As a creative agency, we are charged with the task of wrangling people, ideas, and assets in service of the future of our clients. Doing this year after year, an obvious truth emerges: The success of our creative endeavors depends on our ability to work collaboratively.
As we navigate complex and uncertain futures, we must work on our ability to work together.
It’s easy to say, but in practice, collaboration is as complex as the people engaged in it. What we bring to a creative environment depends on more than our experience, skillset, or best intentions. When we are engaged in a creative process with others, we are unconsciously influenced by learned patterns of seeing, thinking, and acting. These patterns are a mix of our personal biases and the signals we pick up from our environment, or “business as usual.”
So what kills collaboration? Competition and hierarchy, both so entrenched in our way of experiencing reality, we see them as “natural,” inherent to our humanness. Subtle forms of competition and hierarchical thinking show up everywhere: Our unwillingness to let go of an idea we think is “right,” our fear of uncertainty or taking risks, our attachment to a specific outcome, or the othering of people based on our bias.
We call this competitive, hierarchical way of perceiving “binary.” From a binary perspective, we see through the lens of right and wrong, or “this or that.” There is usually one right answer, rather than many potentials for creative outcomes. The nature of creativity is, of course, never “this or that,” but the result of what happens when this relates to that.
Being stuck in binary thinking is not entirely our fault. As a culture, we have inherited binary models as a way to make sense of our world, reinforce our identities, and maintain structures of power. When we look at the world that has resulted in binary thinking, we see the tension it produces in our closest relationships, our work environments, and the institutions that govern our everyday lives. Consider how our two-party political system is the result of binary thinking in the extreme - when creative problem solving has left the room and only identities remain. Our political discourse is more concerned with whether someone is right or wrong, than arriving at new outcomes.
In this old pattern of binary thinking, a possible outcome only includes the current “knowns.” But it’s the unknown — what we call the unconscious — that is our most powerful creative ally.
both/and - a mindset for a resilient future
As we continue to navigate complex and uncertain futures, we need tools, human tools, that will help us build more resilient futures.
both/and goes beyond binary thinking and harnesses the incredible power of paradox. A both/and approach invites us to see our differences not in tension, but in creative potential.
At its heart, both/and is a way of relating — we call it a “mindset” — that can be scaled within a system to reduce friction and lead to better outcomes.
Both/and is not a trending framework or hack. It’s a deep practice that unlocks the creative and relational capacity underneath our learned habits. It is the mindset that helps us solve our stickiest problems by giving us the raw material we need to work through the tension we feel in creative relationships. It invites paradox into our collaborative spaces to engage the divergent interests of multiple stakeholders. It requires radical empathy to work with different viewpoints and a willingness to use dialogue in ways we haven’t before.
A both/and mindset is inherently creative, allowing us to make breakthroughs that wouldn’t be possible on our own. As an agency, we use both/and thinking to push the boundaries of collaboration, strategy, and design, and uncover our best and most authentic work.
