I’ve been watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the series about the mysterious organization Monarch and the giant creatures—Titans, or kaiju—that occasionally emerge to wreak havoc on humanity.
I enjoy the series. Not only is Kurt Russell and his son playing the same character over different parts of his life, the other actors and actresses are really good too. Plus - what is NOT to like about a Kaiju movie.
But, while I’ve been watching, I keep having the same thought. It's about Humanistic Management.
Why don’t they just work together?
Seriously. Much of the plot revolves around people who are ultimately trying to accomplish the same thing: understand the Titans, contain the threat, and keep human beings from getting killed.
Yet again and again, the people involved work at cross purposes. They withhold information. They make decisions without knowing what other groups know. They become convinced that their approach is the correct one and everyone else is making things worse.
And, of course, sometimes their certainty is spectacularly misplaced. Their solution doesn't solve the problem. It makes it worse.
Which got me thinking about something much bigger than giant monsters.
Cooperation
Cooperation is one of humanity's most important problem-solving tools. And cooperation depends on trust. The problem is, when people disagree, they often loose trust.
But, disagreement isn't necessarily a problem. Disagreement can be incredibly useful.
If everyone looking at a complicated problem reaches exactly the same conclusion, that doesn't necessarily mean they've found the right answer. It might mean they're all making the same assumptions.
The reason we need diversity of opinion and information is because:
- Different people see different things.
- Different organizations have different experiences.
- Different experts have access to different information.
If we embrace that diversity, we can make collective problem-solving dramatically better. But only if the information is shared.
Information Hoarding is the Bane of Problem Solving
This is where Monarch keeps going wrong. The different groups are rarely working with the same information. One group knows something another group doesn't. Another group has evidence that would change the first group's understanding of the situation.
But the information remains siloed. So everyone is making decisions based on an incomplete picture. And here's the really interesting part: They don't necessarily realize that their picture is incomplete.
We don't know what we don't know
This is one of the most dangerous features of complicated problems. When you don't know something, you don't necessarily know that you don't know it.
You have some information available to you. You analyze it. You come to a conclusion. And from your perspective, the conclusion may look perfectly reasonable.
Meanwhile, someone else has another piece of information that would completely change your analysis.
But you don't know that they have it. So you don't ask. Or they don't tell you. Or you don't trust them enough to believe what they tell you.
And now you have multiple groups of intelligent, competent people making completely different decisions about the same problem.
Not because they're stupid. Not necessarily because they're malicious. But because they're working with different versions of reality.
This is like the blind men looking at an elephant. There information is correct, just incomplete.
Certitude makes the problem worse
There's another problem that shows up repeatedly in Monarch: certainty.
People become convinced that their solution is the right solution. And once we become convinced that we are right, something interesting happens.
- We become less curious.
- We stop asking, "What am I missing?"
- Instead, we start asking, "Why won't everyone else listen to me?"
That shift is dangerous. If I believe I'm right and you disagree with me, I can interpret your disagreement as evidence that you don't understand the problem.
If I believe you don't understand the problem, I have less reason to listen to you. And if I don't listen to you, I won't discover the information you have that I don't.
Which means I become more certain while remaining woefully uninformed. That's a terrible way to solve complicated problems. It creates a feedback loop:
Certitude → less listening → less information → incomplete understanding → bad decisions → more conflict → greater certainty that everyone else is the problem.
And suddenly everyone is working harder and accomplishing less.
The missing ingredient is trust
So why don't people simply share information?
Sometimes the answer is obvious.
- They have competing interests.
- They want money.
- They want power.
- They want credit.
- They want to protect their organization.
- They are afraid that someone else will use their information against them.
- Sometimes they don't trust the other people involved.
And this is where the fictional kaiju problem becomes a very real human problem.
A shared goal isn't always enough to produce cooperation.
Two people can sincerely want the same outcome and still fail to cooperate if they don't trust one another. I can want to solve the problem while simultaneously worrying that you'll take advantage of me.
I can believe that we should both succeed while still believing that giving you access to my information will hurt me. I can even believe that you're a good person and still not trust your organization.
So information gets withheld. Decisions get made in isolation. And everyone loses the benefit of what everyone else knows.
Trust is the infrastructure of cooperation
We sometimes think of trust as the nice thing that happens after people have successfully worked together. But I think that's backwards.
Trust is one of the things that makes successful cooperation possible in the first place.
Cooperation requires vulnerability. I have to tell you what I know. I have to admit what I don't know. I have to allow you to challenge my assumptions. I have to give you information that you might be able to use against me.
And you have to do the same.
That requires a reasonable expectation that we are going to use what we know to solve the problem rather than to exploit each other.
Without that expectation, people protect information. And once information becomes something to hoard, cooperation starts to break down.
Information is a collective resource
Here's the part that really struck me while watching the show: Sometimes the most valuable thing you can contribute to solving a problem isn't your solution. It's the information that allows everyone else to see the problem more accurately.
Imagine five groups each have 20 percent of the information needed to solve a problem. If they cooperate, they might be able to assemble a reasonably complete picture.
But if they don't share information, you don't have five teams working on a problem. You have five teams working on five different versions of the problem.
Worse, each team probably believes it has enough information to proceed. That's where unintended consequences come from.
It's also why organizations need to be extremely careful about information silos.
A silo can look efficient. But complex problems don't respect organizational boundaries. The monster doesn't care which department is responsible for it. Neither does a pandemic. Or climate change. Or a cybersecurity attack. Or a workplace conflict. Or a dysfunctional organization.
