This introduces you to the double-think common to artists in their work. To make a work of art, the maker or makers must consider purpose: Why am I making this thing? Any unique thing has a double purpose that guides its makers: 1) to be perfect of its kind; and, 2) to perform its task successfully.

Does that look familiar? Yup: it’s the grounds for the choice you have when you think about closure. The double-think attacks when you realize that, while you sure want to make a useful, thus saleable thing, you can’t put too much attention on that or it will distort the thing and interfere with your need to make it perfect of its kind.

To perfect a form, a maker must insist on formal perfection as the principle consideration during the making process. Every part of that process is interdependent with every other, just as every part of the thing made is interdependent with every other, so this gets complicated, hairy even. Fixing even the tiniest detail requires that you consider the whole thing.

Here’s an example from my experience of making. The script must be in the composer’s hands tomorrow, first thing. I’m nearly done. I’m at the obligatory scene in the sawmill. Fair Marcia Truepenny struggles against the ropes that tie her to the buzz saw, the blade coming ever closer. Dauntless Dick Dreadnaught thrashes on the floor in his cocoon of ropes. In his last official act before leaving, the villain sets the place on fire. Flames and smoke! I’m writing along, copying and editing and inventing the final draft.

DAUNTLESS DICK: Oh, no! We’re on fire!

FAIR MARCIA:  Cough cough.

DAUNTLESS DICK: Courage, Camille!

Oh, no is right!  That line just popped out of nowhere. Her name is Fair Marcia, not Camille. We’re back in the stone age: I’m writing on an actual typewriter, on actual paper. I’m on page 157 of the script. And my lizard brain has come up with a great gag: Courage, Camille!

Here’s the closure double-think problem in spades. Do I stay up all night re-typing the entire script, changing Fair Marcia to Camille? Nowadays, of course, it would take perhaps 90 seconds. Or, do I shrug, drop the gag, and press on?

Dang, that was a long night.

But to achieve closure on an innovation you must be certain of the thing’s coherence, of the arrangement of parts that creates that coherence. No Camilles hanging alone out there in the second act. It’s that arrangement, after all, that makes the thing unique, one of a kind, potentially valuable in its market. It would be so great if someone could tell us how funny the gag is going to be, or how gotta-have-it customers will find the gizmo. But no—we have to judge it on its own internal principles. And that means weighing the trouble, the extra iterations, it will take to get it perfect against the possible value it might achieve if we get it right.

This is hard.

Why we call it work, I guess.

Compromise has a long and honorable history in law, politics, and other fields in which there’s a zero-sum requirement (establishing rights or privileges) or not enough of something to go around (managing scarcity). Each goal can be divided or partitioned: a party can bargain with parts of the goal, and can modify it to create the compromise. Usually compromise consists in each party giving up (either to the other party or simply removing) part of the declared goal in exchange for a similar accommodation. Sometimes, though not often, compromise results in an arrangement that can be called “innovative.” Mostly, though, the goals remain constant: the only new thing is agreement.

A deal is a sequential compromise. Each party has a clear goal or project in mind; these need not be similar or even commensurate. One party agrees to support the other’s goal in return for similar support. Sometimes the deal includes modification of one or another of the goals, but it need not. Deals rarely if ever produce innovation.

We cooperate as a team toward the completion of a single project that needs a number of different skills for its successful completion. A leader usually chooses team members according to the skills each has, and each team member works on the parts of the project requiring those skills. The success of the project depends on them, and on the skill of the leader in planning, directing, organizing, and unifying their work. A team leader usually has a good understanding of the work necessary to the project, though perhaps not skills equal to the team members. Innovation on a cooperative project takes place in the conceiving and planning stages, or (as in the case of team sports) when someone improvises during the game.

Collaboration, the most difficult way of working together, works best in the management of excess (too many ideas, possibilities) and when the project requires something new to achieve closure. The parties or team share a common purpose and the goal of completing that purpose. But the purpose and the form of the completion both evolve during the work process. No one can predict the emergent work product, but its emergence, viewed in hindsight, will appear inevitable. This happens when the team members use each others’ work as material for their own. That is, when you present an idea to the group, instead of debating its potential usefulness, each team member incorporates it into his or her own thinking; each reconceives the project in light of the combination of this new material and his or her own ideas. You, of course, reconceive your own ideas with their work as part of your material. This process continues through many iterations; the project reaches closure when everyone agrees that it’s done.

Collaborating in this way naturally, irresistibly, produces innovation.

As far as I know, there have always been two basic kinds of acting. You’ll see my preference when I call them “indicating” and “acting.”

