I spent most of the weekend catching up on the MOOC that I am registered for – The Secret of Life. We are learning about cloning and it is fascinating. The acceleration in discoveries and innovations has gotten up to a point where the “tools” of cloning are now available in a catalog – you can order the “cloning vectors”  (“Plasmids“). We are also learning how the scientists have been unraveling the “secret of life”. It is mind boggling to hear how there is always an enzyme that assists a specific chemical reaction, which led the professor to quip that “there is always an app for that”! It is pretty amazing how all of these have to come together in particular sequence (no pun intended) and at particular times for everything to work just right. No wonder it took several million years to perfect this….

Whereas this course is teaching us the intricacies of formation of life, I was so sad to see many lives lost in the Philippines due to super typhoon Haiyan. I sure hope that they get the help they need and recover quickly. We were relieved to hear how technology, combined with the government machinery, helped evacuate 800,000 people from somewhat a smaller Typhoon that hit Eastern India a few weeks ago. I still vividly remember the 1964 cyclone (cyclone, hurricane, typhoon – they are all similar)  that destroyed a bridge in South India (called the Pamban Palam) connecting an island called Dhanushkodi. My cousin was coming back to Sri Lanka after a trip to India around that time and it took us several days to know that he luckily skipped the train that submerged in the waters. Communication was pretty bad in those days!

I was talking to a colleague last week about a proposal to collaborate and we were both fretting how hard it has become to collaborate. We also were wondering aloud as to “what is collaboration?” One can look for its definition in dictionaries, but I think this definition in Wikipedia captures the essence well “Collaboration is working with each other to do a task and to achieve shared goals. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals”. The key is “working together”, “shared goals” and  “recursive process”. Too often, in our interest to collaborate, we lose sight of these key things.

In my opinion, driving is a massively parallel collaboration, highly successful and perhaps we can learn from it. Driving is an exercise where everyone who is on the road is working with each other to achieve the shared goal of reaching our destinations as efficiently as possible. Of course, this comes with several complications. Some like to drive fast, go above the speed limit, or tailgate. But the rest of the drivers “collaborate”. Some say “Why do I care?” and move to the other lane to accommodate and some others say “Do what you can” and continue to annoy the fast driver behind and slow the person down. Frankly, in the end for the kinds of distances we drive, going too fast has a poor return on investment. It may be a few minutes of advantage, but increased risk of accidents and being ticketed make it not worth the trouble. When we enter into collaborations, we see this. Not everyone involved is on par either in terms of knowledge or speed of execution, but the reality is that the collaboration can only move as fast as the slowest participant.

However, there are those who realize that they are slow drivers and drive in the rightmost lane, thereby letting the others move at whatever speed they want. Perhaps those participants in a collaboration who fess up that they are unable to contribute at a level or speed that certain tasks require them to, we give them tasks that are not critical to the achievement of the shared goal in the first cut. There are still very important tasks such as testing, training  or documentation which may fall in this category.

And accidents happen, either due to unexpected “machine” failures or for the most part due to human errors such as drunken driving, sleeping while driving or texting while driving. I am surprised that we don’t hear about accidents while applying mascara! Luckily, the number of accidents are relatively small in comparison to the amount of driving that takes place. There are accidents where the driver who is at fault is the one who is hurt. However, there are many accidents where the driver hurts others for no fault of others. And invariably, accidents are always the other party’s fault, but we call in a neutral party, the police, to figure out whose fault it is. These things can happen in a collaboration, though they are mostly unforeseen & unanticipated accidents. But the finger pointing can be real and we all need to be on the same page about this. We need to establish reasonable procedures to debrief and correct the problem and move on. There are cases where the collaboration involves sensitive data or intentional data theft, where the actions will be different.

The collaboration that happens when we drive in a western country is made possible by a lot of thinking by the governments and enormous commitment in terms of infrastructure, laws and guidelines. This is essential for collaboration too. Not necessary that the collaborators need to pass a “law”, but common understanding, agreement and guidelines are essential. Then there are countries like India, where, in many places, one wonders how people get around in such a mess, but they do! The chaos still results in achieving the shared goals. This is because every participant adopts to the driving – some choose to go on two wheelers because it is easier, some drive wherever there is a gap etc. Not an ideal collaboration scenario. However, the best collaboration I have seen is a single lane road which is meant to be a two lane road – where opposing traffic travels. The two sides approach each other at high speeds as if they are on a suicide mission, but they use signals effectively to move and accommodate each other, at the last minute, of course!

The library and technology staff from Higher Ed do a great job sharing. This is some form of collaboration indeed. But many of us feel that we can do a lot more. Where we fail is in “shared goals”, which is very hard to establish. Stylistic differences & local institutional cultural differences amongst other things come in the way. However, with the kind of financial pressures many of us are facing, it is high time that we really look at real collaborations where we are not repeating the same work!

If you are interested in learning more about driving and traffic, I highly recommend the book “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)” by Tom Vanderbilt.