Collaboration — You Might Hate It, But It’s Where Creativity Springs Eternal

In movies, quite often you see, male journalists portrayed in a certain manner — a lonely guy, who wears old-fashioned clothes, has a beard and unkempt hair, usually drinks a lot and is, well, lonely and, as a whole, a bit of a moody fellow.

While most of those clichés are, well, to put it mildly, absolute rubbish — that lonely thing might not be far off. Journalism can be a lonely business at times, especially if you’re a reporter. You come in, cover a story or three, write it down and leave.

Usually, most journalists are friends with people from other media houses — as they cover those stories together — than with the people from their own company. That’s because, reporting, especially, is a pretty “let’s not talk too much, let me just write my story and get outta here” business. One that requires very little collaboration.

So, when a “journalist” moves into another field — I know a lot of them, who just couldn’t handle the overly-collaborative, communicative industry that is public relations, and chose to go back to journalism, even if it made them work harder and paid very little — it can come as a bit of a shock. The collaboration required, the overly-communicative arena, where everybody discusses stuff and then comes to a conclusion over the final product.

It was a little bit like that for me. The collaboration, the meetings (yeah, journalists don’t do those. The big news editors might, but even they don’t like it that much) and the constant back and forth, before arriving at a final consensus.

Let’s face it — life is a lot easier, when you know exactly what you have to do, and you are left alone to just go ahead and do it. No overly-though out discussions; no “let’s ponder over this a little bit, and we’ll come back to it”; no “I think we need to bring in another person to discuss this further.”

You get a story to do, you do it and that’s that. Thank you very much, see you tomorrow.

At a design firm, where I currently employ my “skills”, or pretty much any other industry, it isn’t quite like that.

You talk, you discuss, you collaborate with more than one person, you discuss again. Then you take a break, come back and continue that discussion, talk a little more, before deciding to continue the discussion the next day.

The next day, someone else comes in with a different perspective, and just when you thought you were nearing a conclusion, you go through it all over again. And guess what, there is another meeting scheduled for the next day.

This whole collaboration, the collaborative effort, the coming-to-a-conclusion-after-a million-meetings used to get on my nerves initially. My thought always was “why can’t we just get on with it, do our work, and move onto the next thing.”

But, slowly, I started to understand, realized why it is the way it is.

Working in a design firm cannot be about isolating yourself, doing a job and leaving. It requires collaboration. Some clear sky thinking and some left-field ones. Some straight and narrow thoughts and a few “wait, where did that idea come from” ones. Some simple and easy plans to go with a few “that’s complicated, but it’s brilliant” thoughts.

Without collaboration, and those meetings, all of these would not happen, would not be possible. There would just be the same thing happening over and over again, with no creative process or future plan.

You cannot stand still — there has to be a constant churn of creativity, of thoughts, of new plans, of strategies. While “new” anything can come from an individual, I believe, the best “new” comes through collaboration; through sitting in those meetings and brainstorming (yup, I’m actually using that word un-ironically) and pushing yourself to come up with something that hasn’t been done or thought of before.

Those meetings can be a pain — and I still believe quite a few of them can be avoided — but the ones that aren’t, well they tend to be a treasure chest, where ideas, plans, strategies and innovations pour out and make you feel a lot better about yourself as well as the place you work in.

So, maybe those extra pointless meetings are worth it, as long as the pearls arise every now and then. Maybe. Or you just find a way to ensure that you only hold those pearl-worthy meetings.

How do you do that? Well, I’ll leave that for another time.