The best teams can fail if they don’t know how to work together – witness the engineers who responded to the Chernobyl disaster 32 years ago, writes TC’s Peter Coleman in The Five Percent, his blog for Psychology Today. Drawing on a century of literature on the topic, Coleman offers tips for working together, ranging from establishing a safe environment for risk-taking to encouraging productive conflict. Applying that advice to current political divisions in America, he argues that the nation’s founders created good conditions for continuing collaboratio, including a constitution that sanctions the rule of law and civil discourse, a motto of E Pluribus Unum (“Out of many, one”), and traditions of compassion and unity.

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