Confronting The Deluge: When Self-Interest Drowns Collective Progress

The ancient Mesopotamians carved their story of the great flood into stone tablets. The Deluge wasn’t divine punishment: it was what happened when each person looked only to their own survival, when collective action became impossible, when short-term protection trumped long-term flourishing. And we are living our own version today.

Walk into most commercial negotiations in 2026 and you’ll see contracts designed to protect individual organizations rather than create shared value. Terms where risk is shifted, not shared. Timeframes set to match quarterly pressures. Innovation stifled because it requires levels of trust we no longer have. It’s not that anyone set out to build this system. It emerged, and rose steadily, the way flood waters do – and each organization seeks safety in isolation, rather than through collective action.

When uncertainty surrounds us – political division, market volatility, stakeholder pressure – self-protection appears defensible, rational, safe. But ultimately, it leads to loss of value and threatens our future.

Picture the commercial landscape a decade from now, if it is shaped by today’s defensive decisions. Coalitions fall apart and those that could have happened never form. Programs that could have succeeded are abandoned or cut back due to cost overruns and delays. Rather than aligning, each organization puts its own protection first – different risk appetites, different measures of success. different attitudes to data sharing. They hold endless meetings, produce multiple papers, sign contracts no one can understand and disband in disarray amid mutual recriminations. Perhaps a construction firm develops a breakthrough approach to affordable housing through contract structures that share risk over fifteen years. But competitors can’t adopt it because their contracts are standardized for protection, not innovation. Investors move on. The breakthrough dies.

So here’s how the commercial and contracting deluge happens. Uncertainty rises and organizations focus on how to protect themselves; collaboration is declared, but not put into effect;  problems compound and they are all blamed on someone else; trust is destroyed so further protective measures are introduced, driving up costs and destroying opportunity. Given the behaviors, each protective move is understandable. Each defensive contract makes sense given the pressures. But ultimately, they offer an illusion of protection and a guarantee of sub-optimal results.

The ancient tablets described a world that drowned because people couldn’t act collectively when it mattered. The modern version is quieter: we risk drowning  ourselves in self-interest, each organization building its own ark, discovering too late that isolated arks don’t save civilizations.

When commercial relationships default to self-protection, time horizons collapse. Real breakthroughs may take years of iteration – like Rwanda’s drone blood delivery or India’s telecommunications transformation. But protective thinking can’t accommodate ten-year horizons. We optimize for this quarter, we resist adaptive or agile relationships because we say they are too risky, that we want certainty.

Your organization might be uniquely positioned to address major business opportunities or societal challenges through contracting relationships. But if you’re focused on protecting yourself from every risk, you’ll never deploy those capabilities where they matter most. However, this isn’t inevitable. History shows the way forward: narrow focus, capability-led action, long time horizons, collaborative coalitions built on shared risk and shared reward. We know it works – from developing unleaded gasoline to seat belts to maternal health systems. Shipping container standardization turned global trade from chaos into a system, but only after competitors agreed to share specifications rather than protect proprietary designs. The internet itself required telecommunications companies to adopt common protocols. Nike and Apple combined fitness tracking with sportswear. The biggest commercial breakthroughs come through partnership, not protection.

Commercial contracting operating in a spirit of shared risk and reward is central to all of them. The question is whether we’ll choose this approach. Right now, our research continues to show that we say we want greater collaboration, but we don’t believe it will happen. It’s a choice whether we structure a contract and design a relationship that seeks to protect us from every risk, or build one that creates shared value.  

The Mesopotamians couldn’t stop their deluge. But ours is commercial, and it rises from accumulated defensive decisions, not rain. Which means we can choose differently. We can ask: What challenges could our contracting relationships help solve? Who needs to be in the coalition? What would unlock real scale? What time horizon does change require? We can build contracts that deploy capabilities toward impact and outcomes, instead of just managing exposure.We can form coalitions that persist long enough to matter, instead of protecting ourselves into irrelevance. We can choose collaboration over self-interest, shared risk over shifted risk, collective progress over individual protection.

Or we can keep building our isolated contractual arks, wondering why the waters keep rising around us.