Sapiens
Cooperation runs on fiction
A company is a story too
Sapiens, chapters 2 and 10
Chimpanzees top out at a few dozen collaborators. Sapiens run to millions. Harari says the difference is something nobody can touch.
What actually happened?
Harari's claim is flat and strange: any large-scale human cooperation is rooted in myths that exist only in our collective imagination. States, money, laws, human rights, limited companies — none can be touched, and each works the moment enough people believe at once. His example is Peugeot. The plant could burn, every employee could leave, every shareholder could sell, and Peugeot would still exist, because it was never the building or the people. Money he calls the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised: two men who hate each other will still take each other's cash.
The organisation is the story people still believe
Assets can be sold, staff replaced, offices moved. While the story of who we are and what we are for still holds, the organisation exists. When the story goes, the assets and the people are all still there and the thing has already dissolved.
One public gap between what a founder says and what he does costs more than a bad quarter. A bad quarter damages assets; that damages the story.
Rewriting the story beats rewriting the process
Harari's point about Sapiens is that we can revise a fiction fast and change behaviour with it — France went from divine right to popular sovereignty inside a year. Change the process without changing the story and people will read the new process through the old one.
Going from sales-led to product-led is not an org chart. It became real the day a large contract was turned down in public to protect the roadmap.
Trusting the note is cheaper than trusting the person
What makes money the strongest of the fictions is that it converts trust in a person into trust in a system. Cooperation stops requiring that either side like or understand the other. It requires only that both accept the same token.
Two departments that cannot stand each other do not need an away day. They need one unit of account both sides accept — hours, credits, an internal transfer price.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you need people who do not know each other, and may not like each other, to cooperate.
Ask first: what is the story or the token they all believe in, and is it still credible this week?
Where it goes wrong: treating the story as a lie you can improvise — one exposure zeroes it — or repairing the rules and then wondering why nothing moved.
Lines to keep
Any large-scale human cooperation is rooted in common myths.
Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination.
Same situation, other people are asking
Nobody here believes the thing we say about ourselves.These people don't like each other and still have to deliver.We stopped believing our own story · all 2 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.