How work works when we work together

Here’s what happens when someone starts something.

You’re sitting around minding your own business.
Perfectly happy. Doing nothing.
Maybe combing the dog. Drinking a margeurita.
Maybe both at the same time.

And then the peace of having no wishes, dreams, desires or ambitions is broken.

The dawning realisation that — dammit — there’s a thing I have to do.

It can be a flash of inspiration. Or a fully-fledged, technicolour, gift-from-God vision. Or sometimes it’s that mysterious feeling in your belly that arrives unannounced and inarticulate. That you know won’t go away until you do whatever it has in mind for you.

And if the thing you have to do is washing the car, then it’s easy. You go wash the car.
And if it’s going to the shops, then you go to the shops.

If it’s something more elaborate, then you may have to get clear on the detail of it. Maybe you suddenly realise you have to travel, but you don’t know where to. Or you know you need to create a vast wooden sculpture on Dartmoor — but you don’t know what of.

Then the task is clear. You have to get to the bottom of this mysterious feeling that has turned up. Listen more carefully to the crackly phone call from the muse. Tune into the detail of this thing.

I know four ways of doing that:

Do nothing.
Do something.
Talk about it.
Or change perspective.

When you do nothing, the signal gets louder. The voice inside starts making itself a little more insistent.

“Hey! Wash the car! Hey…. Really… It’s time to stop lounging around. Remember you won’t have time to do it tomorrow. It’ll be dark soon. Wash the car… Hey! Stop reading the paper. Wash the car.”

When you do something, or when you talk about it, it makes the thing more tangible. When it’s just a feeling in your belly or a hazy picture in your mind, it can be hard to grasp. But if you start building, writing, talking — anything — then it becomes tangible. When it’s more tangible, it’s clearer.

The risk with this approach is you start to get caught up in the doing and the making and you lose touch with the original feeling, with the original need. Or that you commit yourself to the wrong path and have to go back and make a correction later. The trick is: if you start before you know what you’re doing, remember that part of your job is to get clear on what you’re doing.

When you change perspective, you get to see what you can’t see. Here’s a really beautiful secret to being clear. When we start out on something, most often we start from one particular angle. Some people are more emotional, some people are more practical, some people are more intellectual. And so, when we start a thing, we tend to see it from whatever our default angle is. By changing perspective — and looking at a thing emotionally/practically/intellectually/every other way — we get more information. (The Very Clear Ideas process is designed to make this swift and painless.)

Because there’s a difference between not knowing something and not seeing that you know something. What I’ve found from working with hundreds and hundreds of people starting things is that they’ll quite happily say — with absolute certainty — that they have no idea about the detail of what they’re doing. Until you start asking them about it.

“I don’t know anything about what I’m making.”
“Oh. OK. Well, is it red?”
“Red? Are you crazy? Of course it’s not red.”
“Is it shiny.”
“Yep. It has to be shiny.”
“Is it long or short?”
“Oh, it’s somewhere between 129cm and 134cm, depending on the weather conditions.”

When we need something, we know what it is we need. We just can’t always see that we know what we need. But the information is there. Hiding in the feeling. That feeling in the belly that knows when to say yes or no to things. Because that feeling is the need and the need is the information. When you’re starting something, the genius is in the need. The genius is in the feeling. It’s just a question of if we know how to listen to it. If we know how to see it.

So, if you’re working alone, all you need to do to know what you’re doing is keep listening. And keep on responding to the need in your belly until it goes away. If you listen well, then it happens quickly. If you don’t listen well, then it takes forever. Sometimes we can get wildly off-track if, rather than listening for what is needed now, we get attached to what worked some time in the past. Then you end up smoking when you want to give up smoking, splitting up when you want to stay together, or invading foreign countries without any real justification. But that’s just part of the art of listening. It’s a skill. We can learn it. And we can help each other.

So, life is simple when the need you want to meet is something you’re able to meet by yourself. If you want to build a wooden sculpture on Dartmoor or wash the car, if it’s within your own means, then you don’t have to get into any thinking about organisations or organisational design or organisational purpose or collaboration or hierarchies or anything like that. You have the blessed simplicity of just listening for what needs to be done and then doing it. And, because it’s something you actually need, then you actually have the appetite to do it. So you do it, the need is met, and then you stop working. And you can go back to drinking margueritas and combing the dog or whatever it is thats the most restful thing you can imagine.

