The fundamentals of collaboration and The Art of Letting Go

To harness the full potential of being in collaboration we need to walk the delicate balance between being a responsible author and making space for natural emergence brought through others’ authorship.

Building on the work of Charles Davies (I recommend his work on being clear) and bridging into The Art of Hosting practice, a way of working that’s been developed by many people over the years, while held well by it’s own authors.

The fundamentals of collaboration

There are only two roles in a collaboration.

The helper and the helped.

The helped has a need, usually expressed as a vision or a question.

They can’t realise there vision without help.

It’s a vulnerable — literally helpless — position.

So they recruit helpers, or helpers just show up attracted by the vision.

The best collaborations happen when it meets a need for the helper, to help.

When the need is met, the work is done.

And if you want to know if it’s going well, ask the person with the need.

This is why their role (the source) in any initiative is crucial.

They initiate because they have a need, so only they really know what it is.

This is what we call ‘creative authority’.

This paradigm causes problems when we confuse personal power and creative authority.

For our purposes, let’s describe personal power as individual humans having universal authority over other people or resources.

And let’s describe creative authority as knowing what needs to be done, to get a specific need met.

So, to repeat — there is a human, who knows the edges of a task or need, but that human is just there to give information.

They are helpless, needy, vulnerable and asking if anyone wants to make a thing with them.

After that point, their biggest role is letting go.

The art of letting go

The person with the need does not know what it will look like when the need or vision is actually manifested.

So they need to be very good at two things:

1. Letting go: getting out of the way of other people dreaming, designing, and building things that start to give the need shape.
2. Stepping in: knowing those rare moments when to step in with clear and kind authority, when something has strayed outside of the need.

The moment they get in the way when someone is trying to help, for a reason other than ‘this isn’t helping’, you kill the collaboration.

If the helped feels small, not in control or undervalued, and steps in to reassure their anxious ego, it will shut everything down.

The helped needs to understand that they don’t have the answers.

They need to understand that the people in the field they opened up might have a much better idea of what this thing looks like, than they do.

They also also need to understand that if their vision is about helping others (a group of people ‘out there’), then their ego is not going to help.

For example: if I start a project that’s about helping my local community, I may start with a hypothesis about what is required, but I don’t really know.

If I really want to help them, I’ll be listening to them. I’ll be listening to the people who are helping, who are sensing what is needed.

I won’t be listening to the small, scared voice inside me that demands more control, more security and more recognition.

What it is easy to forget, when you’ve initiated a process, is that you or anyone else, can stop at any time.

There’s nothing to be afraid of if people try out or offer up new ideas. Everyone is free.

And if someone brings something that’s really not helping with the need, they can take the initiative themselves and run with it.

Stepping into their own creative authority, outside the field.

Authority and responsibility

We have a pretty poor relationship with these two words.

Authority is often equated with ‘power over’ and responsibility with ‘blame’.

We need to reframe these.

Authority means ‘the author of’. The right person to go to for the information needed in a given situation.

Responsibility means ‘in care of’. The person who ultimately is caring for everything that happens within an initiative.

So if someone holds Creative Authority, they also hold responsibility.

This means it’s important to be very clear what you are initiating, and either fully committing, or fully stepping away.

If you hold creative authority but do not take responsibility, you leave the people who are trying to help without the information and care that’s needed.

If you don’t have creative authority (you commit to something you don’t feel clear on) but try to take responsibility, you’ll be either be giving the wrong information or none at all, or you’ll be pretending to care for something that you don’t.

A live example

I felt the need to initiate a training here in Brighton.

My need was to contribute to the community I live in.

I wanted to offer a leadership training course that builds agency for under-resourced communities.

I invite three friends to help me.

We didn’t agree exactly what we’d all be doing, but the need is clear, and we all know I can’t host the training without them.

And critically: we have enough trust that we can work it out together.

Along the way, we get so much interest that we can’t fit everyone on this training.

And I feel that not enough of those on the course are from Brighton.

So we start discussing who else should come on this course, and if we should run future dates.

Two things happen:

1. I propose giving someone priority because it could lead to very interesting and exciting work.
2. The rest of the team suggest we all need to sense what might happen next and that it’s not just my call and I feel frustration.

In situation 1. I have allowed a need that’s not about the originating purpose (contributing to the community here) to creep in.

And it’s totally apparent — I realise it and fess up. We discuss it, and I leave the person on the waiting list as they were.

Another person in my position might not have been so straightforward about it, and/or may have felt that they should have some kind of privilege to choose who comes given they initiated the training.

This would have caused tension and difficulty as we’d have been confusing the needs, and also the difference between personal power and creative authority.

All would have got messy. Loss of clarity, loss of trust.

In scenario 2. I feel frustration because of a sense I’m not being acknowledged for value of the hard work I put in (not true, everyone’s been super appreciative) and concerned that I was losing control of something I initiated to meet my need.

But (and thankfully I caught this early), I realised that I really don’t know what might be the next best step for this training.

And although my need triggered the training, my friends might have a better idea of what’s now needed to serve the communities in Brighton.

If I really want to contribute to the city and its communities, then I have to get out the way of the information and energy that might make that happen.

It’s no longer about ‘me’.

And if I don’t like any ideas or where things are going, I always have freedom to choose whether I’m involved with it, as do they.

Everyone is free, at any time, to opt out or run with a new initiative.

And I realised that we can manage anything that comes up because we have trust, respect and the ability to have good dialogue.

Trying to sum up

So:

1. Founding needs are most solid when they are ‘empty’ — they are a desire to contribute, support or create, simply because it gives you joy.
2. Allowing deficiency needs — need for control over others, clinging onto pre-defined outcomes for security, acknowledgement to feel like you have status in the group (etc) to creep in, messes things up because it becomes about filling holes in your ‘self’.
3. You do not know the answers. Especially if it’s grown from your originating need or vision. You not only rely on people to help you create the thing, they’ll actually know better than you what it might look, smell and feel like.
4. To make collaborations really powerful, you need to get out of the way. Take your ego out of the picture, and get really good at knowing when the little bugger starts stamping its feet and chucking its toys out the pram.
5. You also still need to be able to speak up when something isn’t meeting your needs — whether your the initiator or someone who’s helping. This is not just about creative authority but creating the conditions for trust and great dialogue.

That’s it.