“Us” is all of us. “Them” is none of us.

I was grateful to learn last week that I’d been invited to the research advisory council of BIF, the Business Innovation Factory – a non-profit in Rhode Island dedicated to exploring business concept innovation and how different organizations can innovate together. I’m very glad to have been asked to get involved. BIF has been remarkably successful at building an engaged, active community.

One of the most important things that communities like BIF can achieve is advancing the cause of open and collaborative innovation across many organizations. We still have a long road ahead. “Us and Them” is a mindset that’s fundamental to the human ego. People seem so eager to define themselves – and their teams – by whom they are not. “We are better than them over there.” “We can’t trust them.”

There is no question that healthy competition can be a good thing. And the “us/them” mentality is not going to go away. On the contrary, it can help ensure survival. But it is, like so many things, a question of balance. And in an open or collaborative innovation world, the balance point needs to change.

Where I think we go wrong, in one specific instance, is in the way many people respond to folks who are working for their company but who aren’t actually employees. I would like never again to hear the phrase, “Oh yeah, we use xyz for our strategy or marketing or IT management. THEY aren’t doing a good job.” It’s the THEY in that line I don’t like. Rather we should say, “If OUR marketing and OUR technology isn’t working, it is OUR problem. The consulting firm’s people, many of whom have been faithfully working for OUR company longer than many of OUR employees, are US! WE may have a problem together, but it is OUR problem.”

Open innovation relies on turning down the amplitude of the “us/them” reaction. If you accept a person from another organization – a consultant or an expert from another firm – into your team, it is important that everyone from your corporate counsel to your management team embrace them as “US.”

The phrase I like to use on consulting engagements and when working with teams assembled from different parent firms is, “Us is all of us. Them is none of us.”

The power of “US” was well illustrated by David Gibson in R&D Collaboration on Trial. Gibson tells the story of a Japanese silicon chip consortium in the 1980′s. It was set up to pool research efforts and keep pace with US firms like IBM and Intel. One of their leaders, Masato Nebashi, noticed that the researchers from the different companies in the consortium simply were not working together. They were not building trust, and they were achieving very little as a team. Nebashi instituted the now famous “yoma atsumari” (whiskey operations) protocol, essentially taking the researchers out to get drunk every week and weekend. Nebashi said, “All I did this four years was to drink with them as frequently as I could.” After a while, the teams began to put aside distrust and work as though they all were from the same company. They achieved major breakthroughs after that.

It is hard for humans to get over the “us/them” problem. It is fundamental to how we think, and it has its uses. But we know that the next big challenges facing the world are bigger than one company or even one country. If we are going to have any chance of combining insights and expertise across company lines to solve these problems, it appears we are going to need a lot more alcohol.

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