4. The surprising problem of shared creative ownership

What if to connect more, we need to share less?

All the posts are part of a single series. You might want to start at the beginning.

The last post ended with a nice simplification of our goal—self-organising competence hierarchy without dominion. We also saw the five key principles that I’m proposing as the foundation of gift community. So far, we haven’t quite connected the dots to show why these particular principles are a good starting point, so we’ll try to do that in this post.

In the process we will come across a critically important and perhaps radical idea: shared creative ownership with intention leads to either dominion or weakness.

This will need some explanation but if it clicks for you the way it did for me, the implications are highly significant. It completely changed the way I think about collaboration and led directly to the gift community ideas and all this writing.

But we need to work up to it. First we need to pick up where we left off and examine how our goal of self-organising competence hierarchy without dominion leads to the five core principles of gift community. We’re going to do so with the help of three observations:

• Culture is better than rules

• Desire is better than obligation

• We can find only two sources of potency

Let’s take a look.

The first helps us avoid a tricky contradiction: how can we reconcile self-organisation with having a deliberate goal? The whole point of self-organisation is that it does what it does, not what you want it to do. Nothing can be forced.

But, as every gardener knows, something can be done: we can create the right conditions. The right conditions can never ensure a self-organised outcome, but they can guide us in the right direction. In particular they can help eliminate the things that work against the results we seek, also known as weeding.

In organisational terms, what do we mean by the right conditions? One thing we do not mean is rules. Rules require rulers. They are meaningless unless enforced and enforcement is dominion. This suggests that a company, or really any kind of organisation in the way we normally understand the word, will not make a good container for gift community. Companies are all about rules, policies and fixed processes.

Some do aspire to be different. Using ideas like self-managing teams and high levels of autonomy they aim to free themselves from fixed processes and rules. But if that were really possible, why have a company in the first place? A network of freelancers would do the job. The purpose of a legal entity is always some form of control.

We want to genuinely let go of control, but at the same time, paradoxically, we do want something specific to emerge. We want to see livelihoods and prosperity generated by systemic potency. This can only come from self-organisation, but of a very particular kind. What does it mean for people to organise in a particular way, but without rules?

Fortunately we have a word for this: culture: the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society. The word comes from Latin cultūra, meaning cultivation, tending, or care, and in turn deriving from the verb colere which adds further meanings: to inhabit or dwell in, and to practice or pursue. Culture, it seems, is something to be created and nurtured from within. Culture takes its shape from a shared way of being, and simultaneously shapes us as individuals, in a constant cycle of recreation. (Fascinating aside: colere also means to worship.)

The goal of the gift community principles, then, is to establish the basis for a shared way of being that can persist and grow (both bigger and richer) over time. Rules organise from without, culture from within, just like the difference between dominion and potency. And history shows us that culture can be extremely robust and long-lived. Culture is better than rules.

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This shift, from organisations to culture raises another important question: how is this thing going to grow bigger and have any meaningful impact? Business has a straightforward answer: make more money, hire more people, do more. And it works. Many companies have changed the world in one way or another. It’s just that they tend to be ambivalent about whether the change is for the better or worse.

Fortunately, as individuals we rarely share this ambivalence. We’d like to see a better world, but our efforts to do something about it seem hopelessly stuck. Specifically, we are stuck in ‘should’. The only way to fix our big problems, the consensus seems to be, is through some form of moral obligation. We should recycle, we should donate to this cause or that, we should vote a certain way, we should boycott certain products. Should, should, should.

As we can all see by now, it doesn’t work. The world doesn’t change unless the obligation is backed up by some kind of force. Leaning on moral obligation may be well intended, but it is also just another form of dominion: you should do as you are told.

Meanwhile, change that does not come from dominion happens all the time, when large numbers of people decide they want to do something new. This is usually when a new technology or idea comes along. Take the way social media has reshaped the world. No one had to be told they should join in, they do it, for better or worse, because they want to.

Being fundamentally opposed to dominion, this is our only option. Yet again the thing we seek must come from within. The desire to participate must flow directly from the activity itself. This is the only way a new culture can thrive. Desire is better than obligation.

Before moving on to the third observation, it’s worth noting that we are in very tricky territory here as the social media example might suggest. The big three desires—money, power and sex—are famously corrupting. And whether we are chasing these big things, or simply cookies and dopamine, none of this feels quite right to get us to benevolent systemic potency. Fortunately we also share some rather more enlightened desires. Here are three that are relevant to our story:

• People love being creative

• People long for strong social connections

• People love to be generous

(If you find that third point debatable, it’s a robust scientific fact about small children. Maybe dominion sometimes beats it out of us)

Our increasingly individualistic, systematised and dominion based world is slowly robbing us of these simple and benevolent pleasures that were naturally present throughout history. I believe there is a vast untapped desire to bring them back—if it can be done in a way that stays genuine and resists the corrupting effects of the wrong kind of organisation (harder than it sounds!). More than anything else, this untapped desire is the source of my optimism.

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The third observation—that there are only two sources of potency—will explain why shared creative ownership is surprisingly problematic.

Where does genuine potency come from? I don’t mean in theory, I mean where do we see it? Where do we see examples of great power that flows out from within? I can only think of two sources. We see it in certain people, who somehow manage to be ‘in their power’, and we see it in ecosystems.

The personal level is straightforward and is generally what the word potency suggests. When a person is connected to their inner power, we understand implicitly this power is completely different to the one in ‘power corrupts’.

