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Cultivating Collaboration: Don't Be So Defensive! | Jim Tamm | TEDxSantaCruz

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    I want to share something with you today that I believe will make you much more effective at
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    resolving conflict and building collaboration. But, I want to start by telling you a little story about
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    some groups of chickens because believe it or not, chickens have a lot to teach us about collaboration.
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    This takes place at Purdue University where Bill Mear is a professor of genetics, and a genuinely
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    nice guy, and Bill was looking into the differences between groups of collaborative chickens. These
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    were just chickens that got along well with each other. I call them the green zone chickens.
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    And there were no star performers in their group. They were just nice to each other. And in the
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    chicken world, a star performer is the hen that lays the most eggs. But the problem with the star
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    performers is that the tend to be much more aggressive animals. And so we often times see
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    among the chickens, something that we occasionally see in human organizations, and
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    that is that the star performers become the stars not by being so good themselves, but by
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    suppressing the egg production of other chickens. So, the look better. And they do this by pecking
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    on them. Now, I call these more aggressive star performers the red zone chickens, and they do
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    a lot of damage. So the farmers have tried different strategies to deal with that. One is to house the
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    birds in individual cages, about this big. Not a great solution because it's very expensive - takes
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    millions of cages. Another thing they tried is something that's called trimming their beaks.
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    Now, this is a bit of a deceptive term because it gives you the impression that there's a chicken
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    manicurists out there sort of filing down the sharp point, but really it's an employee with a tool
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    that looks a little bit like a pair of pliers, and they go up and rip a big chunk of the chicken's beak
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    right off its head. Also very expensive, not to mention horribly unpleasant for all the chickens
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    and the employee that's assigned to do that. So Bill was trying to see if it's possible to breed
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    collaborative instincts into chickens, and if so, what would be the impact of that on their egg production.
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    So we had all of the green zone chicken groups over there, and the red zone chicken groups
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    over there, and he took the best of each generation's egg producers to produce the
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    next generation. He did this for one year - about five generations. And at the end of that one-year
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    period, the results were pretty dramatic. This is a picture of the green zone chickens. They were
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    healthy and productive. Now the next picture is what was left of the red zone chickens.
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    And I say it's what was left of them because more than half of the red zone chickens had been
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    murdered by their colleagues - pecked to death. Now, they say that a picture is worth a thousand
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    words, but if this doesn't tell the whole story, let's look at the egg production of the green zone
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    chickens. In that one year period of time, it went up 260%. So what we can learn from these chickens
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    is that red zone environments that are more hostile, that are more adversarial, highly-conflicted,
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    internally competitive vs. externally competitive, they produce more red zone behavior. It feeds on
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    itself and can spread like a virus in an organization. And green zone environments that are more
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    supportive and cooperative and more highly skilled at collaboration, they produce more eggs - or
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    whatever your organization's equivalent is to more eggs. Now, I'd like you to think back on that picture
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    of those red zone chickens for just a minute and get that in your mind. As a judge for almost
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    25 years, my jurisdiction was collective bargaining disputes - labor management conflicts. And in that
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    role, I believe that I have mediated more school district labor strikes than any other person in the
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    United States. In just about every single strike that I have ever mediated, by the time we get to the end
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    of that process, every single person involved in that process, on both sides of the table, knows exactly
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    what those chickens feel like because that is the existence that they are trapped in. Now these are
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    not mean people. These are good people doing their imperfect best to improve the world the
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    best way they know how. I mean they've all dedicated their lives to public education. They
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    didn't lack an interest in collaboration. What they lacked was skills, and this lack of skilss was
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    costing the state of California a tremendous amount of money in the cost of conflict.
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    So a small group of us got together. We did a lot of research and we set out to teach the more
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    adversarial red zone groups to be more collaborative. We were wildly successful.
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    Trust went up. Conflict went down. We reduced the amount of measurable conflict in almost 100
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    different organizations by almost 70% over several years. It saved the state of California a huge
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    amount of money. It also transformed the working lives of thousands of employees who had been
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    trapped in that red zone chicken existence, which in turn, I believe, improved the quality of education
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    for the thousands of school kids who finally had positive role models who could teach them
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    how to resolve their differences without destroying their community or going to war with each other.
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    And what we learned from this experience is not just
Title:
Cultivating Collaboration: Don't Be So Defensive! | Jim Tamm | TEDxSantaCruz
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
15:18

English subtitles

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