I’m working on two different projects dedicated to exploring what effective collaboration looks like in practice and how to create the conditions for it to occur more often. The idea is that if we can work together better, maybe we can focus more energy on the creative potential of the work at hand, advancing the real possibilities that exist there rather than the interpersonal or process dynamics that so often get in the way.

I still have plenty of questions, but this is clear: collaboration is much more than two or more people working together; it’s about communicating and learning with others in order to create something you couldn’t possibly have created alone. It’s about finding a shared groove, yes, but a purposeful, synergistic, fantastically unique one.

How often do we set out with this goal in mind rather than simply think, Let’s go work together to complete this very important task!?

Like most things, we learn best about collaboration by doing it rather than thinking or talking about it. This “doing is better than thinking”/experiential learning idea frustrates me sometimes because I love mulling things over, but nine times out of ten it holds true. As fellow writer Raakhee Mirchandani reminded me and others in a conversation about writing and publishing recently, when we think or talk about something, that terribly interesting thing never moves past the idea stage. We spend a little time with it in our heads and then we lose it. We should do something with it sooner rather than later, she says. When we go out and do something (even if it’s just putting pen to paper), we’re halfway there. We immediately begin to lay down new pathways in the brain, practice new behaviors, build new mental muscle. So for those of us who feel called to work with others and know there is something to be gained there, especially for those of us who seek to learn something about how collaboration works in the process, we must go and run collaborative experiments.

As we do this, we don’t think “Now I am going to collaborate!” No, collaboration isn’t the point, the what of whatever we’re doing is the point. So we enter into symbiotic relationships when we feel there’s alignment and enough of the right conditions are in place. And then we pay attention. We notice what works and what doesn’t, we play with tools that help us think, communicate, and do the work better. And we try to keep the work moving. Most of us know what it feels like when collaboration works and when it doesn’t. We know when we’re in flow, when things are just ok, and when it’s time to part ways.

Each of these scenarios has something to do with how collaborators gather in the first place:

1. They find each other due to shared purpose.
2. They find each other due to shared activities, skills, or networks… and then attempt to align around purpose.
3. They are invited to work together or are thrown together by an outside actor, typically an employer or community institution… and then attempt to align around purpose.

In each scenario, alignment is key. As I’ve learned at The Lean Enterprise Institute, in order to have a chance at arriving at alignment, we must first get clear on purpose. I have found that alignment, while it’s always shifting, always coming in and out place, is essential because it’s the thing that keeps the work moving. The work need not always be moving—this is another conversation altogether—but if we want it to keep moving, we must ask ourselves several times throughout a project: Do we know our purpose? Do we have alignment? Neither of these things are the same as consensus.

In sports and dance, alignment refers to the optimal placement of the body parts so that bones and muscles are efficiently used, and muscles do less (think no extra or unnecessary) work. At work, in the office or in our shared creative projects, alignment doesn’t mean doing less work per se; it means doing less of the wrong kind work, no extra or unnecessary work that doesn’t directly relate back to purpose. This relates directly to the lean idea of maximizing value and minimizing waste. Extra or unnecessary work is energy wasted (think misdirected).

What is your purpose? How has it changed (or not changed)? Do you have alignment in your group? How might you and your group come back into alignment? These are questions I ask myself fairly regularly. And there are all sorts of tools (see The Presencing Institute, The Lean Enterprise Institute’s A3 dojo, and Art of Hosting) that can help us with these questions.

While it’s uncomfortable and disheartening to lose sight of purpose, to notice how our individual purpose or a shared purpose might be changing, or to observe individuals or entire groups fall entirely out of alignment, we have much to learn there about what helps collaboration along and what keeps us (and the work) stuck.

Alignment happens over time, in short bursts and over long periods. We have some power, not complete control, to create the conditions for it and to bring ourselves back to center (shared purpose). And so the same goes for collaboration. When we fall out alignment or we notice that our purpose has changed… new ideas, associations, problems, and questions emerge. These are all good things full of energy and opportunity. All of these things are workable.

With thanks to John Shook and Rachel Regan at the Lean Enterprise Institute for their thoughts on lean thinking and collaborative learning, and Martha Schley Thayer and Janice Rous for their teachings on alignment.

This past October I interviewed my brother Nicholas on writing and the creative process. We ended up talking about persimmons, pain, squirrels, Nicholson Baker, and trust, among other things. My feeling after our conversation was that it all really comes back to the earth. I continue to feel this way. I followed up with Nick by phone this week to see what’s changed for him since then about poetry and life. We’ve both been reading a lot of Jack Gilbert, so I’m not surprised Jack shows up. We continue the conversation around pain. I find out we feel differently about gardens.

LS: What’s changed for you about poetry since we last spoke?

