Learning together
The Scale of Cooperation, meanwhile, has had quite a history of developments. Pieter began very tentatively with a distinction between Learning Together as the opposite of Struggling. There was also something in between, he then called it ' the fog'.

Surviving - Evading - Learning
The three-pronged approach Surviving - Evading - Learning arose later. For years Pieter thought 'This is already there, this is so simple and self-evident, it must have already been described in detail... There are bookcases full of conflict management, dialogue, escalation ladders, learning circles and flow. But describing these three worlds together as one appeared not to exist in this form.
In mid-1998, Reclassering Nederland asked Pieter's employer to help think about how arrested young serious offenders aged 15-17 could still re-enter society - without a prison sentence. Despite their serious offence, a long prison sentence would in many cases keep these young 'followers' in crime for life. Putting the real criminals behind bars and giving the rest of the boys another chance was the thinking. After all, prison has long been the best training ground for 'not living by the agreements of our society'. Can we give young people an alternative route, and let them become proud of what they accomplish within the rules and laws of our society? So that they do not fall back into delinquency again? Is it not also the best outcome for victims of these offenders that young people express regret, and say goodbye to 'their' gang culture? In the search for a strong programme, which became the 'DOEL Project', this three-pronged approach often emerged in conversation with the participants as well. When Pieter got another young person out of prison, he knew: this young person was Struggling. The laws of struggling apply, it's about 'who wins', 'what are my chances of escaping'? How can you win over such a young participant who has (often almost exclusively) negative experiences - and whom you have only known for 15 minutes, to a learning pathway that will benefit everyone? It was the conversations with these young people that laid the foundation for a new outlook on cooperation.

Struggling ⇿ Avoiding ⇿ Cooperating
Later, we increasingly used 'Cooperation' as a synonym for 'learning'. The three-pronged approach became Struggling - Avoiding - Cooperating abbreviated "O-O-S" - in Dutch. Learning gave confusion because in a Struggling setting you also 'learn', not what you need to cooperate with energy, but you could call it learning to survive. Struggling is active, Cooperating is active and Escaping is in between: that can be an escape from a Struggling setting, literally getting sick of something and also saying 'yes' and doing 'no' in addition to that, while no one calls you on it with effect. It is a kind of fog in which you become increasingly distant from each other. Both in a struggling setting and in cooperation, you can 'go into the mist' with it.

It must have been around 2002, the time also when the Scale was translated in English, originally abbreviated as "SAC": Surviving - Avoiding - Cooperating. Later, Surviving became Struggling, because 'to survive' is too strongly linked to 'overcoming', whereas in a world of Struggling it may be about overcoming, but ultimately the behaviour (also) produces casualties and resistance, irritation and 'opposing'. 'Struggling' captures that better.

Avoiding
There are many books on struggling, the fight, conflict and resulting 'countermovement' of diplomacy and (much later) mediation and non-violent communication. There are also many books on team play, cooperation, group development, group roles, communication styles, leadership, flow, etc. There are few, if any, books on the world in between: Escape. Perhaps 'who would want to read that?' Fighting with - under stress - the choice between fight, flight or freeze on the one hand and fine trusting cooperation on the other, are totally different worlds. Working together creates a world where everyone is indispensably in place and takes on a challenge with flow. We notice now that we are using the Scale in professional teams how important (our definition of) Avoidance as a phenomenon actually is. Little literature has been found on it, let alone the combination of surviving, Avoiding and Cooperating in the form of a route over which teams move back and forth.

Scale of Cooperation
The triplet S-A-C was less and less satisfactory, there are all kinds of intermediate steps, Struggling, Avoiding and Cooperating each has many sides, and this confused training sessions. Moreover: "can't we represent those differences in each world in an order?" became the question. "It's a scale you can move across" said Floor during one of the numerous conversations at the Hoorneboeg estate on how we could make S-A-C work even more powerfully.
It gave Scale of Cooperation (2013) its final name. Janneke Tromp designed the Scale and the logo. It is fair to say that more than a hundred people have since contributed to the Scale, while many thousands of participants were introduced to it.

Two websites launched
More and more people got involved in the Scale while, until now, the Scale had mainly been used internally. In (international) trainings, we noticed that the Scale was appreciated. First as an important insight and later increasingly as a good tool, a kind of roadmap to better relationships and thus faster results.

Open source
We decided (2017) to release the scale as 'open source', as long as people respect its developers, cite it as a source and share improvements 'for free'.

From seven to nine positions
Since 2018, the seven sub-areas - we now call them 'positions' - have been definitively changed to nine and we give concrete tips on each position on the Scale. A scale that measures the degree and quality of a cooperation process.

27 action cards
Meanwhile, there are not only nine positions but also three actions per position (so 27 actions in total) that advise on how to move from one position to another.

A manual and other products
You know that year of the COVID-19 virus - for us it gave time. Time to write a manual printed in early 2021. Time to share other products with customers. Time to prepare webinars and training days. The first training day was in September 2020. (Partial) translations have been made, in addition to English, into German, French and Polish. There was also a demand for certification from abroad.

Celebrating successes
For more than a decade, we have been coaching groups to an energising state of cooperation.

On 1 February, our cooperation was officially established as a separate company. The Scale of Cooperation VOF. Another milestone to celebrate! The first webinar is in February and we're going for a first podcast in March. Who knows, maybe the first Ted Talk will succeed after the summer!

The Dutch website passed more than 75,000 unique visitors and over a million hits on 1 January 2021. We are happy and proud of it.

Once the English translation was a reality, the Scale opened up internationally. The Scale is used professionally in four European countries, besides the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and France. The organisations we work with also organise training courses there.

The Scale has since been translated into Arabic, Bulgarian, English, German, French, Frisian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Polish, Portuguese and Swedish.

First international meeting
Ommen hosted our first international meeting in January 2023.

In Poland, a team assignment has been developed based on the Scale. The group is challenged to win, but whether that will be a joint win becomes a question for the reflections. Even for a team that regularly works with the Scale, the team assignment became a special challenge. Meanwhile, an English and Dutch version of the team assignment is in preparation.

Is a milestone year