🎶 Co-Creative Collaboration 🎶 — “sweet dreams are made of this”
People talk about collaborating and co-creating all the time.
Could it be that there’s still more talking about it, than actually doing it?
There are many:
🔮 Rough starts…
🔮 False starts…
🔮 Gingerly exploring…
🔮 Getting ready…to get ready…to collaborate…
🔮 Examples of…maybe we oughta collaborate…
These are among the recurring patterns that many of us are observing on too many occasions to remember…
Awareness of the need to collaborate has increased. Good!
More collaboration is underway. Better!
So is collaboration washing, and those looking to out-compete by superficial pseudo collaborating. Not so good, yet understandable given pervasive patterns that have become normalized…
Hang in though…these vitally important words warrant serious attention and more serious and mindful activation.
Moreover…
🎶 Sweet dreams are made of this 🎶 …borrowing the title from a song by Eurythmics/Annie Lennox.
How to activate and continue to cultivate meaningful collaboration — is harder and more important than ever in a competitive polarizing world, paradoxically stuck and undergoing deep shift…
There are many cultures and wisdom traditions with more balanced partnership ways that naturally honour and invite diversity of thought and collaborative participation.
There is much to learn and work through to shift from engrained domination-oppression, command-control and dysfunctional competition patterns and cycles.
This goes way beyond (surface deep) good will and good intentions.
Deeper layers…
Much to earn in terms of well-founded authentic mutual trust — rooted in true partnership.
Hmm…digging a little deeper…
The Inuit people have about 49 different words for snow. Their language — the granular meaning of each of these 49 words, is grounded in very practical needs that guide their everyday life and decisions. Their ability to survive and potentially thrive depends on their deep embodied understanding of and relationship with— snow.
…this got us thinking…
The singular English word — collaboration — is quite loaded. We somehow expect that one word to carry a huge load, to convey with clarity, its meaning, manifestations and potential.
Our current and future trajectory as a human civilization is poised and teetering at a critical juncture — facing entangled challenges across all domains of society. Our ability to survive and potentially flourish — individually and collectively in life, work and as a human family — is kinda hinged on the quality of our interdependent relationships and our capacity for deep collaboration, within and across contexts, as part of the living planet we call home.
While many people talk about collaboration with well-meaning intentions, it seems there are many assumptions and varying expectations about what collaboration is — what it means to collaborate and be collaborative.
Collaboration: “The act of working together.”
At this stage, it’s abundantly evident that collaboration is imperative to meet practical and systemic needs, as we engage in our everyday interdependent lives and navigate between worlds — facing and experiencing tectonic shifts.
Perspectives of what collaboration looks like in action — can and do vary.
Capacity for deep collaboration calls for…
🔮 Mind shifts from scarcity to abundance…
🔮 Learning curves to acquire and become skilled and experienced…
🔮 Multitudes of ways to embody and live into collaborative ways of being…
World views and (ad)vantage points are real. They set the stage. The enabling contexts and conditions for collaboration, matter.
🔮 What conditions nurture collaboration?
🔮 What conditions prevent or squash it?
🔮 Can we expand our collective collaborative literacy with a wider, deeper repertoire to navigate wisely and well through the inherently messy and often difficult iterations of true collaboration?
We’re not suggesting that we need 49 words — however bringing deep collaborative capacity to life, warrants dedicated care and feeding.
The human system stuff is too often viewed and treated as secondary. Yet the real grounded work of collaboration is at the heart — among our biggest challenges and creative opportunities.
Collaboration: let’s drill down a bit further…
What is it and why is it so important?
Humans are naturally communal social beings with innate abilities to live and work together. However, living through the western influenced Industrial Age, our interdependence and interconnectedness with one another and our living planet has been on a steady downward spiral — de-emphasized, compromised and downgraded. With emphasis on breaking things down into parts, compartmentalization, silos and individualism — those innate abilities haven’t been fully valued, cultivated, developed or tapped.
