Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups

by Paul W.B. Atkins

the opportunity to impact the social process

becoming more psychologically flexible is potentially a way to enhance social value orientation.

psychological inflexibility leads to the objectification and dehumanization of others,

behavior change in groups cannot be separated from behavior change in individuals, and vice versa.

unspoken ways that the group might hijack its noble goals and undermine its chances of achieving them.

Over time, people who spend more of their life moving toward what matters have broader and more flexible repertoires of behavior, whereas people who spend their life trying to avoid having difficult or painful experiences have smaller and more rigid repertoires.

appetitive stimuli

aversive stimul...

When fear rather than what he cares about motivates his work, it loses its vitality.

Another key capability that’s associated with well-being is the capacity to distinguish between what is actually happening and the interpretations and meanings we attach to what is happening.

giving people permission to not try to remember every detail of what’s said, but to focus on feelings, values, and needs, can help cut through this complexity.

We designed the Prosocial process to be modular. It contains six interlocking modules, which groups can use separately or in combination:

Measurements for assessment and diagnosis

The individual matrix

The core design principles

The collectiv...

Goal s...

Measurements for evaluating change

this sort of integration is disrupted because people are simply expected to toe the line for the good of the group.

goals for committed action for the group, which are anchored in organizational and individual values.

Goals for committed action … anchored in organizational and individual values.

prioritize these goals to turn them into committed actions.

vote as needed to prioritize the values and goals

Buy-a-feature using quadratic voting (to account for intensity). This will work for defining a Mission (goals). It doesn't make sense to prioritize Values.

organizational inflexibility flowed from the failure to work on psychological flexibility.

Operations goes as psychology goes. Flexible? Inflexible? You tell me, Mr Psychology.

Such experiences, while rare, often stand out as peak experiences

the Prosocial process is designed to integrate individual and collective interests so that each member is more likely to identify with the group:

There are two faces to group cohesion: social cohesion and task cohesion.

Group cohesion also protects group members from stress and depression.

all these positive effects of group cohesion are even more important for self-managing groups

having a sense of cohesion has been shown to be a more important motivator than money.

While the core design principles are important on their own, we think it’s their combinati...

like trust, cohesion is slow to build and easy to fracture.

You can easily check whether members feel like they belong by asking them to consider and discuss this question: What are the benefits of belonging to this group for me personally?

All of the other design principles suffer when the first principle is weak.

Consider Enspiral,

This is something that Nearsoft does well. Aided, no doubt, by its ecology's culture.

the matrix can become a shared language

Share reflections.

Retrospectives.

Use “onboarding” processes.

Each team need to design a conscious onboarding process. It could be minimal or very sophisticated, but it needs to be there. ------- I am starting to see the possibility of starting with Prosocial as toe-in-the-door, "we are to help your team be more collaborative." USE CASE: "It takes a long time to get new people productive" (ACME, Switchfly). "Let's help them design a lightweight onboarding process"… "Hmm, they need to learn to be collaborative. That would help new people become productive sooner"… "Hmm, they're ready to really do Agile. They can self-manage!"… (Alternatively, "Hey, we could apply what we learned to our Agile process, right.) "Hmm, it would make your company amazingly productive to spread, self-management to other teams. It would reduce costs, too. And It would make it easier and less costly to attract and keep them unicorns. Hell, you could disrupt Google's hiring practices of offering more money and stock; even their brand would not stand a chance against working at a company where you can manage yourself, without having to deal with a manager (do you know that people leave primarily because of their managers?) Of course, for self-management to really work well, you'll have to be part of the training. … We sure can include your CEO, too."

unless these changes are initiated by members.

Really?

You can minimize this risk of conformity by finding some way to acknowledge and celebrate diversity

Extremely strong within-group cohesion can be problematic for another reason; it can work against good relations with other groups, a violation of core design principle 8,

constructing a sense of “we” invariably attaches a sense of “them” to those who are not part of the group.

One approach to lessening this sort of intergroup identity conflict is to work so that “us” and “them” together constitute another “us” at a higher level of organization.

Won't scale, sorry (unless the aliens reveal themselves).

In some circumstances, a clear sense of shared purpose is so powerful that it can substitute for a formal, hierarchical leader role by guiding behavior in ways that are aligned and coordinated.

Not really. For co-management to work at a company, you need the trifecta of Vision (What), Purpose (Why), and Mission (How) for it. That's the (virtual) boss.

Enlightened leaders

And Enlightened Monarchs.

One recent study demonstrated that workers were willing to be paid 44 percent less for the same job once they learned that their prospective employers had a social responsibility mission statement.

Burbano, V. C. (2016). Social responsibility messages and worker wage requirements: Field experimental evidence from online labor marketplaces.

the effort of one matched worker was equivalent to approximately 1.7 unmatched workers.

Carpenter, J., & Gong, E. (2016). Motivating agents: How much does the mission matter? Journal of Labor Economics.

the positive effects of being well aligned with the purpose of the group to which they were assigned was much greater than the effects of offering large extrinsic incentives.