Re-envisioning Collaboration: From Money-focused Friction to Passion-driven Co-creation

Through our experiences working on multiple projects, as part of different initiatives, with different people, through different modalities, and even for different kinds of compensation, we have been able to gain both valuable hindsight and clearer insight into the kind of collaboration we now want to be a part of.

Because we’ve been able to verify, time and again, the importance of seeing eye to eye with the client and their initiative, lest we should encounter friction, miscommunication, and a resulting loss of time and energy.

This has led us to acknowledge how a couple of shifts could lead to a significantly smoother, more productive, and more enjoyable collaborative process.

In this article, we share about our resulting approach to creative collaboration, looking beyond the what of initiatives, to their why and its connections to the how of the very collaborative process that brings content, products, and services to life.

From passion to a shared mission

In our experience, working with passion-driven clients makes all the difference.

The effect is twofold:

• We’re not collaborating with someone who’s only interested in the money they can make: they do have a heartfelt mission they are passionate about, as their primary motivator;

• When their passion-based mission resonates with us, we’re not just doing work for a project we feel no affinity for: we can genuinely get behind their purpose.

This is what allows their mission to become ours.

And it completely shifts the energy of the collaboration, from a cold, formal one, with a focus on money from both sides, to a passion-fueled common initiative which everyone involved can get behind.

In our experience, this is when the best work can get done, as passion fuels every stakeholder to go above and beyond.

A process of co-creation

We help entrepreneurs, startups, and initiatives share a message, content, service, or product with the people they mean to help.

As such, they bring in the substance, the thing they’re passionate about, and that we can help manifest with our work.

We can’t “do all the work” because they’re meant to come up with whatever it is we’re meant to help them share.

We therefore invite them to be fully involved in the creative process of manifesting this substance they know so well, and not just watch from the sidelines, in a somewhat powerless and frustrating position.

Just as we trust them with the substance they bring in, we ask the clients that they trust us and the skills and expertise we bring to help manifest it.

So we don’t just execute their vision or ours. We co-create our joined vision for their mission.

In doing so, we become co-creative partners.

And this co-creative process becomes a blend of skills and expertise from them and us, coalescing around this mission that we all embrace.

That’s another aspect in which the “passion-driven shared mission” start point makes all the difference:

In addition to fueling the client’s motivation on one side, and Oryzon Studio’s on the other, it directly fuels this co-creative process in a synergistic way, between the client and ourselves.

Beyond the money divide

We’ve mentioned the difference between working for money and working from passion.

In addition, we have found that, in some business relationships, the money aspect can sometimes have a rather perverse effect.

As soon as the contract is signed and some amount of money changes hands, from the client to the service provider/contractor, there’s a “you better deliver or else” energy that sometimes emerges from the client.

In some cases, the clients are almost rooting for the provider to fail, waiting to pounce on whatever they feel may be a shortcoming in the work provided.

We’ve even witnessed it through a project we did for a local association with limited financial resources, whom we had provided with what was, in our eyes, the deal of a lifetime—about 60% discount off our usual rate at the time. We completed the project, but they still somehow felt they had overpaid.

This seems to all come down to the relationship we each have with money and financial transactions.

Fortunately, the shared mission and co-creation aspects we’ve discussed here both work their magic in moving beyond this money-related friction.

Simply because they allow for the approach of co-creating together and with the same purpose, thus bypassing the divisive and restrictive energy that can emanate from a cold, money-focused transaction.

In a nutshell

There are multiple aspects to creative collaboration.

In our experience, the two shifts we discussed in this article, i.e. working with passion-driven clients and treating them as co-creative partners, are so fundamental that they ripple into most of these aspects: they help reduce friction and miscommunication, in favor of an alignment of time and energy between stakeholders.

They essentially help move the energy of the collaboration from a restrictive and potentially divisive focus on money—money to be earned and money to be spent—to a highly motivating and unifying manifestation of passion, through co-creation and the collective blending of skills and expertise.

In our experience, this simply leads to more genuine, fruitful, and fulfilling creative collaborations.

And, at this point, that’s exactly what we want to be a part of.