Indicating. An actor makes a physical gesture (movement, tone of voice, etc).  This signals to the spectators that the character feels, means, wants this or that. An animated character offers the purest form of this: the animators manipulate an image so that it indicates an intention or state of mind. Wiley Coyote indicates with his face that he’s just noticed that there’s no ground under him. The gesture issues, not from the character’s action or state of mind, it’s a cartoon and has no state of mind, but from an animator’s intention to show something to a spectator.

Acting. An actor makes what we’ll call a “gesture of the heart,” thinking a thought so vividly that it causes a physical gesture (movement, tone of voice, etc. – you do this when you cry at the movies or smile at the baby.). The physical gesture and the character’s intention or state of mind are the same. The first notice of this is an apocryphal story told about the actor who played Electra in Sophocles’ play. He brought an urn to the show, an urn that contained the ashes of his son, and used it in the scene where Electra sees the urn she thinks contains the ashes of her brother, Orestes. The intention to show something to a spectator takes second place to the intention to make the something real in the economy of the performance.

Here’s an example that will show you the difference in our real life. At the end of a scene in a soap opera on television, there’s often a close-up of one character thinking about what just happened. The show needs this shot because the actors can’t possibly play exactly to the time available (the break to commercial must be at exactly 11:14:30) so the producers insert a little slack into the scene: the camera holds on the character for however long is necessary. If you watch a few of these you’ll see the difference between indicating and acting. Sometimes the actor will simply be waiting, with an appropriate expression on his or her face. Other times the actor will actually think of something to do with the scene. You will be able to tell the difference, no problem. In one case the outward appearance of the character and the inner behavior of the actor differ; in the other they are the same. For biological reasons we won’t go into now, the gestures of the heart have  much stronger affect for you than the indications. In most cases they will create a more interesting character.

Both kinds of acting are essential to any theatre (or TV or movie) performance.

Is it far-fetched to suggest that something like this difference exists for any kind of work? You can perform gestures to indicate that you are working, or, you can work. Look around you at the next stand-up: I’ll bet you can see both kinds of work in the group.

Her name is Ellen Dissanayake, and the books are: What is Art For?, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988; Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995; and, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

She’s a real polymath, and her research presents an amazing variety of support for her thesis that biology and evolution have hard-wired art and artful behavior into human beings. In Art and Intimacy, to take one example, she shows (convinces me, anyhow) the common roots of art and love. She places them in the interactions between mother and infant. Her argument is wicked persuasive, and she has wonderful pictures of exchanges among people, especially moms, and babies. She routinely gets off to one side of a subject and looks at it skeewawkus, seeing familiar things in new ways. For instance, she proposes that evolution has delegated to babies a life or death responsibility for being loveable and charming. Why? Because human babies (with their giant heads) are born into the world so early in their development that they can’t take care of themselves. To survive they must ingratiate themselves with someone who will look after them. They do that with behavior that’s mighty like what grownups do to make and appreciate art. She has a raft of pictures showing moms and babies playing together in games of repetition. She doesn’t cite Aristotle (who does, these days?) but her work illustrates his ideas in the first few pages of Poetics about the inevitability of art.

These ideas and insights have led me to interesting places (Think how they complicate and support Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman’s ideas about deep metaphors, for instance.). For innovators and thinkers about innovation they offer pathways to consideration of questions like “How do I judge something new? if it’s new I have nothing to compare it with.” Her understanding of art, and her ways of defining it as behavior, helped Rob Austin and me figure out how to describe and discuss the plot, coherence, and resonance of things, processes, and ideas that have appeal beyond, or in addition to, the functional.

Alas, most of the behavior we envy as talent is, in fact, hard won skill. Effortless? Hah! This is entirely true of the skills you need to become a collaborative team worker, a reliable innovator. The truth is, anyone can learn these skills (they’re quite simple), and with hard work anyone can get good at them (they’re not quite easy). Of course, that person across the table from you, with the same amount of practice, may well get ‘way better at them than you will. But that only means we’ll expect more of her.

Approaching these skills with a view to learning them, we need first to identify them. We’re talking now about Release, letting go of body and mind tensions so that we’re free to respond quickly and reflexively to discussion. I’ve suggested that for a knowledge worker, body release is a path to mind release. So let’s begin there.

It’s a fact that no matter how we try, we can’t accomplish negative goals. You can’t go in the corner and not think of a white elephant. Action requires forward movement. To accomplish your negative goal (Don’t think of a white elephant.) you must go in the corner and think of a blue aardvark. Just so with release. You cannot sit carefully on your chair and be not tense. You must sit carefully on your chair, actively clench up the muscle you want to release, then deliberately let go the clench.

