Open letter from a team to a loner

This letter is a response to the open letter from a loner to a team published a few days ago. The ‘us’ in the letter below represents any team that wants to let loners participate in group life. 'You' is a fictitious individual, that represents all loners out there struggling to find a comfortable stake, or simply a stake, in social groups.

Dear loner,

Thank you so much for your letter.

Agreed, teamwork is challenging. Oh it can be so tiring sometimes, this group life of ours. That’s ok. It would be naive to hope for a once and for all salvation from the tensions that arise in social groups. Human associations seldomly run like clockwork. If they always would, we would all soon be bored to death.

A smooth and easy life is not at all attractive in the long run. Having things plainly laid out is alright for some time, but it will soon turn dull and unrewarding. Constantly running an obstacle-free course would deprive us of opportunities to learn and to find pride in what we do.

That said, we do not mean to ridicule the troubles of your kind. There were long epochs throughout history when nature conspired against loners. In the embryonic days of human civilization, as we were seeking refuge behind our jointly constructed palisades, many of you loners got brutally devoured by savage beasts. If Darwin was only half right, most of you lot got weeded out by evolution. Those were harsh times. We haven't always sympathized with the sorrows of loners back then. We're sincerely sorry about that.

But it is time we get passed all that. Prehistory is long gone. We are just about to cut ourselves loose from the remnants of the Middle Ages. Ever since modernity hit on us, we are in a continuous state of struggle to find a balance between equality, liberty and belonging. The wicked trade-offs between these values are notoriously difficult to soothe.

Better times are up ahead. The tables are slowly turning to your advantage, dear loner. We are bound to get better at striking a balance with you in the future. We must. To understand why, there are three things you should know about us teams.

Firstly, we owe most of our successes to our proneness to stick together. Social groups rallying around common goals can achieve marvellous things. Look around. That abundantly equipped environment you're dwelling, well-aligned teams made all that happen, down to the tiniest detail.

Behaving corporately has enabled us to build cities, set up multimodal transportation networks, disseminate technology across the globe, cumulate ever better innovations from one social group to the next, distribute advanced products and services in massive amounts, erect sophisticated health care and educational systems, and this list can go on to infinity. All that could never have existed but for widespread configurations of many closely knit teams.

Secondly, as we do our daily chores to maintain this complicated world of ours, we mostly fall back on collective routines. Teams work in autopilot mode most of the time. For the sake of efficiency we thankfully execute the great majority of our actions in accordance with unreflected rules.

The products and services that we so lavishly consume are delivered by thousands of workers obeying dutifully to fixed repertoires in long winding supply chains. Prepacked building blocks of knowledge translated into behavioral routines is what make teams tick.

It's routines rather than brains that we owe our present-day luxeries to. To a time traveller visiting us from, say, two centuries ago all our current prosperity, so self-evident to us, would be grossly unimaginable. Yet, as brain scientists confide us, we are not a shred more intelligent than our ancestors were. We're only lucky to have enjoyed a bit more education than they have, thanks to knowledge that in large part they have put together. Inherited routine scripts govern our lives.

Thirdly, and this is where your regained sense of self-worth ought to come in, our ability to adapt to novel circumstances hinges on trial-and-error behavior. Unfortunately, trial-and-error work is often at odds with the above mentioned operating principles. Sticking together and holding on to pre-established scripts gets in our way when circumstances change. Teams frequently get stuck for that reason, probably increasingly so.

Some things have turned more complicated these days. It's ironic how routines that once were the fundament of our riches can later lead to our downfall. Hiding behind palisades and complying with disciplinary routines will do us no good when the self-inflicted collateral of our own sophisticated creations is backfiring on us. It’s no longer dumb savage animals that we’re up against nowadays. Digital technologies, evolving socio-political institutions, climate change, polarizing inquality, pandemics and the likes are the new breed of challenges.

Evolution takes a vicous turn now and then. Sometimes it all of a sudden and without any warning starts conspiring against those who stubbornly hold on to scripts of the past, instead of targeting the loners minding their own business. In such cases, ordinarily sticking together and sheepishly complying with the usual only ignites the karma that we call upon on ourselves. That's why so many teams are pressured to become agile, to learn and let go of unproductive routines, to break up if circumstances require, and to reassemble into creative and autonomous squads, only for as long as it takes to get the next job done, then disband and start over again.

We realize that we will have to cut it down a bit on the social conformity habit, which quite frankly does make us look foolish sometimes. Deviating opinions are more useful than before, so we can no longer affford to penalize those with ostracism. The days when loners were liable for witch-hunts are far behind us.

So we are open to alternatives for suffocating in obsolete frames and constraining norms of social conformity.?If you hold on to your promise to keep reaching out to us, we promise to wholeheartedly endorse your stake as a free thinking half member in our team. We'll work on that psychological safety, and make it the new normal to take dissenting loners seriously in group decisions.

So stand there on the fringes and speak up. Be an inspiring and empathic loner. Don’t shield us off and do not conceal useful ideas or pertinent information. Do your part in helping us find our way through messy experimental pathways.

While you're at that, keep in mind that group life is somewhat of a Sysiphus curse. So stop beating both yourself and us up. Our boulder is always on the verge of tumbling down. Sometimes we merely pretend that it stays in place for a while, even if only for no better reason than to take some time off and celebrate life.

Whenever we do celebrate, feel free to join. If you feel like it, that is. If you'd rather pass on the get-togethers, or simply dash early, we won't make a big deal out of it. You shouldn't either. No need to get worked up about that at all. These are things we just do for the fun of it. You’re always welcome to the next party.

?Let’s make it work.

?A team

This piece's a follow-up to an earlier contribution, entitled 'Open letter from a loner to a team'. You can read that one here if you like.