Failure to collaborate may be to Guyana’s undoing

Apr 12, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

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By Dr. Karen Abrams, MBA, AA

(Kaieteur News) – Everywhere you go in Guyana, you see examples of complete disdain for collaboration. You see it on the road, in the minibus, in the marketplace, in our communities, in politics, in business, and sometimes even in the way institutions relate to the people they are meant to serve. Too often, our instinct is not to work with others, but to dominate them.

That is both a cultural flaw and a development problem.

The OECD defines collaboration as a social process in which people work together toward clear objectives, resulting in shared products, consensus, or decisions. It identifies communication, conflict resolution, sharing resources, and social interdependence as part of that process. In other words, collaboration moves beyond some soft, vague ideal, to a practical human capacity. It is how serious societies solve difficult problems.

And yet, from the earliest years, many of our children are shaped by a culture that rewards comparison far more than cooperation. Beat the other child. Bring first. Get into Queen’s College. If you bring fifth, then next time you must bring first. In too many cases, the objective is not to develop mastery, character, confidence, or teamwork. It is to outrank everyone else.

Then there is the shaming and the licks, designed to embarrass, undermine, and ridicule, often by educators who seem to have little appreciation for the lasting damage these behaviors can do. Recently, a student related to me that when she was in second form, she volunteered to go to the board to work out a math problem and mixed up a sign, which led to the wrong answer. She said the teacher ridiculed and shamed her and asked whether she was “stupid.” This is not an isolated story. This behavior continues today, even at the university level, by far too many educators who should know better.

What many learners experienced in school under the guise of discipline was often a reward-and-punishment culture built around fear, shame, status, and public comparison. That kind of environment may produce obedience, compliance, and sometimes even strong short-term performance. But it does not reliably produce emotionally healthy, collaborative, reflective citizens. It produces adults who become highly sensitive to rank, embarrassment, defeat, and power.

And that is exactly what we now see around us.

We see streams of disrespect, bullying, and domination in places where diplomacy, collaboration, and finding common ground would be far more useful. We see people treating compromise as weakness. We see consensus treated as if it were surrender. We see too many people equating leadership with force, volume, humiliation, and control. In Guyana, collaboration too often feels to people like losing.

That is a serious problem for a country trying to develop at speed.

Harvard Business Review published Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s famous argument about “collaborative advantage,” the idea that an organization’s ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations gives it a significant competitive edge. That insight applies not only to companies, but to countries. Nations that learn how to align talent, institutions, sectors, and communities around shared goals move faster and waste less energy. Nations that default to ego battles, territorialism, and internal sabotage do not.

Guyana is too small for a national strategy of domination.

And domination is, in any case, a costly strategy. When power is used to disenfranchise bright people, capable people, independent people, those people do not simply vanish. They regroup. They find another path. They build around the obstacle. They prevail elsewhere. So while domination may feel satisfying to the bully in the moment, it almost always requires more resources, more enforcement, more vigilance, and more conflict over time. The bully may win the encounter, but often weakens the entire ecosystem.

That is one of the great tragedies of immature leadership. It may secure obedience, but it rarely builds durable capacity. It also creates the conditions for a long-term fight.

The modern world has already moved on from this way of thinking. UNESCO continues to emphasize the importance of transversal competencies, including critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication. These are the skills societies now recognize as necessary for citizens to function productively in complex and changing environments.

Even employers are making the point. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs work highlights leadership and social influence, resilience, flexibility, and related human capacities as increasingly important. These are skills for an interconnected world. They are not nurtured well in cultures that teach children to see every peer as a rival and every disagreement as a battle for supremacy.

That should give us pause in Guyana.

Because if children grow up in environments where public humiliation is normalized, where marks are read aloud, where status is constantly reinforced, where “bringing first” is elevated above learning how to work with others, we should not be surprised by the adults those systems produce. We should not be surprised when public life becomes harsh, when workplaces become territorial, when politics becomes vindictive, and when communities fracture around ego and exclusion rather than shared purpose.

Of course, this is not the whole story. There are leaders in Guyana, especially in parts of the private sector, who are doing things differently. They collaborate. They build partnerships. They lead without spectacle. They do not seem threatened by other capable people. They know that bringing others in can strengthen the whole. And it is refreshing when you see it, because it stands in such sharp contrast to the national habit of domination.

But those examples are still too rare.

For Guyana to develop effectively, efficiently, and fairly, we need an ecosystem built on justice, fairness, and the globally recognized capabilities that help nations thrive; collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, adaptability, resilience, leadership, and social influence. These cannot remain words in speeches, workshops, and school banners. They must be woven into our cultural framework, our institutions, and our education system.

Otherwise, we will continue to raise generations that view domination as preferable, conflict as a reason to destroy enemies, and disagreement as a threat rather than an opportunity to solve problems. We will continue to waste national energy on smallness. And we will weaken our own ability to develop rapidly and intelligently, even while sitting on extraordinary natural wealth.

We simply must build a Guyana in which our children can thrive without being trained to crush one another first. We must teach them how to listen, how to negotiate, how to share credit, how to disagree without contempt, and how to build something larger than themselves; because in the end, the countries that rise are not always the ones with the most resources.

They are often the ones that encourage citizens to work together.

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• collaborate, Dr. Karen Abrams, failure, undoing

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