🎶 Sweet Dreams Are Made of This - Co-Creative Collaboration 🎶

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 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. Good!

So is collaboration washing, and those looking to out-compete by 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 🎶

How to activate and continue to cultivate meaningful collaboration — harder and more important than ever in a competitive polarizing world, paradoxically stuck and undergoing deep shift…

There are many cultures…wisdom traditions with more balanced partnership ways that honour and invite diversity of thought and collaborative participation.

Much to learn and work through to shift from command-control and domination-oppression patterns and cycles.

Way beyond superficial good intentions.

Deeper layers…

Much to earn in terms of well-founded authentic mutual trust — rooted in true partnership.

Hmm…

The Inuit people have about 49 different words for snow, based on practical needs to guide everyday life. Their ability to survive and potentially thrive depends on their understanding of, relationship with and decisions regarding snow.

…this got us thinking…

The singular word collaboration is quite loaded. We somehow expect that one word to carry a huge load.

Our ability to survive and potentially flourish — individually, collectively and as a human civilization — is kinda hinged on our capacity for deep collaboration…

There are assumptions about what collaboration is…and what it isn’t.

Collaboration is imperative to meet interdependent systemic and practical needs as we navigate between worlds.

Perspectives of what it looks like in action — can vary.

(Ad)vantage points are real…

Collaboration…

🔮 A mind shift from scarcity to abundance…

🔮 A learning curve to acquire skills and experience…

🔮 A multitude of ways to embody it…

🔮 Conditions that nurture … conditions that prevent or squash it…

Can we expand our collective collaborative literacy with a wider, deeper repertoire to navigate wisely through the inherently messy iterations of true collaboration?

Not suggesting that we need 49 words…however…

The human system stuff is often viewed as secondary…

Yet the work of collaboration is at the heart — among our biggest challenges and creative opportunities.

Collaboration…

What is it and why is it so important?

Humans are naturally communal social beings with innate abilities to live and work together. Living through the western influenced Industrial Age, our interdependence and interconnectedness with one another and our living planet has been 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 overvalued linear left-brain reductionist ways of functioning and relating. Our right brain is more 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, talk and networking in the name of collaboration…Some of this is great, with demonstrated collaboration making real strides. Some of this is falling way short…

Collaboration washing is also on the rise — when collaborative efforts are mostly pursued for competitive advantage. Under the veneer, competitive win-lose patterns persist. Sometimes this is subtle, sometimes thinly disguised, often kicking in through a felt need for self-preservation, as people and organizations jockey for position and market, in a noisy world. Driven by the same old economic model that feeds scarcity mindsets and fear, the system is overdue for an overhaul.

We’re observing 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 the context — 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 involved shares equal decision making authority on everything. This is a crucial area that requires clarity of expectations, processes and practices — discerning what is right, fair, required and reasonable.

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 can 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.

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 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/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 — with practice, becoming the natural expected ways 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 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.

Effective collaboration is essential for mutual learning. Learning is catalytic, 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 viable solutions.

🔮 Have we lost collaborative ability somewhat, somewhere along the way in competitively driven environments?

🔮 What would happen if we competed a lot less and collaborated a lot more?

🔮 How can we nurture and develop collaborative ecosystems that also allow for the balance of healthy 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 new/alternative forms/structures of governance and work systems are needed to birth and ground the commons or 4th sector — the space between the conventionally configured 3 sectors and loose networks?

These are the kinds of questions our Unstitution commons collaborators continue to research and explore in the context of ongoing evolutionary navigation work where we’re all learning together through commons-based living lab initiatives.

Alternative forms of governance and work systems warrant a much deeper dive. These and other articles explore our journey and some of the advances underway. Our way of being. Starting with Unstitution governance patterns. Dance to a different tune on a new dancefloor — elaborates on the FairShares Commons framework and how we can help collaborative impact coalitions, hubs, initiatives, ventures or collectives adopt healthy adaptive interdependent ecosystems with fractional-pooled investment — patterned and/or incorporated as a FSC.

As we navigate, the experiences and stories emerging at every stage shed light on collaboration from a wide spectrum of lived experience.

Considering contexts, history, the people who must be meaningfully and centrally included, warm and hard data, issues and opportunities and the various stages from fragile readiness through to mission critical regenerative ways of making progress on a finite living planet — it’s time to reframe and recalibrate 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 em-powered 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 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 learning over recent 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 Game A environments over many years, this isn’t an instant flip-of-the-switch shift. Younger generations who are inheriting the many complex challenges we face, are primed and best poised to help step up needed shifts.

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 and sometimes almost magical — producing results that are aligned and yet not predetermined in any linear way.

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.

And-and…

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 — 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 advance progress toward viable alternatives. Addressing wicked problems calls for deep and radical collaboration and co-creative breakthroughs. When this becomes the norm, we won’t think of it as radical!

What if we conveyed our own perspectives as partial, unfinished invitations for 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 contributed 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, with 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 meaning-fully 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.

The unstitutional way welcomes diverse perspectives, ideas and capabilities through collaborative communities, initiatives and coalition building work that brings key stakeholders (careholders) together across business, government, civil society, cultures, generations — all the 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/contexts for healthy interdependent ecosystems.

How to scale collaboration points to an overarching human system challenge. We support learning-by-doing, especially :

🔮 Context-based and place-sourced living labs

🔮 Mutually funded collaborative partnership ecosystem ventures and initiatives

🔮 Bringing people [stakeholders] together [outside their usual bounded organizations/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 needed. We need to dial up and deepen our commitment to collaborative co-creation because it is a critically important way to:

🔮 Navigate forward and live into a viable regenerative future

🔮 Effectively address social, environmental and economic imperatives.

🔮 Implement 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, 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 healing work that may be a necessary for deep-rooted progress

🔮 Find/uncover the common ground toward authentic and sustained commitment of those who need to support and shape the pathways and live with the outcomes

🔮 Ensure an integrative, interconnected approach that considers multiple potential risks and downstream consequences and acknowledges what’s unknowable

🔮 Build healthy trust-enhancing relationships that open the way for 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

Of course, collaboration alone is not the only element required to address the challenges we face.

However, isn’t it time to imagine and realize a world with a whole lot more of it, on our way to interbecoming?

We gotta scale co-creative collaboration, widening our holistic regenerative lens, integrally connecting social impact — with a wide diversity of people and places naturally interdependent within nested living ecosystems.

When we do that:

🔮 We see the interconnections with health, housing, food security, community, biodiversity, agriculture, education and much more…

🔮 We open more pathways to vibrant places for people to live, work and play

🔮 More people will care about one another and the living biodiverse planet we call home

🔮 More people across all walks-of-life can gain more agency, stepping up a variety of collaborative initiatives 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 for all.

This article, fundamental to all our work, was updated again April 2024, 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.

You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn.

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