One of the “discoveries” of the Forum, “How Collaboration Arises and Why It Fails,” is that the definition of collaboration requires a much-needed update. To start, distinguish it more explicitly from cooperation and coordination and delineate its moral connotations. We started preparing the Forum with the definition “cooperation between agents toward mutually constructed goals”. In the end, the definition emerging from the discussion is “collective action driven by a co-constructed imagined future embedded in a shared worldview”. This latter definition is a proposal that requires further analysis and debate. The reasons behind this transformation of the definition of “collaboration” are reflected throughout the report of the Forum published in book form as “The Nature and Dynamics of Collaboration”. One good example of the variable definitions experts use can be found in the podcast summary chapter ” Collaboration in Diverse Settings“. To summarize, let me quote from the concluding Chapter, ” Reflections on Collaboration,” which summarizes the key observations in the following way:

“The concept of collaboration has transformed from its pragmatic Latin origins of collaborare, compounding com- (together) and laborare (to work) into an ambiguous and vague form that encompasses attributes such as aspiration, valued relationships, treason, moral judgment, and injustice (see Chapters 3 and 4; Digeser 2022). We began with a working definition that viewed collaboration as cooperation between agents toward mutually constructed goals but found that such a tight link to goals is unnecessary. Goals do not necessarily shape collaboration, nor do they need to be mutually constructed. Humans can collaborate for the sake of collaboration; goals might not be the same for each individual in a collective given sub-goals, and goals can change due to the collaboration itself. How, then, should collaboration be distinguished from cooperation? Our discussions brought the original notion of a singular external goal as the main driver of a monolithic collective process into question and pointed, instead, to the goal-oriented nature of collaboration as a post hoc interpretation of the emergent structure of the dynamics of a collaborating collective but not as its exclusive cause. Moreover, given that collaboration is, by necessity, future-oriented, a more inclusive definition would be a collective action driven by a co-constructed imagined future embedded in a shared worldview (Chapters 4, 5, and 17). This definition places cooperation and collaboration on a continuum of the information required from proximal external physical cues, driving cooperation to distal cognitive constructs defining collaboration. Consider the chemo-mechanical signal exchange that defines ant cooperation versus a community of fate that can make humans collaborate to strive toward abstract objectives such as justice, freedom, or various malignant visions. Viewing collaboration in this manner resolves the ambiguity between these constructs and shows they can co-exist within a collective of agents, creating sub-structures and synergies. The notion of the cooperation-collaboration continuum opens new avenues of research and for shaping human collaboration in more heterogeneous and diverse dynamic structures.”

The future-oriented nature of collaboration, or the “shadow of the future” as Bob Axelrod called it in his podcast interview, and its intrinsic intentionality challenge the third-person perspective at the heart of Western science. For example, we can think of reducing mental processes to observables in the “empty organism” paradigm of traditional behaviorism, which failed as a science of psychology (despite sensitizing the field to the necessity of methodological rigor) [see 1 for more background on this]. The move towards an “internal view” on collaboration with an emphasis on underlying mental processes we propose challenges the dogma that collaboration is critically linked to managing shared resources, i.e, the commons. The analysis presented in the Forum’s report argues that collaboration exists and flourishes outside the traditionally defined commons. It is fundamentally future-oriented and so, “in the head” as much as “in the world”. This new definition expands the realm of collaboration to include the counterfactual states of reality humans can aspire to (See group rapport “What Is Collaboration Good For?“). Moving away from this operational anchoring of collaboration in the physical world of resource management allows us to appreciate collaboration as an ongoing, evolving process, not a singular, controlable object. Only a subset of collaborative processes deal with resource management. I will return to the relationship between collaboration and the notion of “Commons” shortly.

Our analysis also defines a proximal zone of collaboration, bringing Vygotsky’s constructivism into play. This proximal zone is not static but instead reshaped by the dynamics present in the collaboration itself. On the one hand, there is a feedforward influence through the initial conditions of the collaboration and the dynamics of agents and their physical, psychological, social, and cultural environments. On the other hand, an emergent effective environment created by the collaboration biases the perceptual, emotional, and cognitive structures of the agents involved, including virtualizations, imagined futures, and narratives. In other words, the products of the collaboration shape the collaboration. Hence, collaborations unfold in a continuous feedback loop between the task space, agents, their virtualizations, and the resistance created by opposing forces, which can be seen as a form of niche construction (Chapters Freire and Verschure ” Synthetic Collaborative Systems” and Sander van der Leeuws’ “Innovation, Perspectives, and Commons“). Deciphering these feedback loops will allow us to identify the architecture of collaboration (Scott Page’s “Collaborative Architectures“). Understanding this architecture and its different topologies (e.g., implicit or explicit, flat or hierarchical, voluntary or enforced) will allow us to better assess and shape the success, failure, and dynamics of collaborative processes in various contexts.

1: Verschure, P. F. (2016). Consciousness in Action. In Engel A. et al (Eds) The Pragmatic Turn: Toward Action-Oriented Views in Cognitive Science, Cambridge: MIT Press pp 235-60.