Collaboration is hardly a new concept. A quick search through TED reveals numerous talks from such luminaries as Clay Shirkey and Matt Ridley all espousing how collaboration is needed to consistently come up with breakthrough ideas. And many creative enterprises have long tried (and usually failed) to break down boundaries between departments and individuals to create different ideas.
Having worked with and for many successful creative organisations, I’ve been fortunate enough to have collaborated with some of the very best and brightest in the business. And our most famous work has always been very much a shared effort. Even those moments of individual brilliance that so often characterise great ideas usually came about because of the context created by other members of the team.
Much as Pine and Gilmore predicted in “The Experience Economy” some twenty years ago, the trend towards winning and losing together continues to gather pace. People increasingly want to work together, not compete against each other. One would have thought, then, that there had never been a better time for the quality of output of modern creative organisations, despite the significant ‘headwinds’ facing the sector as a whole.
But something else is happening to how people work together. As #williamwu tells us in his excellent story on why soil matters, the mindset that shifted from ‘my’ world to ‘our’ world is now moving towards ‘the’ world. ‘We’ is increasingly seen as no longer enough to fully meet the challenges that come our way.
For the humble creative enterprise, I suspect a closed group of individuals, even star industry names, will increasingly find it harder to compete against looser, more fluid soft networks. An ever changing cast of characters that constantly adapt to the nature of the task in front of them, and find new ways of collaborating as they do. The benefits for the end user are as compelling as for those who deliver them.
I’ve always felt at my best, professionally at least, when I’ve had my gang around me. In the modern creative enterprise, that gang is now significantly bigger. The networks I work with are more fluid than they used to be, and it’s why I launched Frank & Friends, a means of collaborating with the right individuals and organisations to solve complex strategic problems. There will be no stopping us.