The dark side of collaboration
This is a reflection written after DesignMakeDo event in London about creative collaborations where I presented along with Peter Mandeno, Miquel Mora and Steve McInerny.
Collaboration is often seen as the “nice thing to do”. But a theme of the evening lurking beneath the surface was the darker side to getting things done with each other. I’ve written elsewhere how collaboration is awash with unpleasant emotions — if you collaborate you can expect to experience doubt, anxiety, frustration, conflict and sadness. And in our work, one of the important things for leaders to grasp is that collaboration doesn’t have to be nice. In fact, difficult emotions are not problems at all but helpful signals of what needs attention. For example, frustration might be a signal that you need to make a decision, or anxiety that you need to make a better plan.
Steve McInerny (Senior Design Manager, FremantleMedia) spoke talking about the importance of conflict as part of the creative process. Not holding back from disagreements, embracing a good fight and not letting the edges of good ideas be knocked off by polite compromise. His talk included this quote from Chapman Maddox (formerly VP of Development & Production, FremantleMedia Kids & Family Entertainment):
“My big piece of advice for people would be to not be scared of creative tension, disagreement or even creative arguments.”
Miquel Mora (Design Director, Technicolor) eloquently described how he navigates complex global collaborative design projects in big organisation. As well as the positive selling, he also pointed the audience to consider power and politics. If you want to think about getting things done, you need to consider who in the system you need to keep on side, and work to connect with their priorities and commitments. We can’t look down on politics and power as “dark arts” if we want to create real impact.
And as part of Peter Mandeno’s PhD at UCL on human connection, he is looking at how vital it is we get good at human disconnection. Using the example of a cocktail party: How many of us know how to exit a conversation gracefully when the time has come? Or do we linger too long in an attempt to be polite? If we can’t disconnect we will never learn to really connect. This is true in collaboration too.
At Let’s Go we are all about helping organisations get more from collaborative working. This is not about being nice but about being truthful: What is really going on? What is the real conversation we need to have? What will move us forwards?
And that’s why in my part of the talk I introduced the Collaboration Cards a leadership tool we created to highlight the 30 conversations that groups often forget to have. First funded on kickstarter, they have now been translated into French, Spanish, Mandarin and (soon) German.
But collaboration isn’t always the answer and we certainly shouldn’t be assuming we need to collaborate on everything or with everyone. When people say “will you collaborate?” sometimes they just mean “will you do what I want?”. And in all the talk of collaboration, let’s not lose sight of some very noble alternatives: negotiate, compete or just get on with it.
Richard Watkins is a lifelong collaborator as a scientist, strategist and artist. He founded Let’s Go in 2013, and his team give organisations of all sorts the tools and practices to help them get more from collaboration — working with the likes of Aviva, The BBC, Cancer Research UK, and Deutsche Telekom.
Twitter: @Letsgorich