What exactly is it that we let go of when we “let go the clench”? In an earlier note I recited some names for mind tensions that we all experience: nervousness, inhibition, vanity, panic. Notice that these are all conditions-in-general. Naming them won’t get rid of them. The great Russian acting teacher Stanislavsky once said: “In general is the enemy of art.” (Expect examples from theatre from time to time: theatre’s the home office for collaboration.)

There’s little point in exhorting yourself, “Don’t be nervous,” or, “Just don’t think about it, you’ll be fine.” Let your mom do that. You need to get more specific. See if this story reminds you of anything in your history.

We’re on the last day in this location. George Washington and Governor Mifflin of Pennsylvania review the troops. Your correspondent as the Governor, Barry Bostwick as George. As we ride along in front of the troops, The Gov has a few expository lines: these are great soldiers, we’ll do you proud, exciting stuff like that. Low key acting for me, but bold directing: a tracking shot nearly 90 seconds long: an eternity. As we approach the first unit, the Sgt Major bellows “Preee-sent Harrh!” and a hundred muskets clash into position. And the Company guidon, that pointy flag on a long pole, also snaps down from the vertical to Present Arms. Well. George’s horse has put up with a lot during a long day of shooting, but this is just too much to ask of anyone, let alone a nervy white charger. He goes sideways about 10 feet, and takes off for the distant hills. It’s a couple hundred yards before Bostwick can get control. “Sorry about that,” sez he to the director; “won’t happen again.” It takes about an hour to get the shot set up again, an hour in which the sun races across the sky, the light changes significantly, and everyone is reminded that this is it, there’s no tomorrow. We do the shot again. I say my silly lines again, and this time there’s this little nagging thought that sneaks into the pauses: What if the horse chills and I screw this up? Better be perfect. No need to be perfect this time: the horse goes nuts. Conference with the director: Bostwick’s horsemanship is on the line here and he’s determined to prevail. Horse is equally invested (Who’s the boss here, me or this turkey in the funny hair?). All that’s needed is that the soldier with the guidon not wave it. We watch the sun. I study my dozen or sixteen lines. We re-do the shot. Again with the bucking bronco. By the fourth time all I can think of is, “What if I screw this up?” “How can I possibly be letter perfect for the fourth time in a row?” I am real busy not thinking of a white elephant.

What I finally did for the final shot (No guidon waving): I put the script pages in front of my mind’s eye, and read my lines. Total attention on the page. No acting for me—I’m too desperate for acting. By directing my attention to a specific object (the imaginary script pages) I was able to let go of my fixation on disaster.

And, of course when I recounted these hours of terror and moments of triumph to my movie pals they each had half a dozen horror stories that put mine in the shade. All in a day’s work, Bubba; nothing to it. No, you’ll be in a meeting, not on a movie location, but doesn’t this sound familiar?

You’ll want to learn and practice particular exercises that will get you good at moving your attention away from the negativity of nervousness, inhibition, vanity, and panic and toward the action you want to take.

We were talking about release-in-general. Now let’s look at some specifics. Stay tuned to this space for reflections on a few common inhibitions to collaborative/innovation work.

We can use Descartes’ artificial distinction to assume two orders of release: body and mind. Body release is not the same as physical relaxation. Body release means that you know how to get free of tension so that you can respond to anything, quickly, reflexively, without thinking—not quite the same thing as “relaxed.” Practice relaxation and you’ll learn to fall asleep, useful, but not a skill you need for most meetings.

To see body tension all you need do is watch people walking. Look at the way their arms move: not in complementary response to the moving shoulders, but all herky-jerky, marching to the beat of an inner anxiety. After watching other people walk for a while, take an inventory of your own walk. Notice where you hold positions and movements that you don’t need, that use energy to no useful effect. Where are your shoulders? How do your arms move? Etc. To see body release in action look at Maria Sharapova’s face as she tosses the ball up for a serve: no tension there. She may have been gnashing her teeth or screaming a “Yes!” just a moment before, but now, coiling up for the explosion, she’s utterly placid. Or, watch that Tiger Woods swing a golf club: look how far his arms extend, at the rotation of his torso and hips. Even as he’s applying incredible force to generate club speed, his entire body moves without a hitch: no tension there.

Body release is the essential first step on the way toward mind release. We know the mind’s tensions by other names: nervousness, inhibition, vanity, ­­­­­panic. When we learn to identify and release the tensions in our bodies we can see how to apply the same methods to our hearts and minds. You’re at the crucial meeting: you’ve done your homework and then some, you sat at the kitchen table ‘til all hours polishing the one million dollar idea. You are loaded for bear! And suddenly, as you play over in your mind what you’re about to say, it all sounds so stupid. What were you thinking? How could you have dreamed that anyone would go for such a cockamamie notion? Face burning, stomach churning, you stare a hole in the table and mutter “Nothing” when the spotlight falls on you.