Because this is how work works when work works. You have a need. Having the need means you have the energy and information necessary to meet the need. Making use of that energy and information is the work. And when the need is met you stop.

So, what about when you can’t meet your need alone? When the sculpture you’re planning on constructing on Dartmoor is going to be eighty foot high and you want it to have a carved head in the shape of an Alpine bearded vulture but you haven’t got the first clue about how to carve birdfaces?

Then you need help.

And the most important thing to remember when finding help is: we all basically work the same way.

If you start something, then the thing starts from a need. And the work you do is a response to that need. And the need you feel inside contains the information and the energy for the work. If someone is helping you, then the same is true for them. The work they do is a response to a need they feel inside. And that need contains the information and the energy for that work.

The way to choose someone to help you is by finding someone who has a need that overlaps with your need. So, find someone who really likes carving wooden birdfaces.

They don’t need to have a need to build a whole eighty foot high wooden bearded vulture. That’s your need. And you don’t need help with the whole thing. Just the birdface. And it doesn’t even really matter why they want to carve birdfaces. Maybe they just like carving birdfaces. Maybe they’re trying to carve the faces of the top ten largest birds in the world. We can all have our different reasons for doing things.

Then life is still pretty simple. Just you and the birdface carver. You each have your own reasons for being there. Your needs overlap. In the process of helping you meet your sculpture-building need, the birdcarver gets to meet a face-carving need. Still no need for an organisation or an organisational purpose or anything. There’s just two people with needs, one of who has asked for help and one of whom is helping. And both of them are meeting their own particular needs.

Don’t ask the birdface carver to work on the legs. If there’s no shared need, no appetite for leg-carving, then things are going to get much more difficult.

Don’t expect or demand that the birdface carver care about the rest of the sculpture. Or the point of the sculpture. Maybe you want to build a cultural bridge between the mountains of south-east France and the moors of south-west England. But that’s your need. And it doesn’t matter. The thing that matters is the overlap: you both want a carved wooden birdface to get carved.

Don’t give the birdface carver the impression that you’re going to decide things together. Or that you have an equal vote. Or that the birdface carver has a vote at all in what the sculpture is going to be of. It’s your job to listen to that need in your belly and respond to it. Because it’s your belly. And no one else’s. Because it’s your need. And no one else’s.

But do get very clear on what the overlap is between your needs. Because when that’s clear — when you’re sure that the face that the birdface carver wants to carve is the same face that you want carved — then you don’t have to do anything more. Don’t interrupt. Don’t micro-manage. Don’t interfere. Don’t expect to know the minutiae of the steps by which the birdface carver is going to carve the birdface. When the contract is clear, then you just step back and watch the birdface carver working to meet a need. And rejoice in the fact that it’s a need that you share.

If you stick to these limits, then it’s easy to work together.

Find people to help who want to help.
(After all, if you want something actually to get done, would you ask someone who wants to do it, or someone who doesn’t want to do it?)

Don’t try to make people do things they don’t need to do or want to do. They won’t know what they’re doing and they won’t have the energy to do it.

And don’t try to get everyone to agree on everything all the time, because there’s no need to do that.

And if you need help from more than one person? If you need one person to carve the legs and one to do the face and one to do the left wing and one to do the right wing? Then just repeat the process and stick to the principles. Identify shared needs. Accept the infinite variety of everyone’s particular motivations for showing up. Be clear on who is helping who with what and why.

And if the birdface carver needs help? Needs one person to do the detail on the beak and someone else to lacquer the eyeball? Then the birdface carver can just repeat the process and stick to the principles. Identifying shared needs and accepting the infinite variety of everyone’s particular motivations for showing up.

Because this is what working together looks like. This is how working together works. It’s just people with needs doing what needs to be done to meet those needs. It’s just people asking for help. It’s just people offering help.

And if you’re clear on who is helping who with what and why, then what else do you need to know?