2nd Serving: Why is Collaboration the Highest Form of Human Interaction?
- May 15
- 3 min read
By Ray Fisk, Founder and President of ServCollab
In ServCollab, we seek to discover and refine core concepts for serving humanity. The first core concept - serving - was introduced in the first Serving I shared.
Our second core concept is collaboration. This serving explains why collaboration is the highest form of human interaction.
Interactions
Our social species depends on interactions with other humans for its survival. This begins at childbirth, when the first few years of life require protective interactions with parents and family. Learning to socialize with other people benchmarks our progress from childhood to adulthood. For example, in my childhood, my teachers recorded whether I “played well with others” on my report cards.
Importantly, the systems we live in as adults are based on regular interactions that are often labeled personal interactions or public interactions. Personal interactions include the private interactions with family and friends. Public interactions include customer interactions and employee interactions. These public interactions are so important in business that the academic disciplines of marketing and management focus on customer and employee interactions, respectively.
ServCollab explored how we interact with others in our 2020 article introducing ServCollab (published in the Journal of Service Management - see below for link). That article explained that human interactions can be grouped by how we behave during interactions: Conflict, Competition, Cooperation, and Collaboration.
Both conflict and competition are oppositional interactions with winners and losers. Cooperation and collaboration are service interactions because they start with service offerings or service requests. Cooperation and collaboration occur when offerings or requests are accepted.
Social scientists describe humans as naturally cooperative. You will find ready support for this claim in your daily personal and public interactions. Such cooperative interactions range from major to minor. As a minor example from my days serving restaurant customers, I learned to deliver food to the table and then ask, “What else can I bring you?” That question assured the patrons that I was eager to help them.
Collaboration
So, if we are naturally cooperative, what makes collaboration so special?
Collaborative interactions are how humanity solves hard problems. Collaboration requires free choice. Each potential collaborator offers their skills in hopes of mutually beneficial interactions.
Here, I need to remind you of the first universal wisdom principle of Serving Each Other.
Practicing the principle of Serving Each Other supports everyday human cooperation and enables the special practice of collaboration for the hard problems humans face. Across human history, understanding ourselves and how to survive on Planet Earth have remained hard problems.
Scientific collaboration is one of the best examples I can offer for the important role of collaboration in helping humanity learn important truths about our species and about the complexity of our living planet. Scientific collaboration includes the important practice of proposing truths and testing those truths.
This is the deeper connection to why ServCollab’s name includes “Collab”. We believe that only collaborative interactions among humans will enable humanity to find and verify the universal truths we seek for serving humanity. This leads to a second universal wisdom principle.
From studying the practice of collaboration, ServCollab offers the second universal wisdom principle for serving humanity: 2nd Wisdom Principle - Serving the Truth. Serving the truth is the second step to fairness in human systems.
In the next ServCollab Serving, we will explore what emerges when humans collaborate to serve the truth.
** Link: Elevating the Human Experience - https://www.servcollab.org/post/2020-josm-article-introducing-servcollab
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