The Industrial Age has overvalued linear left-brain reductionist ways of functioning and relating. Interestingly, our right brain is more naturally geared to collaboration, creativity, feelings and intuition. Paradoxically, the ability to recognize the limits of our own knowledge, whereby we can say “I don’t know” and engage truly co-creatively, resides more in our right brain capacity.
The need to collaborate is apparent. There’s lots of activity and networking in the name of collaboration.
Some of this is excellent, with demonstrated collaboration in the form of cross pollenization and connection — exchanging information, ideas, resources and stories. Much of this is very limited, (still) falling way short…
Collaboration washing is also on the rise — when collaborative efforts are (mostly) pursued for competitive advantage. The appearance of collaboration through virtue signalling can become a holding pattern, as people increasingly appreciate the need cognitively — in their heads — without the enabling contexts and conditions, without having learned how.
Under the veneer, competitive win-lose patterns persist. Sometimes this is subtle, sometimes thinly disguised, often kicking in through a very real felt need for self-preservation, as people and organizations jockey for position and market, in a noisy world. Driven by the same old flawed neoclassical monocapital economic model that continues to feed scarcity mindsets and fear — the system is overdue for a serious overhaul.
We continue to observe and experience many early stage collaboration efforts that fail to take root and advance substantively beyond the fragile preliminary goodwill and superficial layers…
There is considerable fuzziness as people navigate between informal networking and more formal organizing efforts to make tangible progress getting the right work done right.
It’s messy…
Understanding differentiated needs, conditions and circumstances based on contexts, place, cultures and more — is vitally important. Deeper, overarching driving common[s] purpose sets context for the nature and quality of collaborative working and co-creating.
Collaborating doesn’t mean that everyone is involved in everything, sharing equal decision making authority on all aspects, at all stages. This is a crucial area that requires clarity of expectations, processes and practices — discerning what is right, fair, required and reasonable.
And figuring all this stuff out is real work, that must be understood and valued as real work — an investment of energy, time and funds in preliminary ground-setting and follow-on stages essential to set things up well, in ways suited to ongoing and emergent contexts and needs, as work evolves and take shape.
As people (for very compelling reasons) shift away from conventional command-control organization roles and cultures, there can be a tendency to assume that democratic consensus-based decision making (and flat organization structure) is the alternative default model for all decisions and all kinds of work efforts at every step and stage. This assumption invariably spells trouble. A variety of strategic and practical problems creep in and at some point, what began as collaborative good will — often becomes bogged down and erodes. Informal power dynamics can take over. Back-sliding into dysfunctional patterns easily re-emerge. Many initiatives fizzle out…
Sound governance and work structures aligned with operating values and the nature and complexity of the work (required) help to discern and gain agreement on criteria for the kind of collaboration and decision-making discretion required.
This Sociocracy for All article, Governance: the language of collaboration, unpacks some of the challenges posed.
…”Governance is the language of groups to connect and to get things done.”…
…“Connecting through language is deeply human so we’ve become really good at it. What we do struggle with, as a species, is cooperation beyond a handful of people. Because all of a sudden, words aren’t enough. Yelling something ‘into an organization’ or into society doesn’t do much. It’s just words. To make things happen on that larger, more complex scale, you have to speak a whole different kind of language. That language is governance.” …
When there is shared mission critical purpose with some mutual overlapping interests and real stakes…macro and (granular) micro stages and layers of collaboration with clear accountability — can be defined and adapted as work efforts evolve.
Minimum critical specs. Balancing the need for flexibility, fluidity and creativity with some adaptable (semi-permeable) structure, roles and accountabilities helps to discern freedoms — agency to act within fair and appropriate limits of discretion and (role) relationship expectations.
Addressing key questions can clear the way for ongoing collaboration that effectively supports the parts and the whole:
🔮 What kinds of decisions are integral to sound integrated overarching strategy?
🔮 What decisions are best distributed and decentralized whereby people have the agency and freedom to act based on relevant, local contexts, needs and opportunities, along with the enabling supportive infrastructure systems and tools?
