coffee breaks they are called fika and
for the Swedish pikas are a lifestyle in
every Swedish household in every Swedish
workplace some amount of time is solely
dedicated to fica’s so what are they
pikas are all about making time for
friends and family to share a cup of
coffee and a little sweet something they
are all about restoration and social
collaboration a very good afternoon to
everyone here last week my friends and I
were we’re at the Emirates NBD
headquarters to attend a mentoring
session we were led into their
innovation department by their
innovation manager and soon we found
ourselves in their very cozy conference
hall but what set it apart from the few
conference halls that I had ever visited
in my entire lifetime was this one wall
was solely dedicated to the purpose of
post-its these post-its were results of
brainstorming sessions there were
results of social collaboration I want
you to sing back to the olden day coffee
houses that our grandfathers so proudly
talk about those were sorry
those were hubs for collaboration
because you have this mass of people
coming in from different walks of life
you have the elite you have the working
class you have the uneducated you have
the great minds they sit down order a
cup of chai or coffee or whatever it is
and there is an unnoticed exchange of
ideas that take place and those were the
roots for all revolutions that you look
at whether it be the Industrial
Revolution the Agricultural Revolution
or the Renaissance
so why social collaboration the concept
behind social collaboration is that
while you might be able to identify the
different dots to a problem it might be
someone else who is able to connect
those dots together and science is
proven again and again
that productivity increases compound li
wen strategies of social collaboration
are implemented let me tell you a story
a biologist by the name of William Muir
was interested in investigating the the
concept of group versus individual
productivity and subjects of his
experiment were chickens because with
chickens it’s much easier to determine
productivity all you have to do is count
the number of eggs each chicken lays so
his chickens were housed in nine cages
with nine hens per cage and very
randomly he picked out the most
productive chickens he called them the
super chickens and housed them together
and on the other hand he had nine
average performing chickens and put them
together as well and he let them breed
for another generation and the results
were dramatic only three of the super
chickens survived six of them had been
murdered on the other hand the average
chickens were doing extremely well they
were all they were all well feathered
and their productivity had increased and
what this investigation showed William
Muir was that the most productive
chicken in each cage was also the
biggest bully the most productive
chicken in each cage only boosted her
productivity by suppressing the
productivity of the other chickens in
other words the the super chicken in
each cage was only superior to the other
chickens because she pecked at the eggs
of the other chickens and because she
tend to pick more fights with them and
that is exactly today’s scenario we
being the super chickens tend to
overlook collaboration and our
productivity plummets and this trend is
seen across all sectors so what can we
do about it meet Emily me the founder of
people’s supper it’s a very simple
initiative what she does is that she
gets a group of willing strangers and
makes them sit across a table and they
have dinner
and they are faced with questions that
go beyond the headlines they talk about
issues that they face in their
day-to-day lives they talk about the
divide that has become so common in the
21st century and then leave with very
positive outlooks on life listen to what
Emily Mae has to say about this she says
I thought that if there’s one thing that
can change people’s hearts it’s the
ability to hear each other’s stories and
if there’s one thing that people can
unite over its food and this is just a
story of one lady who thought that the
the phenomenon of social collaboration
should not be restricted to the
corporate sector but also become an
everyday phenomenon everywhere we go
so that is what we should be doing
whether you are a student or a member of
the Parliament it does not matter we
start at the grassroots level and work
our way up from there let’s stop trying to be super chickens thank you