I was reading this interesting article on HBR (click here for the short version) and it coincided with the main theme we are preparing for this years’ offsite: Networking and collaboration [within insitum]. The title of the article comes from Richard Dawkins famous book “The Selfish Gene”, which has been embraced by the social sciences for the last 30 years (in case you have not read it, do it).
The HBR article argues that people are not as selfish as we thought (prioritizing your self before others) and that in fact, as human beings, we are more cooperative and less self-interested than most people believe. Neuroscience shows that when we cooperate with others, our brains spark a reward circuit that makes us feel good. And empathy (one of insitum values) boosts this feeling because we are emotionally rewarded when we see others feel good.

This year we want to stress the importance of insitum as a network that encourages intra and inter-office collaboration to increase peoples’ consciousness of insitum as a whole, to share energy and to feel good about yourself when collaborating with people inside your office and in other offices.
To help us design such a cooperative system, the article suggests, we have to consider the following:
- encourage communication
- ensure authentic feelings of cooperation
- fostering empathy and solidarity between all of us
- guaranteeing fairness and morality (doing the right thing)
- using rewards and punishments that appeal to intrinsic motivations
- relying on reputation and reciprocity (pay-it-forward)
- ensuring flexibility and adapting to different motivations

I hope that in the coming months you can help us build such a system. Aristotle said: “The whole is more than the sum of its parts”, so I think that the success of insitum as a whole is more than the sum of each of our individual successes.