OUTSIDE THE VELVET CAGE

Dear Abby Singer: Two Heads are Better Than One, But This Collaboration is Killing Me!

Filmmaker Dean Hyers Tackles Life and Work Questions:
Dear Dean, collaboration is killing me. How can I work better with my partners?

A very good question: Is collaboration working together, or against, your creative partners? When it works, are they really working together at all, or is it nothing more than a segmentation of responsibility where people work independently on items that link together in the end?

Can people actually work and create together? Can a true collaboration without egos exist?

Right now, I've been proudly enduring a grueling summer of successfully frustrating collaborations. Successful because they're working to achieve a higher result, but frustrating because hurt-feelings, bruised egos, defensiveness, and territorialism weigh into the experience about as much as the thrill of the better result.

Today, the results are impressive, yet my batteries are weak because of the amount of energy that's required to collaborate. This issue is affecting SagePresence, my speaking career, my training efforts, and my film projects. I love my partners, but fear my ability to endure.

So I guess I'm writing myself this time. It's me with the question, and I'm going to hold myself to having my own answer. So here goes:

Dear Dean, don't worry. Your feelings are normal, and so are the frustrations your partners are feeling. But you said it yourself – "The results are impressive." Is that not half your answer right there? I hope so, because the tradeoff going the other way is disappointing.

Here's the rest of your answer, and please write me again if this doesn't do it.

The Five Laws of Successful Collaboration:

1) Respect Always: you must actively respect any partners in a collaboration. This means not only that you "theoretically" respect, but that you actively choose to feel the respect in the moment and embody it. If you say you respect, but you harbor resentment and frustration in the process, it won't work.

2) Zones of Responsibility and Input Everywhere Else: My hope in collaboration is that it can really become working together (beyond simply working solo on different aspects of the same project). But zones of higher authority must be established so that team-members are not in competition with each other. If we know our zones, we can have some measure of peace knowing that we have some measure of control, yet we can allow open input on the project as a whole.

3) Listen and Acknowledge First, then Fight the Good Fight Second: What I've observed blowing the lid off the can of collaborative whoop-ass is the launch into the battle before it's time for fighting. Hear your partners out completely, and restate their input, before doing battle with it. Actively understanding first needs to be a pattern. If it's not, the team member least prone to do battle will adopt a prevailing tendency to yield, and their frustrations will build up and explode above and beyond the call of duty.

4) Defend Each Collaborator's Right to Be Heard: In collaboration, you don't have the right to get your way, but you have the right to be heard and understood before you get shot down. Many amazing ideas never materialize because they weren't explored long enough to find their hidden value. Half the time, the contributor hasn't baked the idea long enough to be able to defend it fully, but that doesn't mean the idea won't prove valuable if fully baked.

Each collaborator should police that process and defend the underdog – be constantly on the lookout for a voice being squelched and defend it even if it isn't a perspective you like. You should do that because you believe in the process, but if the high road isn't calling you, do it selfishly – do it because fighting for others' fair consideration will translate into others defending you and your right for fair consideration.

5) Stay True to Yourself: Don't give in to group-think, which doesn't mean you always fight for your way. Collaboration is full of compromise, but so is life, and so is going solo. That said, don't squelch your own voice under peer pressure. Voice your decision to go with the group over yourself on this item, but be honest about your own perspective.

Decide what hill is worth dying on and fight for those items. Never compromise your own voice by pretending to agree when you don't – that will eat you up from the inside. Be honest, voice your truth, and then decide if you will stand your ground or fall in line – it's a choice. It's yours to make and once you make it you have to get behind it even if it is your choice to yield.

Remember: collaboration is a struggle to juggle between the group process you believe in and the mind that does the believing.

The right pattern of being heard and treated respectfully as a contributor will help each individual handle the pressure of collaborating. Even if you're shot down in the end, you will feel part of the process and be able to learn from your collaborative competitors.

Collaboration can exists and be sustained if the we respect, define zones, and listen first.

I have one more piece of wisdom on collaborating: when it gets difficult, there's usually an emotionally charged element of fear or a sense of threat. If it just isn't working, see if you can discuss who feels threatened and why. What is the nature of the threat and what does the person fear will happen if the threat is carried out? You might just be able to resolve or diminish the underlying issue that's causing the tension.

Best,

Abby

Experiential Report: On the Brink of the Brink

There are times I feel that I am on the brink of a certain kind of paradise – the one that comes to a man of purpose when he goes into action on that which he believes he was meant to act upon.

I am at that point now, again, in a strange kind of limbo. I am near the goal, but it's not quite here, and I can't tell if it's right around the corner, or if I've misjudged the distance between me and it. I know, in terms of critical path, that I'm close again. Critical path is about which step comes before another, but unlike my staircase, the size of one step may be unrelated to the size of the one before.

On Earth, the moon looks HUGE on the horizon as it dwarfs a distant farmhouse, yet in the middle of the sky it looks small. So how big is the moon? The twelve men who've actually gone there reported a similar phenomenon on the moon, where the unfamiliar objects caused difficulty in making comparisons of size and distance.

