Blog Post

What Do HASTAC, the Beatles, and Steve Jobs Have in Common?

In this month's Fast Company, some of the newly discovered "basement tapes" of Steve Jobs are discussed and quoted from (and, if you have the right app, you can even download and here Jobs literally in his own voice).   What he has in common with HASTAC is our method of "collaboraiton by difference."   The reason we began as a collaboratory across the sciences, humanities, arts, and social sciences is we were all committed to the idea that, if you really want innovation, you need to design a project from the start with experts in many fields, non-experts, end-users, and even random cantankerous folks who are willing to speak up about what is or isn't working. 


Too much collaboration is "close collaboration" or "add-on collaboration."   In the former, you all basically agree to start with so you end up cheerleading one another.  In the latter, you really just add on other skillsets as you need them but don't really build in truly cross-disciplinary challenges.    Unless you are careful in how you plan a team, you can build self-affirmation and replication rather than challenging, contrary, difference.   "Difference is our operating system," Fiona Barnett, director of the HASTAC Scholars, has said.  And it's our methodology too. 


Steve Jobs agreed.  He insisted that truly innovative collaboration had to work with partners who might share the same goal but who may not have the same view of the world, skills, expertise, point of view---they might not even like one another.  Take the Beatles.  That's the example Jobs uses.   They not only each supplied a certain genius but their strongly opinionated views of music and art and the world meant that each prevented the other from doing too much in that direction.  So Paul prevented John from turning the Beatles into an arty indy band only for intellectuals.   And John prevented Paul from turning it into a pop boy group.   Harrison insisted on the soul.  Jobs isn't sure what Ringo contributed but he was sure it was something that not only contributed but curtailed, not only collaborated but put on the brakes.


Collaboration by difference, we call it at HASTAC.   We're glad Steve agrees that it's a key to radically transformative thinking.   Cue John, Paul, George, and Ringo:  Yah. Yah. Yah. Yah! 







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