We often think of competition and collaboration as opposites or activities opposing each other. This is a notion reinforced by the Collaboration Spectrum, which places them at different points along a spectrum. Bar-Yam (2003) points out that while different, collaboration and competition are interdependent.
We typically think of evolution as a competition, e.g., survival of the fittest. But evolution provides many examples of altruistic collaborations, such as that between cells of multicellular organisms, or symbiotic arrangements like the ones we humans enjoy with the microbes in our guts (without which, we could not live). Collaboration makes higher order structures possible. It permeates our daily life.
Bar-Yam suggests that as we go up in scale from smaller to larger systems (Zoom In, Zoom Out), collaboration and competition characterize alternating levels. He uses a sports analogy to illustrate the relationships between these levels. Teams compete with opponents to win games. But for such games to be possible, teams must collaborate to form and maintain the functions of a league—the level where games are scheduled and tracked, and where resources are mobilized to promote the sport to attract spectator dollars. At the level of marketing and promotion, the league is now competing with other leagues, sports, or entertainment offerings. And all these entertainment organizations must operate according to a common set of rules, collaborating to ensure fair and predictable regulations for their ongoing competition (lobbying, engaging the legal system, etc.). Zooming in from the team level, players collaborate to win games against other teams, but they must also compete for status positions and roster spots on any given night or across the entire season. That competition drives them to be the best they can be—an engine of improvement that trickles up through the levels.
Collaboration supports competitiveness at the next level up. Competition at one level encourages collaboration at the level below. Bar-Yam suggests that improvements to healthcare quality and cost would be enabled by empowering workgroup competition as an incentive. Just as team competition drives improvement in sports, competition between teams of care providers could enable improvement of healthcare outcomes especially for highly complex tasks.
Deeper Dive
- Bar-Yam, Y. Complex systems and sports: Complex systems insights to building effective teams, New England Complex Systems Institute, 2003.
- New England Complex systems Institute. Evolution of Cooperation, 2022.
- Bar-Yam, Y, S Bar-Yam, KZ Bertrand, N Cohen, AS Gard-Murray, HP Harte, and L Leykum, A complex systems science approach to healthcare costs and quality, in Handbook of Systems and Complexity in Health, Springer, 2013, pp. 855-877.
Related Frameworks
- Collaboration Spectrum: illustrates competition and collaboration as ends of a spectrum
- Match Capacity to Complexity: teamwork helps organizational capacity
- Process of Building Trust: needed for collaboration