Dawna Markova - Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently

This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2015 by Dawna Markova, Ph.D., and Angie McArthur

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

ISBN 978-0-8129-9490-2
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9491-9

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

spiegelandgrau.com
randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Casey Hampton

v3.1

To the Possibilists who have come before us, who stand next to us, and who will follow us

We have no choice but to think together, ponder together, in groups and communities. The question is how to do this, how to come together and think and hear each other in order to touch, and be touched by, the intelligence we need.

Jacob Needleman

This book has grown out of many years of our individual and collective experience. And while all stories and examples are based on actual events, many of the places, names, and specific details regarding the individuals we have worked with have been changed. In addition, some of the stories are based on composites of several individuals.

In support of what we can all make possible,

Dawna and Angie

GREAT MINDS DONT THINK ALIKE BUT THEY CAN LEARN TO THINK TOGETHER!

There is a new story waiting for our voice. It is the story of human possibility, of what people are capable of when we come together. Many of us carry this story inside but are afraid to speak it. We tell ourselves were crazy. But in fact we represent the new sanitythe ideas and practices that can create a future worth living.

Meg Wheatley

The most significant gift our species brings to the world is our capacity to think. The most significant danger our species brings to the world is our inability to think with those who think differently. Ive been writing this book for forty years. It has formed and re-formed itself into thirteen other books. It has moved with me from house to house in manila folders: from the lakeshores of Vermont, to the mountains of Utah, to the foothills of California, and now to the side of a volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was in my mind and heart when I was twenty, teaching children who were labeled as having learning disabilities in the migrant labor camps of Florida. It came back when I was in private practice as a psychotherapist in Norwich, Vermont. It resurfaced when I was training psychologists and social workers on the East Coast, in the Midwest, and on the West Coast. It nagged at me when I was an adviser to CEOs of global corporations. The need to write this book has been driven by what all of us should have been taught and never were: how to access the full range of the unique intelligence that is within us and between us.

Now that I am seventy-three years old, I can only say it is for this I have come. My life has been, in one way or another, about collaboration. This obsession of mine has taken on new importance as it has become clear that to stay competitive in our global economy, we must learn how to think collaboratively and innovatively. But if you have ever sat through a mind-numbing meeting, or tried to influence a colleagues view on a project, or had a recurring argument with a family member, or struggled to participate in a community project, you have recognized that most of us actually dont know how to think well together. I have attended endless years of education and professional training. Never once did anyone bring up the subject of learning how to collaborate.

We habitually misread people and therefore miscommunicate with them. We blame and belittle one another and ourselves because we have not been trained to notice the effect we have on one another or to fluidly shift the ways we communicate to accommodate others. We take for granted that intelligence occurs within our own minds. We dont realize that it also occurs between us. What keeps us from communicating effectively is that most of us dont know how to think with people who think differently than we do.

In the past decade, neuroscientists have learned some remarkable things about the human mind and brain, things that can directly increase our capacity to relate to others. As these new understandings emerge, we are realizing how deeply we affect other people. We can grow one anothers capacity as well as diminish it. Despite our unending love affair with digital devices, we still crave face-to-face connection with other people. Too often we find ourselves working alone, through our screens, cut off from the regular sources of renewal and inspiration that only collaboration can bring.

I began my career as a clinical psychologist and educator, with a special fascination with cognitive neuroscience. I was trained to measure intelligence as something static, a noun, a thing, like a cup. The experts told me that some of us are born smart, with a big cup, and others not so smart, with a little cup. A teachers job was to fill that cup, or so I was instructed while mine was being filled in school. I paid for my oh-so-expensive graduate school education by teaching the impossible children that everyone else had given up on. I never questioned the size of their cups. Each and every one of them taught me that intelligence is a verb, not a noun. As with tending a garden, it requires cultivation. All that mattered to me was discovering how they