How can you escape these deadly mind tensions? Release.

Body and mind release are work you do on yourself. But suppose you’re in the chair, managing, and your charge is to lead your team to the essential new service or product. You are “in control.” You have two broad paths before you: control by restraint, or control by release.

A couple of hundred years of industrial progress have taught us about control by restraint—and we’ve learned our lessons well. The very idea, control, means restraint. The modern master of control by restraint was Frederick Taylor; his “scientific management” permeates our thinking about how to get things done.

However. There’s a modern kind of employee who balks at such control. And a couple of thousand years of artistic practice have taught us about control of those folks, the ones you cannot, must not, boss around. As we move into an  information/knowledge/creative/you-name-it post-industrial economy, a lot of work looks more like art and less like industry. And that modern, uncontrollable employee does more and more of the work and makes more and more of the value. We’ve read our Peter Drucker: let’s call that employee a “knowledge worker.” Knowledge workers routinely do things you, a mere manager, can’t do, and they come up with solutions to problems that you, a mere manager, could never have predicted. To control them with restraint, you would have to know where they’re going and how they should get there. But in a knowledge economy devoted to innovation you don’t know those things; you can’t boss your team. They are, in conventional, industrial terms, “outta control.”

To get the work done, to make the essential innovation that will unlock the future, and to succeed as the leader of these new style workers, you need to set them free; you need to aim them rather than corral them: they are arrows, not a train of pack mules.

How on earth can you do that? How can you help your team to prepare for team work?

One important source: discussions with people whose experience and expertise differ from my own. I solicit your contribution to the larger collaboration that we can create in this space.

Now, as Aristotle wrote, let’s begin at the beginning:

Four Categories of Group Work

We use all four of these kinds of group work all the time, often more than one in a single project. By naming them, I don’t mean to create any limits or prescriptions; I offer them as categories we can use to think hard about the work we already do. The four are: compromise, the deal, cooperation, and collaboration.

Compromise has a long and honorable history in law, politics, and other fields in which there’s a zero-sum requirement (establishing rights or privileges) or not enough of something to go around (managing scarcity). Each goal can be divided or partitioned: a party can bargain with parts of the goal, and can modify it to create the compromise. Usually compromise consists in each party giving up (either to the other party or simply removing) part of the declared goal in exchange for a similar accommodation. Sometimes, though not often, compromise results in an arrangement that can be called “innovative.” Mostly, though, the goals remain constant: the only new thing is agreement.

A deal is a sequential compromise. Each party has a clear goal or project in mind; these need not be similar or even commensurate. One party agrees to support the other’s goal in return for similar support. Sometimes the deal includes modification of one or another of the goals, but it need not. Deals rarely if ever produce innovation.

We cooperate as a team toward the completion of a single project that needs a number of different skills for its successful completion. A leader usually chooses team members according to the skills each has, and each team member works on the parts of the project requiring those skills. The success of the project depends on them, and on the skill of the leader in planning, directing, organizing, and unifying their work. A team leader usually has a good understanding of the work necessary to the project, though perhaps not skills equal to individual team members. Innovation on a cooperative project takes place in the conceiving and planning stages, or (as in the case of team sports) when someone improvises during the game.

Collaboration, the most difficult way of working together, works best in the management of excess (too many ideas, possibilities) and when the project requires an innovation to achieve closure. The parties or team share a common purpose and the goal of completing that purpose. But the purpose and the form of the completion both evolve during the work process. No one can predict the emergent work product, but its emergence, viewed in hindsight, will appear inevitable. This happens when the team members use each others’ work as material for their own. That is, when you present an idea to the group (by commenting on this blog, for instance), instead of debating its potential usefulness, they (or I, as the case may be) incorporate it into their own thinking; they reconceive the project in light of the combination of this new material and their own ideas. You, of course, reconceive your own ideas with their work as part of your material.

This process continues through many iterations; the project reaches closure when everyone agrees that it’s done.

Collaborating in this way naturally, irresistibly, produces innovation.

Here’s an image of a simple collaboration.

Each party to this work (horse, grand daughter; jumping over the obstacle) must accept what the other does, and include that in what she does. If Emma shifts her weight, the horse will include the new balance as she goes over the bars. Conversely, if the horse alters the rhythm of her progress, Emma must include that in what she’s doing, or fall off. If either party fails to include the other, the final product (a smooth jump) will be compromised. In this case a team leader (the teacher) declares closure when the two successfully collaborate: when Emma exhibits proper form and the horse produces a smooth jump.