On the topic of possessiveness and co-creation

On top of the recent post on ownership and possessiveness, Rebecca Elvy made me think of a story I heard recently. Unfortunately, I cannot remember where I heard of it – but I remember that someone told me about the trick they used at this person's workplace in order to make people feel ownership without possessiveness. The trick is that they do not reward the good ideas people get, instead they reward those who contribute to making the ideas of the original idea generators even better. An idea is simply not rewarded before one person has conceived it and another person has refined it.
In this way, it is ensured that the good ideas are shared, and at the same time people will feel good sharing their ideas – because anyone knows that next time, she will have the possibility to refine someone else’s bright idea.
There might be downsides to this as well, of course, but essentially, instead of inspiring possessiveness, this approach breeds co-ownership and co-creation.
Which is a good thing for two reasons. Not only is possessiveness (which we established recently is the evil twin of ownership) discouraged – but it must also be remembered, (now that we are talking about “the ancestry of ownership and possessiveness”) that there is another unfortunate cousin in the family tree – the sentiment of “not-invented-here”, where people have an inclination to reject the ideas of others, simply because these are not their own ideas. The rewarding of co-creation is also quite good against “not-invented-here”, as it inspires people to be open-minded with regards to the ideas of other people – because they might be able to make them even better. It simply has a tendency to make people go from saying “No!” to saying “Yes, and…”, which is one of the pillars of creativity.
(Translated from: Noget om besidderiskhed og samskabelse)

On the topic of ownership and evil twins

Again, my good friend Rebecca Elvy made me think of something, which turned into a blog post - the question about ownership. As Rebecca puts it:

Ownership means you’re invested. It means you have to care about what happens, because you’re invested. And because you care, you become attached. This is usually a good thing.

So how come it can be difficult to let things go, once you have developed a sense of ownership? Most likely it is because ownership has an evil twin in possessiveness - the feeling that no one will be able to treat the topic for which we feel ownership with the same care as we do, and that sharing it will cause us to lose control. And once we become possessive, we have difficulties seeing that we might do better by releasing the object of our ownership and let it flourish under less restraining conditions.
In isolation, the feeling of ownership will allow us to let things go (as soon as we see that they will be taken sufficiently good, perhaps even better, care of) - it is only when we become possessive, the problem occurs.
So it is a good thing to consider, whenever we feel a strong sense of ownership towards something: is this actually turning into possessiveness, or would I be able to let go if it was all for the better? (Translated from Noget om ejerskab og onde tvillinger)

Own your failure

The other day I came across a good piece of advice on failures and defeat. In all its simplicity, it goes like this:

You must take ownership of your failure.

This is to be understood in such a way that when you lose (and one can lose in many contexts), then there is no reason to see yourself as a victim, or to make excuses. You must, of course, try to understand why and come up with explanations so that it becomes possible to correct your actions next time - but basically you have to accept that you have lost and take the defeat on yourself. Only when we do this, we able to improve ourselves and thereby have a chance of avoiding to take ownership of more defeat, the next time we try to win.
(Translated from "Tag ejerskab over dit nederlag")