THE CHALLENGE OF WORKING TOGETHER

The idea of collaboration is the idea of working together to accomplish something greater than any one person can create by him or herself. On the surface, it seems so obvious and so simple. The difficulty, like so many things however, comes in the practice. As a principle, everybody agrees, “Yes it would be great if we worked together, got along, and collaborated so that we could achieve things that we would never achieve alone or apart.” Then reality shows up. Then people start disagreeing on how we are going to work together. Then people don’t like who gets to go first, be up-front, get some recognition, divide the profits, etc. Then we start wondering, can we get along? Can we work together?