Collaborative capacity develops with trust-enhancing conditions. In essence, trust is operational when we understand who and what roles we can count on to contribute reliably and adaptively…individually and collectively to effectively support the parts and the whole — in the present and over time.
Collaborative capacity contributes as an enabling how — supporting the why and shaping the what.
We are living in the gap — between worlds.
Deep SHfT calls for deep-rooted life-affirming modus operandi.
Life-affirming economic models, with multicapital value flows and exchanges, sound commons and partnership-based governance and alternative relational forms of (nested) work — accountabilities, organizations and ecosystems — are needed to develop and sustain deep substantive collaboration — as normative.
Deep-rooted collaboration develops through ongoing, iterative stages of real transdisciplinary and (trans)contextual work with multi-stakeholders — people with real stakes, who care. With practice, deep collaboration can become natural — an expected way of operating.
Working collaboratively through stages and cycles of diagnosis/assessment, ideation, innovation, design, experimentation, adaptation, evaluation etc. has always been relevant — yet often paid lip service.
Compartmentalization, fragmentation and dropped balls between the stages, disciplines, organizations and sectors also cause efforts to drift and lose continuity and coherence.
We’ve reached a tipping point whereby the complexity of overlapping wicked challenges and opportunities means that deep collaboration is not optional; it is imperative. Our ability to cooperate, coordinate, collaborate and co-create in ways that support, connect, combine, pool, build upon and surpass the best of our individual, organization and sector capabilities is essential to our collective well-being — if not our ultimate survival as a species.
Collaboration and learning go hand-in-hand. Effective collaboration is essential for mutual learning. Collaboration invariably fails to develop deep roots in the absence of ongoing mutual learning. Learning is catalytic and embodied — enabling breakthroughs whereby we co-discover, apply and adapt innovative strategies and alternatives that address increasingly complex challenges. As we navigate, we continuously experiment and assess progress. Through mutual learning, we are better equipped to discern promising solutions and innovative pathways toward real workable viable solutions and ways of working.
🔮 Have we lost collaborative ability somewhat, somewhere along the way in competitively-driven environments that reinforce individual and organization accomplishments at the expense of mutual needs, interests and common(s) good?
Yup, a keen grasp of the obvious, at this point!
🔮 What would happen if we competed a lot less and collaborated a whole lot more?
🔮 How can we nurture and develop collaborative ecosystems that also allow for the balance of healthy co-opetition and competition, contributing to ongoing improvement and flourishing — essential for all nested adaptive living systems?
🔮 What barriers prevent or truncate collaboration, causing collaborative efforts to sub-optimize, stall, break down or fail?
🔮 What blocks collaboration from becoming naturally sustainable in the ways that we function or work?
🔮 Are there varying circumstances and stages that call for different kinds of collaborative work?
🔮 What does collaboration look like in action, in its many forms?
🔮 How can we evolve new forms of collaboration for the benefit of our organizations, networks, communities, ecosystems and our planet?
🔮 If collaboration, learning exchange and individual and collective human development are integrally and iteratively linked — what contexts and conditions will foster and optimize their creative interplay?
🔮 What is required to nurture and sustain healthy well-functioning interdependent (nested) ecosystems with the regenerative capacity for future generations?
These are the kinds of questions we continue to research, explore and live, drawing from the patterns we’re observing — an ’unstitutional‘ dance of emergence and strategy. From an omni-partial collaborative commons space between, we’re co-catalyzing and supporting evolutionary navigation — nurturing commons-based living lab work.
Alternative forms of governance and work systems warrant a much deeper dive.
Referenced here are three articles. Exploring our ‘unstitutional’ journey and some of the potential options for others, we elaborate on the FairShares Commons (FSC) framework — a pattern language and legal form of incorporation. Enabling and protective governance and structural building blocks are available, that can be adopted and adapted in complementary, synergistic ways to help coalitions, living lab initiatives and start-up business ventures establish healthy mutually invested interdependent ecosystems of entities. These are set up with the minimum critical conditions to develop systemic trust and resilience, navigating through ongoing uncertainty and complexity toward regenerative capacity with a long view to future generations — what Indigenous cultures have always naturally understood.
