The blog of Ricardo Zamora

Café Rouge Oxford

Some months ago I went to the Café Rouge Restaurant in Oxford and we had one of the most interesting service encounters ever.

I was having dinner with my wife. This was not the first time we’d visited it and on previous occasions we had tried a very nice wine that was recommended by one of the waiters. We couldn’t remember the name so we tried a different one. In the middle of the meal, when we had consumed half the bottle we recognised the waiter from our last visit and asked for the same bottle of wine. He approached us from his area (waiters have a designated area of responsibility) and told us that yes, he remembered us and the wine was a Malbec, a kind of wine originally from the south west of France (Burdeos and Cahors). In fact, he remembered even where we had been sitting at the time. I don’t have a very good memory for names and places so when these things happen they impress me a lot.

After a while our waiter came and asked us if everything was ok or whether we needed anything. The question was obvious because we had just been talking with this other waiter and he probably noticed. We explained the situation and how we’d mistakenly chosen the wrong wine because we hadn’t been able to recall the name. What happened after was not so straightforward. He went to ask something to our known waiter and immediately after he talked to another person that we couldn’t identify at that time. Then he came and offered to change the bottle for the Malbec, but we declined because the current wine was also good and we had already drunk half of it. But he insisted so much that we finally accepted. In a moment we were drinking our preferred wine.

The level of satisfaction was very high and the associated feelings extremely gratifying. The situation was so unusual that made me think deeper. My first analysis was from the waiter’s perspective. I made an association with the situation and the John Poindexter⁽¹⁾ Model (Zamora Enciso, 2011 pag. 68). For those who are not familiar with it, his model, based on the Knowledge Pyramid (DIKW) from Russell Ackoff (Ackoff, 1989) distinguishes between:

• Data. This is gross data. In this case the bottle of wine we had.
• Information. Data in context. Understanding the situation. We wanted a different wine.
• Knowledge. Understanding what the information means. We had a kind of feeling of frustration. That is why we asked the waiter who had served us before.
• Options. We decided what to do according to the constraints. Clearly in this case change the bottle or pass.
• Action. Execution. Asking for permission from the boss who was the person we initially didn’t identify and change it.
• Finally we had an interaction that produced a great satisfaction.

But then I began to consider a couple of simple questions from the business perspective. How was it possible to have workers so involved? What was the underlying policy? The first thing we have to notice is the waiter’s proactivity, which means a lot. The Oxford Dictionaries define proactive as an adjective “(of a person or action) creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened”. Proactivity is central to the Cooplexity model (Zamora Enciso, 2011), a model of collaboration in complexity for management in times of uncertainty and change. Complexity is related to emergent behavioural patterns and human interrelations are clearly complex because of our capacity to make different decisions. According to the model, “proactivity oriented to results” and “proactivity oriented to relations” are key factors of the first level or knowledge level. In both cases we recognize the activities of the model (data gathering, decision making, control of the objective first and interaction, interchange, relation after) in relation to the waiter’s actions.

At this point it is worth thinking about their objectives? For sure it is not profitability because it was possible to avoid the expense. Instead it is easy to assume the option of emotional satisfaction and therefore loyalty (we have repeatedly gone back since then). When I remember the situation I can still visualise a kind of emotional connection. It couldn’t just be acting. I know what is called Emotional Labour, a term coined by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” (Hochschild 1983). His work, explained from the perspective of theatre where the customer is the audience and the service provider the actor, proposes that managing emotions is one way for employees to achieve organizational goals. Thus, there are two processes involved, surface acting (managing observable expressions) and deep acting (managing feelings).

Not enough. It cannot be so simple. When the waiter that attended our table went to ask his colleague, it seems he was checking the wine we wanted. This approach must only be done based on a trusting relationship. Any other situation of mistrust would result in a lack of action. We can clearly find again a parallelism with the second level of the Cooplexity model, which is related to cohesion. In this case the awareness of a common project, and the two factors “group integration” (cooperation, implication) and specifically “trust generation” are present.

