All quiet, too quiet
Collaboration without conflict
This year I edited the work of photographer Gemma Wouters in an RMIT cross-program collaboration. Her photobook, This One’s for the Road, chronicles a day in the life of Tania Stanley — librarian, wildlife fosterer, artist and mother (among other things).
Your overconfidence is your weakness
I came to the project in full stride: through editing videos, workshopping writing, co-designing tabletop roleplaying games and collaborating with actors in plays and players in roleplay, I felt I’d come to an understanding with collaboration. Not, by any means, an understanding of collaboration, just an understanding that was unassuming enough to be reliable.
Of course, making such a modest appraisal of my vast and varied experience, of my foresight and perspicacity, I felt I simply couldn’t go wrong. I wasn’t nervy like those other green editors; I make decisions for a living, and where my wise counsel might be rejected (through no fault of its own), I would play my best Sir Humphrey, and all would go according to plan. Ahem.
Yes, and…
No matter your experience, every collaboration is uncharted waters. In that, it’s like any relationship: all we can do is better learn ourselves and the patterns we play out. With what brief experience I’ve had, I felt that the dynamic would always be essentially the same: the editor, game master, publisher or producer must broker a peace between author and audience; the author, player, designer or actor, must leave behind the parts they love for the sake of the work as a whole. I accompanied this understanding with a general principle to help me negotiate it— the first rule of improvisation: never No, always Yes, and…
I thought this was a vague enough principle; it would guide me like the north star, inexactly but unerringly.
Then somehow I ended up in the southern hemisphere.
All quiet
Gemma’s work left barely anything to be said. The photos were striking and her captions never made the mistake of simply saying what we could already see. Every version she delivered promptly without any need for haranguing. She didn’t counter or defend or quarrel. And all was quiet.
Too quiet.
I was missing the battle, the back and forth. Was there no dialogue simply because we had nothing to say? Or was my association between collaboration and conflict so strong that I felt I couldn’t have one without the other? At any rate, how can I complain, when so many editors struggled to find copy to work on, or a photographer to work with?
Well, because discontent is my inalienable right!
Our process felt one-way: she would send a version of her photobook, I would make comments on the PDF, she would take my edits into her InDesign project and some time would pass (in which she would continue her work on the project as a whole) before I received an updated version. The process of decision-making — suggestions taken or left — was a silent one, one only revealed under close examination of the revised version’s unmarred monochrome. There were no comment threads, no ‘accepted changes’.
Each time, it felt like I came to the process anew; I would have to check my suggestions in previous documents to ensure I wasn’t giving the same feedback twice. I began to regret the method I had chosen. I missed ‘version history’. Oh what I would have done for ‘track changes’… or a good argument.
No, but…
There’s a particular session of game design that always comes to mind when I think of the Yes, and… principle — it was the first time working with a friend of mine. He came to the table with a set of game mechanics that I saw some problems with, but instead of raising them with a solution in mind, I rejected them out of hand (No).
What followed was a two-hour workshop that consisted of him finding arguments to favour his original approach, and me countering with the ways his arguments didn’t address my problems. At the end of the session, I was exhausted. He didn’t understand why — for him, the session had felt very productive — but I’d had enough experience to know better: the decision we’d made in two hours should have taken the first five minutes.
Neither ‘Yes, and …’ nor ‘No’ suffices to address a problem. Instead, you need a No, but… — when you give someone no options, their natural inclination is to spend their energy arguing for the decision they already made. Certainly that’s what I do when others criticise my work.
You need to recognise that when a problem is raised it needs a solution, not arguments to reinforce it. You enter a process of option, counter-option, each suggestion building upon the last so that you’re always moving forward.
At the end of two hours, my friend and I had chosen one of the two options we came with at the beginning, and while we were pretty certain about it by that point, the idea hadn’t developed at all. We had chosen the better option, but were nowhere nearer to discovering the best.
The best ideas
I can’t say what would have been better or best for this project. The economy of our exchanges may well have been, given the time pressure students face with other assignments and obligations (which has to be considered).
I only wonder what lay down the avenues not pursued, the dialogues not had. I’m happy with my part in the work and impressed by hers, and I hope she feels the same, but I still believe what I always have: that the best ideas are a product of labour. No one comes to the table with them.
