Napkin notes on collaboration
Collaboration can only begin when we let go of personal fixed notions to find greater solutions together. It begins when we recognize others’ great ideas. Here are some ruminations on collaborating, collected from notes I wrote to myself over the years…
Collaboration is about increasing our collective intelligence and decreasing our collective ignorance. This requires a mature degree of self-knowledge where we claim what we know, but also acknowledge that we have deep oceans of blissful ignorance.
Collaboration is a fluid, interactive state where the parts have the power to influence the whole, while the whole influences the parts.
In collaboration, teamwork and individual excellence are equally required: as in jazz, the greater the individual virtuosity, the greater the team virtuosity.
Collaboration should magnify individual greatness rather than suppress it.
Collaboration requires differences, not sameness. And where there are differences there are tensions.
The purpose of tension is to create an arena where creativity grows. As long as there are differences, tension is there to stay. When one is resolved, another appears.
Working willingly with tensions is the prerequisite for collaboration.
Modern cities and communities are filled with differences—people from myriad cultures, ideologies, religions, and worldviews, all expressing their values and talents. These differences (and their inherent tensions) are our greatest and most untapped asset.
Collaboration’s purpose is to relate to each other in such a way that typically irritating differences can be transformed into valuable gifts.
To turn differences into gifts requires strength and flexibility. It involves the confidence to express ideas, and the humility to adjust them to the ideas of others.
This requires us to stand in one’s center while falling into the unknown.
To hear and see without instant misrepresentation and distortion (my wife and I call this ‘premature articulation’) is an act of utmost bravery. The great 20th-century artist Henri Matisse stated that “everything we see is more or less distorted by acquired habits and ready-made images that are to the eye what prejudice is to the mind.” To see through the noise takes courage.
In collaboration, we rely on others to help uncover the greater truth. One of the most powerful sentences is one of the simplest: “And what do you think, observe, understand?”
Avoid jargon, which is the language of lazy shortcuts and presumed shared assumptions.
Collaboration is impossible without examining what we think, old ideas so ingrained that they are invisible to us.
Collaboration is the next step in our evolution. We are all invited to practice.
We are all smart in some areas and ignorant in others.
When lazy, we talk only to those who are alike, which is another form of talking to ourselves.
Collaboration is only possible when all parties are willing to step into the empty space beyond pre-existing ideas where mutual discovery is possible.
Collaboration is not possible between fixed ideas.
When we are able to share our different “smarts” we quickly realize that, amazingly, together we know more and that together we are able to accomplish what no individual or group could do separately.
Paradoxically, our brains need to focus AND roam to generate ‘aha moments’, connecting separate bits of knowledge into a new singular insight. In collaboration we are each other’s aha moments, using separate bits of knowledge to create new understandings.
Because different people bring different priorities, we discover that the results of collaboration can meet many important goals at the same time. When that happens, we call it beauty.
Collaboration is the next step in our evolution. We are all invited to practice.
…Our world is a school where collaboration is the main lesson plan. We have all been invited to enroll in collaboration kindergarten. I trust that very soon we will be able to move on to elementary school.