Finally, in order to ensure the emergence of self-coordination (third level of the model), it must be a policy oriented to people, supporting initiatives, encouraging ideas, creating a decentralized environment, giving them a certain level of autonomy, demanding results instead of procedures, asking for responsibility and not just the standard expected performance, etc. When the situation is complex, an executive cannot manage the whole business, cannot be everywhere, cannot make all the decisions and cannot be aware of everything. The identification of “local” opportunities and risks depends on the people who are in contact with a situation which demands the last two factors of the model, “equal relationship” (mutual consideration, respect) and “criterion of action” (definition of a criterion). The definition of a criterion is not only a problem of defining the objective (already done) but also the way it can be reached. Therefore acting and empathizing are two key dimensions of this criterion.

That is when I can clearly apply the concept of high performance team to all of them as “a small number of interdependent persons that are spontaneously and naturally coordinated, with the motive of a common project, thanks to a feeling of membership resulting from a determined level of cohesion, making decisions based on shared knowledge” (Zamora Enciso, 2011 pag. 7).

But if I include us having dinner then we were a system considered as “a series of parts that interact with each other to work as a whole. Nevertheless, a system is more than the sum of its parts; it is the product of its interactions (Kauffman, 1980).

And it works. I can assure you!

(1) John Poindexter was director of the Information Awareness Office (IAO), an official body depending of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), responsible of the development of projects like ARPANET, the first information transmission network by packets, predecessor of the present Internet.

References:

Ackoff, R. L. (1989). From Data to Wisdom. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis 16, 3-9.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kauffman, D. L. (1980). Systems One: An Introduction to System Thinking. Mineapolis, MN: Future Systems.

Zamora Enciso, R. (2011). Cooplexity: A model of collaboration in complexity for management in times of uncertainty and change. Lulu.com.

Collaboration levels in the Cooplexity model

One of the conclusions that came as a result of the research of the Cooplexity (Zamora Enciso, 2010) model was that the collaboration is not always possible. It depends on the level of maturity that a group has in terms of consciousness of itself. The groups with better results passed through the three levels of the model, knowledge, cohesion and self coordination. In parallel with them appear three degrees of possible collaboration.

With the first that I identify as the Alliance everybody wins and nobody loses. The agreement is obvious and nobody rejects it. As soon as an opportunity for collaboration under these circumstances appears it is accepted.

While the group evolves and the integration process follows it course, new opportunities for cooperation, that although not harming anyone, do create unequal benefits. Here is where the group usually reaches agreements that produced benefit is attributed to one’s self earlier or later as compensation or reciprocity. It is the interchange level or Cooperation. In day-to-day reality we could consider that the win-win negotiations are located here. A value and according compensations are negotiated. The level of cooperation is not a bad one although we can still consider that it produces optimal results for the group.

Global necessities are attended in the third level at the same time as individual ones, but contemplating the group as a whole, as a system, as an entity with its own differentiating personality and particularities. That way its members feel that they have made an important qualitative jump. This is the Collaboration level.

When reaching this point it becomes necessary to make an essential distinction between cooperation and collaboration. Cooperation is linear, concrete, oriented to an objective. In cooperative work the tasks are subdivided between the members and which one works separately. Coordination is important in terms of who does what, how and when (Nezamirad, Higg, & Dunstall, 2005).

Collaboration is a creative process between two or more persons, with complementary abilities that interact to create a common understanding that nobody previously had and would not have been able to acquire alone. Collaboration creates common contents about a process, a product, or an event. In this sense, there is nothing routinized. This is something that did not previously exist (Schrage, 1990).

Collaboration is a state that has many components and one of them is cooperation. Cooperation also is about a common purpose but at a lower abstraction level, more operative. Collaboration is a creative process where the result is the emerging product as a consequence of interaction. If cooperation needs coordination, collaboration needs self-coordination.

Trust is very important in the last level as we assure that although actions apparently contrary to individual interests exist, these decisions will not be judged as transgressions or aggressions but rather as a search for common benefit that includes the individual that takes it into account and finally balances it.

In the Collaboration level the individual and common objectives lose their differentiation. They should be achieved together and in a balanced manner. Going to the other extreme, that the group “only” thinks of a group is not positive, it should also think of the individual. Like as in a company, the dichotomy is proposed among the objectives in a clear manner from a conceptual point of view but hardly defined from an operational point of view. To go after one’s own interest is only logical; to do it only with attention placed on common interest (even at the expense of the individual) is also logical. The problem lies in reconciling both objectives in a balanced manner. Unfortunately here, as in the majority of complexity situations, there are no recipes. Neither more nor less it is a case of obtaining balance between individual and global interests.

Curiously when the group is integrated, it is perfectly capable of understanding it and achieving it, but it is very important that it does, as we are in the final process of evolution. Previously, any attempt to achieve common benefit by the more collaborative participants is rejected when considering that individual benefit is at risk. To be collaborative in the long term, the individuals should also achieve their individual objectives or have a reasonable expectation that the cost of collaboration will be compensated earlier or later.

When the agents or not interdependent, survival is reduce to win-lose competition, where the strongest individual survives. However in complexity this is not applicable. Interrelations and interdependencies cause the most selfish decision to be precisely the most collaborative. Not only that, the interested use of resources with the sole aim of obtaining individual yields will be rejected by the group. On occasions, decisions taken in this direction were identified in the groups, with disastrous results for the cohesion and regressions to previous more individualist positions. These groups could have obtained worse results after a crisis than those obtained in previous game cycles.

Somebody could think that those who only intermediate for their own interests are more selfish or interested. On occasions, this assumption may not be totally right. The degree of collaboration observed in the groups was directly related with the level of trust and therefore with the perceived level of risk. There is a natural tendency in all human beings that pushes them to survival. Therefore perceiving risk releases a series of self-protection mechanisms that push one to take-up more individualist positions. In the measure that the group increases the level of trust among its members and reduces in parallel the perceived risk of the decisions it takes, it becomes more capable of showing collaborative attitudes. Therefore the trick consists of regulating the key to trust and risk to allow the appearance of such decisions.

Robert Axelrod in his work The Evolution of Cooperation contributes some keys that we can perfectly recompile here. Using the famous game “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” created around 1950 by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher and later formalized with its current name by A.W. Tucker, Axelrod invited experts in game theory to a tournament. The competition consisted in sending programs in which the participant should choose between making a cooperative decision or a non-cooperative one faced with a series of repeated interactions of the game. Among them all, the strategy called “Tit For Tat” from Professor Anatol Rapoport of the Toronto University always won. What was surprising is that its strategy was also the most simple. It consisted in that the first decision was always cooperative while after it systematically repeated the decision of its opponent (Axelrod, 1984).

As in the Tit For Tat strategy, that group that initiated its activity in a corporative manner, that is giving the system and opportunity, advances more and goes further in the processes of the model. Likewise the reciprocity concept, a key on in the Axelrod work was like a consequence of complementarity of the interests of the group, of its capacity to reject cooperation if the expectation of returns did not exist and of the real and close perception that the cooperative effort would be compensated. That way one would be cooperative of the other party was also and would generate common benefit. To the contrary, this would not be so if the other weren’t.

When extrapolating these teachings to the reality of groups, therefore we have to take into account that the size of these play against the perception of individual contribution and the expectation of returns. In addition, it would be a negative factor if the benefit of cooperative effort were unequally shared among the members giving way to a less clear expectation of reciprocity. When designing teams and compensatory policies, thus it would be necessary to divide large group into smaller teams to improve this perception.

By integrating collaboration levels in the model, we observe that the Alliance level is accessible to any series of individuals with coinciding interests. The level of cooperation would be at the reach of those groups that have initiated integration processes and have minimum trust, sufficient to sustain the negotiating process and the establishment of compensations on equal terms. When the minimum level of trust is missing negotiation cannot progress even though both parties consider a potential agreement as beneficial. Finally the maximum level of collaboration forcedly needs to be situated at the highest level of the model.

Axelrod, R. (1984). The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books.

Nezamirad, K., Higgins, P. G., & Dunstall, S. (2005). Human collaboration in planning and scheduling. In 7th International Workshop on Human Factors in Planning, Scheduling and Control in Manufacturing. The Netherlands: The University of Groningen.

Schrage, M. (1990). Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration. Baltimore, MD, U.S.A.: Random House.

Zamora Enciso, R. (2010). Cooplexity. A model of collaboration in complexity for management in times of uncertainty and change. Lulu.com.