CHAPTER 1 SHARED INTENTIONS

If it had not been for our ability to collaborate, humans would probably have been consigned to history’s rubbish heap a long time ago. It is hard to imagine that we would have survived very long if everyone had defended themselves against every danger and threat life could throw at them on their own. It is even more difficult to imagine that we would have successfully built cities, developed advanced technologies and sent people to the moon if we hadn’t had the opportunity to collaborate with one another.

We are far from alone in tackling the challenges of evolution by helping each other and working together. Every ant hill, school of fish and pack of wolves reminds us that there are other species that also organise themselves into smaller groups in order to complete tasks that would be overwhelming for any one individual. Nevertheless, it can be a little difficult to draw clear parallels between human collaborations and those in the animal kingdom. According to prominent researchers such as Michael Tomasello, our ability to collaborate differs from all other species in significantly fundamental ways. The very concept of collaboration can therefore, with some justification, be exclusively reserved for humans. Somewhere on our evolutionary journey we humans absorbed a number of psychological and social abilities that give us completely unique conditions for collaboration. Thanks to these we can communicate with and understand each other in ways that not even primates on the immediate branches of our family tree are anywhere near capable of. Our way of thinking, assigning words to things and ability to consider other peoples’ perspectives enables us to share unique perceptions of things, such as the activities we undertake together. Players in a football team, for example, share the same views on how a football match should be played, what their common goal is, how to reach this goal and everything else the game entails. In addi- tion, every player is aware that all the other players share the same opinion.

It is precisely our ability to share perceptions or mental representations, according to Tomasello, that makes our collaborations unique. Unlike other species we can synchronise our individual ways of thinking and agree on common purposes and goals for what we want to achieve, and can agree to work together to fulfil our purpose and achieve our goals. It is often said that we have the ability to share intentions with each other – a kind of shared intentionality.

Individual and shared intentions

Shared intentionality is one of the cornerstones of any collaboration. Without it any form of team building would collapse. Our ability of shared intentionality allows us to create a kind of ‘we-feeling’ –a shared experience of actually working together. It means we can feel confident that we’ll purposefully work together in a collective activity with the ambition to achieve something together, rather than just be two or more people who happen to engage in the same activity, but have individual purposes and goals.