A third article published September 2024 excavates the need for new forms of work systems that add meaningful value with enabling contexts for the ‘commons’ to ‘work.’ Building from longstanding research and potential, this article aims to mobilize beyond abstract conceptual framing to get underway, living into alternative workable forms — now.
As we navigate, the experiences and stories emerging at every stage shed light on collaboration from a wide spectrum of lived experience.
We consider contexts, history, the people and all living beings who must be meaningfully and centrally included. Warm and hard data, contextualizing issues and opportunities and navigating nonlinear messiness, from fragile readiness through to mission critical regeneration — meaningful progress on a finite living planet is a reframing and recalibrating of so many things.
In this video, Adam Kahane unravels Radical Collaboration to Transform Social Systems. He explains how the three human drives of love, power and justice are the essential building blocks to create and sustain the conditions for collaboration. Here are some excerpts:
“To overcome apart-ness/separation is to be driven by love. Love arises from the the reality of interconnection and interdependence, that we are part of larger wholes. To avoid working with love is to ignore the reality of interdependence. Collaboration that does not harness love will not transform social systems. But love is not enough…
“Dialoguing cannot mean giving up ‘power.’ Collaboration that does not harness power will not transform social systems. Power is the drive that enables us to move up and down and from side-to-side. Radical collaboration employs power when stakeholders are each enabled to assert their wholeness: their purpose, perspective and position. Building collective power means working together with other stakeholders to find and enact ways to transform the system. The opposite is forcing, just trying to get everybody to do what you want them to do. Working with love and power are also not enough to be able to transform social systems.”
“Justice transforms structures so that more people can employ more of their power and more of their love. Different people have incommensurately different ideas of how to assess fairness and who is being treated unfairly and it is difficult to transform social systems when the people who benefit from the status quo fight to maintain their power positions and privileges. We need to work with justice but it is not easy. Pretending that one of these drives doesn’t exist is like trying to move through physical space while pretending that gravity doesn’t exist.”
Adam references Martin Luther King, who said:
“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It’s the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change and one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power and power with the denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing right. What we need to realize is that power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time”
Yup, harnessing love, power and justice, understood, defined and realized in this way, is foundational.
So, what does co-creation really look like in action?
The complexity of overlapping systemic issues demands truly empowered co-creative participation.
There’s no single lens perspective, formula, program, pathway, protocol, conceptual approach, toolkit or intelligence that will address the entangled problems and dilemmas we face.
Co-creation becomes more possible when we let go of our need to prescribe or predetermine some, if not many, of the answers and assumed or preferred solutions. Being Right is almost Never Enough…especially when our ideas and views fail to gain meaningful traction. Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and is ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough,’ peels back more layers — exploring many recurring dilemmas and pitfalls as we endeavour to make progress.
Right. Perhaps our biggest sobering realization accumulating over many years is that there is way too little real co-creation happening — for lots of reasons.
We’ve observed that, in spite of good intentions, many people haven’t really learned how to be truly co-creative. The words are there, but the congruent action or behaviour may not follow or may not reliably continue.
Any of us can fall into this pattern at times…ensnared by pervasive societal norms, boxed-in structures and a driving economic model that doesn’t cultivate healthy interdependent ways of being, living and working.
Yup. More monsters and messy humanness! Systemic barriers drive and perpetuate the dysfunctional counterproductive human stuff and mechanistic linear left brain leaning emphasis.
For many, shaped by competitive win-lose environments spanning decades — sometimes described as Game A — this isn’t an instant flip-of-the-switch shift. Younger generations who are inheriting the many complex challenges we face, are primed and perhaps and hopefully, best poised to help step up needed shifts.
