Last week I attended and presented at the National eXtension Conference in Sacramento. Always a great conference, it’s the Extension Ed Tech Conference without calling itself the Extension Ed Tech conference. The first time I attended in 2012, I immediately regretted not making plans to stay longer. This year I didn’t make that same mistake! I recently blogged about the conference highlights and themes on our Ed Tech blog, but I wanted to highlight the themes of collaboration and the Google “conundrum” (as some in Extension have called it) that were both brought up frequently during the week.

Collaboration vs. Cooperation

I’ve spent the last three or so years believing that we were terrible at collaboration in Extension. Whether organizational culture, individualistic mindsets, or power struggles had anything to do with it, I’ve witnessed Educators stifle Program Assistants out of intimidation, program staff strategically kill creative ideas because they didn’t agree with their own, and colleagues take personal offense to curriculum materials they created not being included in program updates. It may be the Millennial in me, but teamwork drives a lot of what I do. Why wouldn’t people be interested in collaborating with one another for the common good of the organization? Even if it meant their idea didn’t win out because someone had a better one, or that a Program Assistant got to plan 4-H Camp because he had more skills to do so? But I learned this week that we’re actually pretty good at collaboration… I just didn’t understand what the term really meant.

“In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity. Stephen Downes commented here on the differences:

collaboration means ‘working together’. That’s why you see it in market economies. markets are based on quantity and mass.

cooperation means ’sharing’. That’s why you see it in networks. In networks, the nature of the connection is important; it is not simply about quantity and mass …

You and I are in a network – but we do not collaborate (we do not align ourselves to the same goal, subscribe to the same vision statement, etc), we *cooperate*”

– Harold Jarche

Harold Jarche, one of the keynote speakers at NeXC spoke at length about the differences between collaboration and cooperation. You can read his full blog post about how cooperation trumps collaboration in networks here. So, we’re great at collaboration because we tend to kill each other’s ideas because we’re forced to work together toward the same goal.

Cooperation in Extension

So here are my 3 ideas for how we can become more cooperative in “Cooperative” Extension:

1. Network and cooperate with Extension colleagues outside of our state more often. Organizational cultures and hierarchies do not change overnight. We may be better served to cooperate with those outside of our state organization simply because it may be easier.
2. Share, share, share. Get over yourself and do it already. We do a decent job of sharing things we’ve created. As long as we’re the ones giving a presentation about it. And another state purchases it from us. And gives us full credit. And… Well, you get the point. Let’s be honest, we’re terrible at sharing. Not only should we freely share (and allow EDITING) of things we’ve created, we need to also share what we’re learning and *gasp* things we consider to be our “secrets to success”.  Case in point: Guy Kawasaki’s “Enchantment”. I’ve been sharing my “Back to the Kitchen” social media campaign materials freely, and I have to tell you people are floored that I send them Word and Publisher documents rather than un-editable PDFs. It’s a great feeling to say to them, “Yes! You can have it… really! Now go and do great things with it!”
3. Encourage people to pilot test their program ideas, etc. as mini pilot projects. We presented a session at NeXC on our Ed Tech project at Ohio State and spoke about the importance of framing this as a “pilot” project so that we were allowed more freedom to figure some things out as we went along during our first year. In academia, change happens slowly.  An innovative person who is itching to cooperate and/or collaborate with others to move their ideas forward is going to be pretty darn frustrated with slow change. If more Extension leaders were willing to invest in many small pilot projects, ideas could potentially blossom into innovative solutions… and creativity could flourish. Dave Gray used this concept to illustrate how Amazon has managed to stay ahead of the competition. According to him, we create “idea killing funnels” all too often when collaborating on a team. Instead, ideas and solutions should arise out of making things.

This doesn’t mean that I think we should jump into cooperation with both feet. I do have reservations about promoting a process that could encourage selfishness over the common good for an organization. So… what are your thoughts?

~Jamie