It may well be that when Brian L. Steed’s Bees and Spiders came out, I did not notice, and I am now banging on about something that has been discussed over and over. Nonetheless, it’s something that bears talking about, even if it is repetition.

In my opinion, Steed gets it absolutely right in identifying the difference in the Arab and Western outlook on operating. His experiences should be required reading for anyone who interacts with Arabs on an operational level. His identification of the cultural differences is spot on. He writes:

Americans are to Bees as Arabs are to Spiders […]
The bee is defined by individual capabilities that allow it to accomplish its role within a larger community. The success of the community is important and defining to the bee. How does a bee define success (remember the poetic suspension as I recognize that we do not really know how a bee defines anything)? A bee sees its day as task oriented. It has “x” amount of flowers to collect pollen from in a given day. When the bee returns home at night and its spouse asks how the day went the bee is going to assess the day in terms of how many flowers it actually collected pollen from, the amount of pollen collected, the distances flown, etc. The bee is about accomplishment of agenda items or task lists.
[…]
The spider sees success as directly associated to its web. In many ways the spider in this analogy is a dual defined creature. It is defined by itself as a creature—those traits inherent to itself—and by its web in terms of its strength, size, location, and effectiveness. The spider defines its daily success by the efforts it has made to strengthen the web. Part of the suspension of reality here is to accept that in this analogy the spider’s web is connected not to branches and leaves, but to other spiders.
Each day for the spider is an exercise in sending out additional strands to other spiders—increasing the reach and size of its web—or strengthening the existing strands which already connect it to others.
The spider is not interested in sharing information about location of its web or the other strands and their strength to its other spider connections. To do so would directly threaten the placement and success of its own web. For example if a spider had a web across a trail that provided particularly good hunting; to introduce other spiders to that same location would threaten the current success enjoyed by the spider.

COIN - and this should be a tagline of this blog - is a multiplayer game: in fact, a co-operative multiplayer game (which is why I think that everyone in the COIN community should sit down with their opposite numbers from the host nation, other forces, civilians, NGOs and other stakeholders in the game for a spot of the board game Pandemic). Understanding the other players on your side, and their operational culture, should be a top priority. And Steed’s article gets this very good point vividly across.