Walking-the-talk-and-listening-while-we-walk means we gotta get out of our conceptual bubbles and echo chambers. We’ve also gotta get out of our heads and into more whole interconnected, embodied and integrated ways of being the change.
“Traveler, there is no path, The path is made by walking…By walking, we make the path.” ~ Antonio Machado, Spanish poet
These shifts demand readiness, a conscious values based choice, conditions that are trust-enhancing, and the muscle memory that might become natural with practice.
Some of these relational human soft skills have truly become very practical necessary grounded hard skills.
At some point along the way or in hindsight, we recognize that the brilliant ‘aha’ moments are nonlinear accumulations and layering of many ideas and iterations, contributed, influenced, shaped and refined by many people.
When we humbly accept the messiness of human creativity, the diversity of gifts differing, the value of deep and wide lived experience and experimentation and the nestedness and unknowability of all the variables that produce little and big breakthroughs — that is when true co-creativity can shine. That is also when creative collaboration can genuinely be experienced as fun, intense, joyful — when we find our natural rhythm and flow.
Kinda like a musical ensemble…knowledge, skills, intuitive creativity and improvisation kick in. Hard work, challenging, lots of passion, sometimes painful and maddening and yet almost magical — as co-creative flow kicks in and aligns. Good outcomes can be achieved, though not in predetermined lock step linear reductionist ways.
When we work together through stages of collaboration that enable co-creativity to flourish, we can make choices based on mutual best interests, common[s] purpose and common[s] sense….heading in the roughly right direction and always subject to learning and needed adaptation.
And in the midst of it all, there are ample opportunities for individual talents to shine and to recognize those contributions. We can celebrate it all. We need it all. Individual and collective creativity. Along with the sense of fulfillment that accompanies worthwhile efforts and accomplishments.
Imagine what’s unimpossible when co-creative potential is unleashed as a force for good!
Co-creation is a form of collaborative innovation where ideas are shared, built upon and improved collectively. The creative process seamlessly takes flight whereby individual egos — not feeling the need to be front-and-centre — can take a back seat. Ideas and alternatives are co-discovered that no one person would have created in isolation.
Our collaborative commons work is focused on co-creating pathways and widening access that can potentially help us move toward viable alternatives. Addressing wicked problems calls for deep and radical collaboration and co-creative breakthroughs. When this way of being becomes the norm, perhaps we won’t think of it as radical!
What if we conveyed our own perspectives as partial, unfinished invitations for co-creative interplay? Imagine if we offered, received and accepted views as input — fractals of a larger whole.
Imagine a world where the exchange of knowledge, ideas and stories was generally experienced as gifts, unpolished, imperfect gems that contribute to something made better as a result of humility, grace and reciprocity.
Imagine, if we all worked at it. Would that begin to look and feel like deeper collaboration, toward better outcomes as we increasingly befriend our mutual vulnerability?
As we live the questions, building upon our various perspectives and contributions, we can discover, recover and uncover more innovative life-affirming out-of-the-box alternatives. We can address the burning questions — transcontextually and within contexts, places and spaces — thereby meaningfully making more sense.
Some of the unknowable might transform into ways of being and ways of knowing that embrace our rich diversity, bringing more light and joy to this existentially bumpy journey.
Lifting us all in life-affirming ways is the most viable way forward.
Being unstitutional, as we describe it, is simply a metaphor for welcoming diverse perspectives, ideas and capabilities through collaborative communities, initiatives and coalition building work that brings stakeholders (careholders) together across business, government, civil society, cultures, generations — all the (artificial) divides — mobilizing spirited co-creative energy toward common[s] ground.
Working from the space between, collaborative living labs or pilots can help us shape, test and prototype new forms of work systems, governance and systemic, pooled funding models — drawing from decades of knowledge and experience and creating the conditions and contexts for healthy interdependent ecosystems.
What’s described here is really not new. Many of us have experienced collaboration and co-creativity, however, it’s often fleeting and not sustained or culturally normative. It can’t be forced. However there are contexts and conditions that can help us rekindle and develop our innate prosocial capacity.