The problem exists in the real world, whether or not our organizational structures are designed to deal with it. This is why the movie Shin Godzilla requires them to build an interdepartmental team to deal with the problem. Getting information into and out of the silos was a nightmare. Eliminating the silos by creating an interdisciplinary team allowed the fictional Shin Godzilla governmental team to - fix the problem.
And yes - Shin Godzilla is a Japanese Godzilla movie and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is one of the USA versions. And that's probably why there is interdisciplinary cooperation in the Japanese film while the American show is ... mired in cooperation and trust problems.
How do we in the west move forward? Given our focus on individual cowboy self reliance? Maybe looking at the Japanese model will help.
Cooperation doesn't mean everyone agrees
I'm not arguing that everyone needs to agree on a solution. Quite the opposite.
We need disagreement. We need people who will say:
- "Wait. What if we're wrong?"
- "We're missing something."
- "Here's what my team is seeing."
- "That doesn't fit with the evidence we have."
- "I think your solution could make this worse."
That's useful. The goal isn't consensus at all costs. The goal is shared understanding.
Once everyone has access to the ALL the relevant information, then we can disagree intelligently. We can compare competing hypotheses. We can test solutions. We can change our minds.
And perhaps most importantly, we can discover that none of us had the complete answer.
That's not failure. That's what collective intelligence looks like.
The humanist case for cooperation
This is also where I think cooperation connects deeply with humanism. Humanism asks us to take human beings seriously—to recognize both our extraordinary capabilities and our limitations.
One of our most important limitations is that none of us can know everything.
We are individual human beings with finite attention, finite knowledge, finite experience, and finite ability to process information. That isn't a defect. It's simply part of being human.
And because we are limited individually, we have developed an extraordinary workaround: We cooperate.
We specialize. We teach one another. We share information. We compare observations. We argue. We test ideas. We correct mistakes. We build knowledge collectively.
Civilization itself is, in many ways, a giant cooperation project. But cooperation only works when people can exchange information. And information exchange requires trust.
Don't let profit destroy cooperation
This is where things get particularly complicated.
Sometimes there are genuine reasons to protect information. Businesses have intellectual property. People have privacy. Organizations have legitimate security concerns. Not every piece of information should be shared with everyone.
But there's a huge difference between protecting information for a legitimate reason and siloing information because sharing it might reduce our advantage.
If we are facing a problem that affects everyone, deliberately withholding information that could help solve that problem can create enormous costs to the real live people we share this planet with.
Sometimes protecting our short-term advantage makes the long-term problem much worse.
The question we should ask is:
Does keeping this information to ourselves help solve the problem—or does it simply help us maintain control?
Those aren't the same thing. A big plot point of this show is that there is a multi-national corporation using the Kaiju attacks to create a business model that they can exploit. They have government contracts, but aren't dealing honestly with the government. They are pursuing their own economic objectives.
More importantly, they also don't share the same objectives as the other groups in the show. While they do want to stop the Kaiju from hurting people. They are also trying to figure out if they can harness the Kaiju as a military weapon and control them.
In other words, their main objective isn't to solve the problem. They see the problem, the Kaiju, as something they should try to control. And that is why they fail.
Control is an illusion. We can barely control ourselves. A humanist doesn't try to control. We try to solve problems in a way that benefits as many people as possible. Creating another weapon - is not on our agenda.
What if we assumed we were missing something?
Perhaps one of the most useful habits we could develop when facing complicated problems is intellectual humility.
Not: "I'm probably wrong."
But: "I might be missing something."
That small change matters. It makes curiosity possible. It makes questions possible. It makes listening possible. And it makes cooperation possible.
Before deciding that someone else is the obstacle, ask: What do they know that I don't know?
Before dismissing another group's solution, ask: What information are they working from?
Before becoming certain that your solution is the answer, ask: What would I need to know to discover that I'm wrong?
Those questions don't guarantee that we'll solve the problem. But they dramatically increase the odds that we're actually solving the same problem.
We don't need fewer smart people. We need smarter cooperation.
The lesson I took from Monarch: Legacy of Monsters isn't that people need to stop disagreeing.
It's that we need to get better at cooperating while we disagree.
We need to share information. We need to acknowledge uncertainty. We need to make it safe for people to tell us what we don't want to hear. We need to build enough trust that people aren't constantly protecting information from one another.
And we need to recognize that being confident in our own solution doesn't mean everyone else is incompetent. They may simply be seeing something we can't see.
The biggest problem isn't always that nobody has the answer. Sometimes everybody has a piece of the answer—and nobody is sharing. So the next time you're facing a complicated problem, don't just ask:
"What's the solution?"
Ask: "Who knows something I don't know?" Then listen to them.
Because when the problem is bigger than any one person, organization, or perspective, the path forward isn't finding the person who is right.
It's creating the conditions in which all of us can be right about something—and wrong about something—and still work together to figure out what to do to solve our collective problem.
Lessons Learned:
The next time you think to yourself, if only this other person/group/organization/whatever, would accept I'm right we could solve this problem. Stop yourself from going down that rabbit hole.
Instead, remind yourself that they are operating from information you don't have. Use your critical thinking and compassion to be humble about what you almost certainly don't know. And start asking honest questions to learn - what you don't know.
And if someone tells you, there is more to this problem. Or that the problem has nuance to it that your solution isn't taking into account, please - LISTEN!
