Many years ago, I worked in a big organisation with several independent project teams. The whole company was governed from the headquarters in Stockholm and the regional units had a local self esteem and collaboration culture that promoted sharing of ideas and helping each other out between projects. 1+1 was more than 2!
One morning the whole unit was summoned to the restaurant. The site manager informed everyone that 15 positions were going to be let go according to decisions from the headquarters. It was going to take a while before it was decided who to let go and who got to stay, but the culture in the company changed instantly. Already the same afternoon, you could hear the first grudging comments about other projects. About their budget overshoot that might affect ours or about that idea they had used that we had originally come up with. 1+1 became clearly less than 2.
It takes trust to make one plus one become more than two. Everyone needs to trust that the combined effort can become more than the sum of its parts, for them to give up some of their individual objectives. If one or more partners in the collaboration breaks the trust, the equation will not hold anymore.
In authoritarian regimes, the principal idea is that everyone will be worse off if they don’t trust the leadership. But this is actually not a matter of trusting, but rather obeying the leader. Therefore, authoritarian leaders need authority to lead. A common way to get people to obey an authority is to be unpredictable. Spice it up with some conflict rhetorics, a few half-truths and threats of violence, and you are in a splendid position to create a dictatorship. If the citizen doesn’t make enough effort to understand the leader in a favourable way, then you are not just someone with alternative ideas, but indeed a troublemaker. In this culture it is almost impossible to develop citizenship that builds on the idea of 1+1>2. Because the vision is not collective, but only resides with the leader, the sacrifice of each individual will only make them less than 1 and the result of all less than the sum.
The war in Ukraine shows exactly this kind of unpredictability and conflict-promoting rhetoric. For years, Russia has established itself as a country where disloyalty towards the president means great risks. As late as September 2021, their presidential election was criticised by EU and the US, for being associated with scare tactics and threats and for having denied the voters the opportunity to exercise their rights as citizens. In Ukraine 2019, a majority of foreign observers marked their presidential election as being fair and just. Ukraine is still at the lower end of the scale when it comes to democracy index, but they have a clear ambition to fight corruption and to develop as an independent democracy. For Russia, the clear ambition is only to abolish Ukraine as a sovereign state. To put it bluntly, you could actually say that the war is ultimately about whether 1+1 shall be allowed to be more or less than 2.
The pandemic has made it more difficult to have collaborations where 1+1>2. For one thing, the distances that we have tried to hold and respect, have made it more difficult to understand each other’s intentions and incentives. And in turn, this distancing has stopped us from understanding and appreciating each other’s hidden or unexpectedly valuable talents. But the pandemic has also made the future a little more unpredictable and therefore it has become increasingly difficult to share and trust common dreams and ideas. The future horizon has become a little “hazier” and when the common vision is not as sharp, 1+1 does not become more than 2 as easily as before.
The examples of authoritarian leadership and a disruptive pandemic show two important things that often sabotage the wonderful equation of 1+1>2. One thing is lack of predictability and transparency. Words that are easy to say or write in your value statements, but much harder to live. This is ultimately about building trust. There is even a connection in economic research between societies with low trust and lower economic growth. And trust should not just be about trusting authorities or governments. It is as important to trust your fellow citizens’ intentions and to trust one’s tomorrow.
Another thing that often cancels the equation 1+1>2, is when the common vision is not shared by the citizens. This can happen due to both authoritarian leadership or just because the vision isn’t clear or constructive enough to engage. To avert the global climate threat is a great and fateful challenge, but also difficult to engage with. We need concrete targets like the Paris agreement’s 1,5-degree target and we need to be able to follow the development and our own contributions towards that target. This requires mutual and constructive dialogue and fundamentally trust in the idea that 1+1 can become more than 2.
We show trust – and enjoy it – daily, but now that we understand what it means, it might be worth the effort to notice it a little extra. What have you done today that shows trust to colleagues, ideas or our mutual tomorrow?