How to scale collaboration points to an overarching human system challenge. We can support learning-by-doing, through:
🔮 Context-based and place-sourced living labs
🔮 Mutually funded collaborative partnership ecosystem ventures and initiatives
🔮 Bringing people (stakeholders) together — outside the usual conventionally bounded organizations and spaces and beyond narrow vested interests — towards mission critical common(s) purpose
We can all be unstitutional, as we work in big and every day ways to seed and cultivate life-affirming conditions for people and planet.
Why not?
In summary, too often collaborative co-creation fails to get the focus and the funding flows that this kind of work requires. We need to dial up and deepen our commitment to collaborative co-creation, as fundamentally important to:
🔮 Navigate forward and live into a viable regenerative future
🔮 Effectively address social, environmental and economic imperatives.
🔮 Implement and adapt viable strategies, alternatives and solutions that reasonably balance the needs of all key stakeholders — across business, government and civil society
🔮 Bring together the best of science, enabling technology and longstanding Indigenous wisdom — ways of knowing — a partnership approach for the common good
🔮 Work through difficult issues, conflict and thorny dilemmas, taking multiple perspectives into account as well as undertaking the reconciliation, grief and trauma work (that may be) necessary for deep-rooted healing and forward movement
🔮 Find or uncover the common ground toward authentic and sustained commitment with real agency of those who need to support and shape the pathways and live into and with the outcomes
🔮 Ensure an integrative, interconnected approach, considering multiple potential risks and downstream consequences and acknowledging what’s unknowable — at least at this point
🔮 Build healthy trust-enhancing relationships that open the way for vulnerability and transparency, ongoing learning, information flow and continuous improvement
🔮 Achieve truly innovative breakthroughs that can right scale in the right ways for the right reasons — creating and restoring life-affirming patterns for people and planet
🔮 Collectively gain traction on the transformative shifts required to address the complex, overlapping escalating meta-poly-perma crises that are on our collective doorsteps
🔮 Learn HOW to become better at doing this…by doing a whole lot of it, whereby deep-rooted collaboration becomes a norm — the way we do things and the way meaningful things get done, naturally and accountably embracing our interdependence
While collaboration alone is not the only element required to address the challenges we face — it provides the essential enabling connective tissue for learning, creativity and co-intelligence. Isn’t it time to imagine and realize a world with a whole lot more collaboration — on our way to interbecoming?
This September 2024 article brings together some resonant themes: Collaboratively imagining the future can bring people closer together in the present. It speaks to the potential far-reaching individual, relational and collective effects of co-imagining the future:
“Your potential futures are not yours alone to imagine. Rather, the future and its possibilities are something that you actively co-create with others. In doing so, you become closer and more connected to them in the present. Collaboratively imagining a shared future together, it seems, may be an important first step toward creating it.”
We gotta (learn how to) scale co-creative collaboration, widening our holistic regenerative lens, integrally connecting the deep social effects — with a wide diversity of people and places, naturally interdependent within nested living ecosystems.
When we do that:
🔮 We can potentially see the wider and deeper interconnections with life: health, housing, food security, community, biodiversity, agriculture, education, all the issues concerning climate risks and mitigation and much more…
🔮 We open more pathways: toward revitalized, vibrant places for people to live, work and play
🔮 More people will care: becoming more caring about one another and the living biodiverse planet we call home
🔮 More people across all walks-of-life can gain more agency, stepping up and supporting a variety of collaborative initiatives and working on the things that light them up and spread some joy
Some day, future generations might look back and recount the collaboration stories — ways that their ancestors birthed a life-affirming pluriverse or omniverse, fuelled by an enduring love of life and all living beings.
Music — Portraits by Samuel Bohn
This article, fundamental to all our work, was updated again September2024, reflecting ongoing action research and additional perspectives as we continue to observe, listen and adapt — a humbling learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work. Each article is a fractal-like glimpse into the unstitutional ethos.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn.
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