One astronaut reported wanting to check out what he thought was a small moon rock sitting part way down into a small crater near him. He began walking toward it, and kept feeling as though he were almost there, yet he never quite got to it. He began to fear the distance he had travelled from the safety of the LEM, and realized that without cars, buildings, people, and planes, he was little more than guessing as to his actual proximity toward his goal.

Upon take-off, he would observe through his window that the medium-sized rock he'd previously estimated to be about 10 feet tall in a 100 meter crater, was actually the size of a small building – he would have run out of oxygen trying to good get to it.

This is how I feel right now, creatively, as I operate in new experiential territory after completing my first feature film and moving toward a second. Making a feature film was a lifelong dream, so checking it off the list put me in new territory as I try to get a second one going. The experience now is that I don't really know how to judge the milestones to know how close I am.

I've often thanked my lucky stars that I didn't know how hard it would be to make my first, second, and third movies as a teenager, otherwise I'd never have done it. Yet once accomplished, I was glad I'd done it and it was worth it. I've felt this way many times about accomplishments, from my teenage films to my interactive media company (Digital Cafe), to Bill's Gun Shop, to my professional speaking career. Things always take time to get rolling, and time to execute, and getting screenplays done, and doing public readings, and even getting some Hollywood names onboard, I'm not sure how to judge how close I am. Am I on the brink, or only the BRINK of the brink?

Mostly, I keep my eyes on the prize, but sometimes I worry about how far I've gone from the safety that goes with the typical "gainfully employed" lifestyle. I've been self-employed now since 1991. Could it be that I've made my entire living foolishly running across the moon with no idea how much air I have, and no way to judge the milestones to gage my distance from my goal.

I was scuba-diving in Lake Superior... the closest Earthly experience I know to going to the moon. I dive with my wife because – in addition to being a lovely juxtaposition of feminine form and masculine gear – Kim is the best dive partner I could imagine. Kim has an amazing, universal competence, and the ability to view all situations objectively and calmly.

We dove down into the depths in our wet-suits to a cold Superior wreck, while all the other divers on the boat had dry suits and nitrox. Many said, "Are you sure you want to do this? We won't look down on you if you back out." We did no such thing.

The water was cold, dark, and cloudy, without a single fish in sight. I remember this point where I looked up to see the guide-rope disappearing into the white. I looked down to see rope disappearing into blackness. Before me was just a dirty blue. Where was I? Limbo. Down a little deeper in the already cold water, we hit the thermocline where the temp plummeted, like stepping naked into ice-water. A little deeper and I feel my fins are hitting something, but I can't see what, until my eyes adjust and I realize I'm standing on the deck of a sunken ship – our destination. It was a ghostly museum in a frigid fog. You couldn't see far, but as you moved forward, objects would present themselves.

This is my "man on the moon" experience, as I felt so very far from safety and I didn't know how far I should go from the rope. We ventured out across the sunken ship. It was scary and stunning. We went into the bridge and tugged at the wheel, and popped into the galley to see spatulas hanging from their hooks. Suddenly I realized I had lost sight of what my moon-man friend had not... my oxygen level. We were told we needed 10 psi of air to get safely back to the surface from the bottom and I had only 8, and I was far away from the rope.

My heart started beating wildly and I could feel myself sucking air. I knew I needed to stop my panicked breathing, but that made it worse. 70 feet down, air compresses pretty small, so each lung-full was a dangerous quantity. I swam way too fast back to the rope, while kim tried to calm me. When we got to the rope, I had a mere 5 psi of air. I looked at her, wide-eyed. It was a scary dark place to run out of air. I wouldn't want to die in such a lonely place, but of course Kim just calmly smiled with her eyes and demonstrated slow breathing and modeled a collected elegance. (The picture below shows the fear in my eyes, even through the mask. It's amazing how presence still communicates even down there – even under all that gear.)

We headed up the rope, my needle buried on the peg. Part of my panic was knowing that not only did we have to climb 70 feet, but a dive that deep required a 5 minute decompression stop about 15 feet under the surface so our blood wouldn't fizz as the pressure decreases (the benz). I remember climbing and climbing in what seemed like an eternity, and then checking the depth gage to see I'd only gone 5 or 10 feet. We had to go slowly to avoid the benz, so how I was going to get back to the surface on less than 5 psi of air?

Kim, with her smaller womanly lungs and her calmer disposition, used less air and showed me her buddy regulator and air gage, so I knew I could share her air, but the very idea of running out of air on a cautious dive like this one was irresponsible and simply unacceptable. Somehow, as the air kept expanding as I rose, I always had one more breath. As we held the line for the decompression stop, the current kept carrying Kim and I farther apart than I was comfortable with, but I got back on the boat without running out of air.

In going for my dreams, I experience these two things: 1) heading into unfamiliar territory which makes it difficult to gage how close you are, and 2) needing to balance my desire to move forward with a keen awareness of survival and a practical calm when the situations gets dicy.

Right now, the milestones all around me are unfamiliar, so I can't tell exactly where I am, but I feel close. I feel very close, yet I know I've said this before. I expect I will get there, and when I've succeeded, I'll look back and realize that I wouldn't have gone for it had I known how hard it would be, but it will have been, nonetheless, worth it.