperation. If you can inspire cooperation to take root where you are, then step by step, I am absolutely certain you will bring real change in the world. If each of us changes one thing, the world will be a better place and that spirit of cooperation will flourish and help us change many things, at scale.

It is my hope, for you, the world, and the Decade of Cooperation, that we succeed. If we don’t, our future and that of our children and all the beauty on the planet, is bleak.

It really is beyond time that we start to cooperate.