Challenges on cooperative collaboration

When talking about cooperativism and cooperative arrangements, its common to find a large number of people who feel inspired by the promise of trust-based work.

Many workers, who have not had the experience of collaborating outside of corporate or freelancing arrangements, can get easily acquainted with the vocabulary of solidarity practices, and find in those words, the promise of an idyllic professional practice.

Non-violent communication, collaborative decision-making, addressing power dynamics, and non-hierarchical arrangements are concepts that can be understood through an afternoon of research, but the insidiousness of the individualistic corporate mentality sits much deeper than most people can understand, and in many cases, this modus operandi exposes how knowledge and vocabulary alone can't carry a true cooperative collaboration very far.

1. The individualistic corporate mentality is a devil that whispers into your ear

When I first joined a cooperative, my conscious practice was focused on reinforcing the autonomy of my comrades, trusting their judgement, and respecting their capacity. However, knowing something isn't the same thing as incorporating it in our behaviour.

During the first months of work, I kept feeling a lingering impulse to micromanage people, a sense of overtly-zealous ownership towards my ideas and inputs. That was the little demon of corporate mentality.

This demon whispers feelings of insecurity, lack of trust, desire to centralise power, to maintain larger ownership over processes, ideas, and projects.
This devil won't allow you to make a cooperator out of yourself, no matter how versed you are in the history and vocabulary of cooperativism and collaboration.

The consequences of listening to the devil depend on the level of power and influence that a person has in the group.

If they're already a central member, they essentially become a petty boss. An insecure figure, with a practice rooted in constantly reaffirming their previous beliefs.

Because the imbalances in power haven't been anticipated in the structure, they can't be properly addressed. This creates stale environments of disengagement, cynicism and lack of trust.

Something that few people articulate is how exhausting it is for workers to manage insecure bosses. In these environments, its not uncommon that the work becomes a process of offering what the centralising figures want instead of committing to proactive collaboration.

If you aren't a particularly influential figure in the group, you may become ostractised and frustrated, as your individualistic tendencies clash with the collective-oriented approach of the group.

2. It's fundamental to admit our difficulties, be open to criticism and experience the growing pains of change

Learning true cooperation needs time. Commitment is the starting point of a long process of change that happens through sacrifice, solidarity, and loss.

Far from the illusive scenario of WeWork-ish labour contexts where the pieces for perfect collaboration seem to just fall into place, cooperation must be concerned with addressing friction and inequality as part of an ongoing process. Cooperators must be interested in rules, processes, documentation, and structures.

What happens in a cooperative environment is similar to a company that's stripped of all of its corporate irks to its bare structure: what's left standing?

Are the processes redundant? Is the hierarchy actually coherent or does it only serve a purpose of surveillance? Do people make things because they believe in them or because they're coerced by others? How many arbitrary choices are made to appease an immature boss? How much energy is spent around issues that don't matter at large scale? Do the communications between members mean anything, or are they just convoluted airflow? Are their people accumulating unchecked amount of power? Are there people working beyond their capacity? Are the differences being acknowledged fairly?

We're interested in building structures around all of those questions.

As the group converges into a practice that echoes their collective values as coherently as possible, members must be open to question their habits and beliefs. De-normalising behaviours brought from corporate environments and insecurity that's rooted in an insiduous culture of competition and ownership.

The ideal cooperative scenario isn't a summit members reach once they commit to pursuing a different work practice for the sake of self-actualisation. Cooperation is a process guided by trust, generosity, and solidarity, where rules must be reviewed, processes retired, structures challenged, and the little devil ignored.