‘Collaboration’ has been a creative industry buzzword for the last 10 years or so. Walk into any agency, anywhere in the world, and within five minutes you’ll hear this word bandied about to describe pretty much any area of the business. It’s an approach to working that has replaced the more competitive ways we were so used to.
I must admit, this ‘collaborative’ focus has had many indisputable benefits, but I can’t help but think we’ve also lost something along the way. What’s missing sometimes is the space for an individual’s competitive single-mindedness to fully blossom. (If you don’t believe me compare Apple’s fortunes under Steve Jobs’ leadership with the Apple run by its board of directors.)
Having just come back from a 48 hour Jaguar Land Rover developer challenge I think there might be another way. A third approach that takes advantage of the best of these seemingly polar opposite ways of working.
This very well organised event pitched a number of agency teams against each other with a clear goal set to determine a winner. The winners would be well rewarded and the prize for coming first potentially huge for the winning agency. This sounded like a recipe for a good old agency scrap. But that’s not how it played out. Instead it blended the healthy competition of a pitch scenario with the collaborative nature of a hackathon. Yes, each team desperately wanted to win. But it was a competition set out against a backdrop of helpfulness, friendliness and genuinely felt (dare I say it?) collaborative spirit.
To me it felt like the end result was a win for everyone, the teams, the agencies and the client. Yes, one winner was chosen. But my overriding feeling was that whilst we had entered the event as a collection of separate units, somehow the competition had brought us all together and we left the event as one big team. Including the client.
Perhaps it can be compared to how the space race developed? If it hadn’t been for the deep-rooted desire of the US and the Soviet Union to beat each other to the moon, the necessary sacrifices would never have been made and the rockets would still be stuck on their launch pads to this day. We know that once the initial goals were achieved, and the competition quieted down, the nature of events changed – and collaboration took over for the good of everyone. Today the only winner is mankind. Not individual nations or political beliefs.
So I can’t help but wonder if what I witnessed this weekend was a little bit of the same thing? And perhaps the dawn of a better way of working? Because as humans nothing drives as forward us much or as fast as competition. But equally, we need to collaborate and work together to be the very best we can be.
Dare I coin a new phrase and predict the future of working creatively together?
If I did I’d call it ‘Competitive Collaboration’.
Author: Mats A. Persson, Creative Director @ We Love Digital
Header image source: Bonhams