Nicholas Schroeder: What’s changed is that I read a line of poetry which asked, “What are we to do about loveliness?” And I think that’s an important question. I don’t know how to answer it. I don’t anticipate knowing how to answer it soon—nor do I want to—and I think the last time we spoke I might have been so brash and passionate about poetry that I would have constructed an answer, which would have been a lie, but still would have worked… But what I’m saying now is I don’t know the answer.

LS: Who said it?

NS: Jack Gilbert asked it.

LS: What do you appreciate about Jack Gilbert?

NS: Oh, I think he is fearful and fearless and just the right amount of desperate in his infatuations. And also he’s a devotee to the experience of pain, a reluctant devotee, but a devotee. So I like that, and often he reminds me of myself regarding the steeps of love that I’ve felt and unfelt in my own life. And the women.

LS: Have you been doing any gardening?

NS: No, but I did buy a minor plot of baby kale yesterday for Mariah, and I gave it to her. I’m concerned it won’t find its way to a pot of soil, it might just stay in its transient state, its minor plot. And this baby kale has a few uses in our life. To eat it directly, feed it to my tortoise, and I suppose celebrate it as a sort of totem of our love. So that’s the only gardening I feel like I’ve been doing.

LS: What do you think the connection between poetry and gardening is?

NS: I’ve wondered this because a lot of the poems that you seem to gravitate toward contain a lot of images having to do with the natural world and its function, and what I have always wondered is how do I, the reader, unpack this natural metaphor to mean something having to do exclusively with my life? Which very often is a social experience or a loving experience, but very rarely has anything to do with just gardening. The temptation now is to resist the reading that there must be an overarching metaphor, and that sometimes a garden is merely a garden, and its natural processes should be ones which I feel comfortable taking at face value. This thing undergoes a process, other things might also undergo a process. It’s not for the poet or the reader to necessarily draw an acute connection between the two, and I think you can sometimes be a fool for doing so.

Gardening, for me, has never been the most important thing in my life [Laughs]. It’s because I’ve never lived a life that can hold a garden. And maybe that speaks to my irascibility as a human or that I’m not a wealthy man, nor have I ever been. Nonetheless, gardening has no place for me… from me. [Laughs]

LS: What are you learning about the way energy works in poems or anything else?

NS: Well, I’ve been wearing a lot of black recently. Personally, I’ve been dreading the question—which is an obvious question, and nobody has asked it of me directly at least—“Why are you wearing so much black?” I don’t know the answer to that question… Who was it? Somebody’s wife wore black until she died, once he died. That could be said about so many people. But I am aware that what black does is obstruct the transmission, the natural function and release of energy from the body, and I don’t know quite how that works. So in poetry, there may be something similar happening there where if we just say “fuck it” regarding our own pain and mountain of suffering and just wear a beautiful yellow shirt, then maybe we’re all better off.

LS: What themes are you exploring in your own writing these days?

NS: Mostly how to honor the work of a person who has dedicated themselves to an artistic life. How to honor their work in such a way that doesn’t fabricate or gussy it up as a saleable product. How to be honest with the work of another… In my own personal writing, basically I’m just focusing on rhythm.

LS: What’s one thing you’ve learned from Elizabeth Streb?

NS: My most immediate answer is to take the fall. You know, the joy of the fall. There’s a lot of places we could go with that. Take the fall. It’s not going to hurt half as much as you think. I think Elizabeth Streb does a wonderful job of going against tradition in a way that doesn’t seem knee-jerk or juvenile and instead feels limitlessly useful.

It’s something I can only hope to dream of with the work I do in theater, which is to try to inspire people in a way that makes them take such risks with their own bodies and relationships. I imagine she must be very satisfied with that type of work. It is indirectly political, but very political.

LS: Any last thoughts?

NS: I think cycling is important.

“What is deeply and abidingly extraordinary about beautiful things is… they put us in a state of bliss at the very moment that they make us feel marginal or secondary… None of us is the center of the world, but each of us can get into the mistake of believing that we are the center of our own world. Beauty relieves us of this. It not only puts us on the sidelines, but makes us acutely happy to be there on the sidelines. Becoming capable of experiencing bliss in one’s own lateralness may not be itself a state of justice, but it certainly prepares us for doing such work in the world.”

-Elaine Scarry, from Beauty as a Call to Justice at Harvard Thinks Big 2012

The air is full of tunes. A piece of rock is full of statues. The earth is full of visions. The world is full of stories. As an artist, you trust that. You trust that that is so. You know that whatever your experience, it will give you the material, the ‘ideas’ for your work… But there’s no such thing as pure invention. It all starts with experience. Invention is recombination. We can work only with what we have.

-Ursula K. LeGuin