Collaborations

An excerpt from The Right Question

Dear paid subscribers,

Apologies, this post is a bit late but I’ve been busy lately with ‘real’ life. To make up for it, you are getting an extra long post today. Below you will find some provocations to help you reflect on collaborating on creative projects. Enjoy!

---

Is hell really other people?

There seems to be a rusted-on belief that collaboration is a magical process, an alchemical melding of brainpower and willpower that yields amazing stuff.

I’m about to commit heresy.

Is collaboration magical? Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. Collaboration may be alchemical, but it is also hard work and carries no guarantees of success.

Collaborating with other people can be wonderful when the stars (by which I mean the project, personalities, conditions, and resources) align. A group of people working productively together can transcend the abilities of each individual and being a part of such a group can be exhilarating. When I look back at my own history, my favourite memories of collaboration are of projects where working with others offered me the chance to help develop concepts and then outcomes that I could never have arrived at by myself. They also offered me the chance to learn skills, methods, and, in the rough and tumble of group dynamics, something about myself and my own capabilities in communicating, negotiating, boundary setting, collegiality, and giving and receiving trust. And they were fun.

Sometimes I found myself collaborating with people who were quite unlike me as personalities and / or in their approach to creative work, but with whom I was surprised to find I could work harmoniously and enjoyably. A shared set of values and hopes for our project was all the common ground we needed, and in these situations we would learn that we could transcend our own egos and insecure attachments to individual practice to reach a common goal. These collaborations allowed me to grow as a human and as an artist.

But sometimes egos and / or the tendency to cling onto preconceived notions or habits could not be transcended and this is when the collaborations did not work so well.

Sometimes collaborations are hell. And if you are stuck in a group of people that are not working well together it can be an awful experience as you watch your project fall short of reaching its full potential (or sometimes fail outright), make some enemies, and take some body-blows to your sense of confidence and positivity.

In my current mentoring work and in my own personal history, I have seen bad collaborations cause real damage to people. Part of the problem is that, in psychologically tangling with other people, especially people who are growing increasingly frustrated or upset, it is easy to become disorientated yourself. Part of the emotional labour of slogging through and then recovering from bad collaborations arises out of agonising over apportioning blame, trying to be fair, disentangling escalation from manipulation or insecurity from arrogance. Bad collaborations set people on a path to feeling anxious and insecure about how they will perform in their next collaboration, and this can leech the joy, inspiration, and learning from what should be a wonderful process.

I would never counsel avoiding collaborating with others, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge that finding a way of working with a team is its own artform, and, like any art, requires discipline, focus, skill, and application. It’s hard work, and sometimes it’s fine to acknowledge that, and to acknowledge that some collaborations take more work than they’re worth. And it’s also fine to admit that you enjoy working by yourself. So, let’s start there: