I was in Prague last month for the annual International Leadership Association (ILA) 2025 Global Conference. I attended a session on collaborative practices and their impact on organizations and communities trying to navigate complex problems and adaptive challenges. I asked one of the presenters what they thought the underlying emotions in collaboration were. I wanted to know what caused people to work together to solve complex problems successfully.
He told me it was because fear was absent, but he couldn’t name the emotions that were present.
Last week, I wrote about webs of causality that increase a problem’s impact, and the anti-webs of causality that decrease the same challenge. Webs of anti-causality are not just another fix, but are founded upon human collaboration and creativity. Perhaps not surprisingly, emotions are deeply embedded in this approach. When I think about this, a couple of questions come to mind:
- What emotions support human collaboration instead of fear?
- How do we unleash creativity instead of relying on control?
Collaboration creates high-performance teams, and creativity promotes innovation. But the current business climate (and the world, let’s be honest) seems to generate a lot of anxiety and fear. And those emotions increase control-oriented behavior in people and organizations. When leaders become anxious and fearful, their leadership style shifts—almost like clockwork—to a controlling style toward those around them.
Emotions that promote collaborative behavior
This blog is an attempt to tease out the possibilities of which emotions, belief systems, and values create predispositions toward collaboration rather than control. In other words, we need to understand the ecosystem of worldviews, emotions, and behaviors that support collaboration and creativity in our organizations—and our lives.
When I asked the question at the ILA, I was initially looking for a simple answer. After thinking about it, I realize the answer is a cluster of things that includes not just emotions, but beliefs, relationships, values, and other “soft” aspects.
Like all anti-causality webs, the elements that draw us together have lots of roots.
Anti-causality webs of collaboration
In addition to certain emotions, I’ve been reflecting on the beliefs and the clarity of connection that help transcend self-interest and promote collaboration. I wanted to understand what hinders the parochial practices that also get in the way of people working together on challenges that matter, also known as wicked problems. When we collaborate with others, we create more sustainable solutions.
To simplify, I’ve gathered my thoughts into three areas: beliefs, connectivity, and emotions.
- Beliefs. Collaborative practices require participants to share a higher purpose. This shared higher purpose necessitates collaboration because individual actions alone can’t achieve sustainable solutions to a wicked problem. People need to see their work serving something bigger than their individual organization.
- Connectivity: Seeing the world around us as connected and interdependent helps us support our collective relationships. We nurture our relationships through collaboration and celebrate our progress together. This connectivity helps us understand that collective problem-solving is more sustainable. Rather than solving the same problem over and over again, we work together to solve it once and for all collaboratively. Collaboration helps us see the webs and anti-webs of causality by creating a unique vantage point.
- Emotions. Many different emotions support our relationships and higher shared purpose. Trust, active hope, a sense of belonging, empathy, care, and love are emotions that bind us together rather than break us apart. When we design our group processes to support and strengthen these emotions, we build a strong core of attraction that creates cohesion. This boosts the problem-solving skills of collaborative groups working on things that matter.
Why it matters
Usually, when solving complex problems, we start by building strategies around the problems’ causes—the webs of causality. But we must also focus on strategies that could reduce the problem—the anti-webs of causality. We can do that from the very beginning. I once had a colleague, for example, who always started a campus transformation by inviting “people who care to come together and talk about things that matter.” It was a simple and powerful way to initiate significant change at the university organically.
I am a change agent, which means I need to look at wicked problems from every angle possible. Examining a complex challenge from the view of what increases—and decreases—offers us many more ways to make a positive impact. Understanding the beliefs, relationships, and emotions that support collaborative, sustainable problem solving is an excellent way to do just that.