The idea of whole systems having this kind of potency is rather more novel, but we do recognise a great and non-corrupting power in nature, and also in certain kinds of communities such as artistic movements. In both cases we are dealing with ecosystems, in the wider meaning of the word. An ecosystem is any large scale self-organising system with strong internal connections and interdependency. (Fascinatingly, it may be that individual creative potency is actually the same thing.)

It is difficult to prove a negative, but for my part I cannot see a source of potency other than these two. People can be potent, certainly. Any kind of power beyond individuals needs some kind of organisation, which must logically come from either without or within. The first is dominion, the second is systemic potency. We can find only two sources of potency.

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With that we are nearly there. We now know we are looking for principles which could sustain a vibrant and self-generating culture, that such a culture must speak to the higher things we desire such as creativity, human connection, and generosity, and we have the key observation that allows us to loop back to the discussion of shared creative ownership that we started with.

The problem of shared creativity

Those who are familiar (or those who happened to click the link on the word ‘source’ in the previous post) will recognise the influence of Peter Koenig’s ideas in the first principle of gift community (direction and decision making always belong to the single person who is the source of an initiative).

Koenig’s ‘sourcework’ is based on the observation that successful businesses are very often organised around a single individual who the original creative ideas came from. This person has, according to proponents of the idea, a unique clarity of vision, an unmatched discretion about the choices that will lead there, and an powerful wellspring of ideas. When all this is properly recognised, by both the person themselves and the organisation, things flourish. It is essentially a productive and practical version of something we are more familiar with in the arts—the power of creative inspiration. Anything that points towards a convergence of art and prosperity is on the right track in my book!

Throughout the sourcework ideas, the implicit goal is effectiveness. The core idea is to give creative people decision making authority over the work they are sourcing, for the simple reason that they make better decisions. Nothing wrong with that, but I want to go further. As we have already discussed, our default approaches to organising have left us in a trap of corrupt or weak. Either we lose integrity or we lose power. I believe giving creators not just decision making authority, but complete ownership of their creations, is essential for escaping this trap.

The way I see it, this is an unavoidable consequence if indeed there are only two sources of potency. The key is to notice that, of the two sources—individual and ecosystemic—one is intentional, one is not. A creative person is very much driven by a vision. There is some kind of inner target they are aiming for, perhaps not fully understood but always present. Their creative choices are all made with the intention of realising this vision. An ecosystem, by definition, is undirected. As soon as you try to push the system in a certain direction, you push against self-organisation. Control is dominion.

And so, logically:

• if there are only two sources of potency, individual and collective

• and if only the personal kind is intentional

• then we can either have intention or collectivity, we can’t have both without sacrificing potency.

And given power must be organised either from within (potency) or without (dominion), lacking potency means we will end up either with dominion, or no power organising principle at all and hence weakness.

Shared creative ownership with intention leads to either dominion or weakness.

Or put another way: intention, collaboration, potency: pick any two.

If this is not a little triggering you might not be paying attention. Shared creative ownership with intention is what almost everyone in progressive, make-the-world-a-better-place circles is doing. We are doing it wrong, people!

But this is not bad news, it’s good! We can have our cake and eat it:

• We can have intentional potency—a deliberate goal—as long as creative initiatives belong to individuals

• We can have large-scale, collective potency as long as we let go of the outcome

• We don’t have to worry because this power tends to organise itself beautifully

(By the way, yogis, mystics and true artists all tell us that the best way to be individually creative is also to let go of the outcome. A topic for another time!)

Getting real

Things are getting too abstract. A concrete example will make things much clearer. To show how strongly I am committed to the idea I’ll take the smallest possible kind of collectivity: a partnership of two people. It’s a useful starting point because it’s a very common way that people try to avoid dominion: the 50/50 equal partnership—in it together! What could be better? I’ve been in many of these over the years and they were all fraught with difficulties.

Creative partnerships can be brilliant of course, the problems start when we decide to do something powerful, like start a business. Are we putting equal effort in? Do we really make decisions together or does some kind of jostling start? Do we actually share the same vision? People who have tried it often end up swearing never again! Longstanding friendships founder on these rocks.

My friend Benoît and I recently decided to try something different: a gift community inspired approach. Instead of co-owning a single project, we would separate out what we each bring to the table, and retain personal ownership of our creative visions. We would explore how the projects complement each other, and how we could support each other in reaching our goals. The creative partnership was transformed. Practically, we could quickly see all sorts of ways we could help each other, but the key difference was in how it felt. Lurking concerns and friction, gone! Creative energy, unleashed! If you are involved in a partnership with someone I strongly suggest you give it a try.

The key shift is that we removed the idea of a shared creative intention. The combined creative output was still there, but now it was in the wind. We are in Blake territory again. Blake once wrote that not a syllable in his writing is out of place, and we would do well to pay close attention to the specific words he uses. He rarely writes about right and wrong, or good and evil. What he does greatly object to is anything that binds.

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise

We had unbound each other. Fascinatingly, it actually felt like both more control and more collaboration. More control because we each felt the purity of our own creative vision return to us. More collaboration because when I act in service I am very happy to support you however you need. I trust your creative process. I could feel myself warm to ideas I had previously been very hesitant about. There are always things we do differently. When we try to work on a shared creative vision these differences can lead to compromise and frustration. When we support each other with crystal clear creative ownership, they become a source of beauty.

This is the essence of the gift community vision. A community with tremendously powerful creative output, with no control whatsoever of the overall direction. A community that kisses the joy as it flies.

Before the switch, the combination of shared ownership and a deliberate creative vision meant Benoît and I had access to neither of the sources of potency. We were not free to be fully personally potent, because we had to conform to the wants and needs of the other, and we were not systemically potent because we were trying to push the system in an intended direction, which is not self-organisation. As a result our collaboration would either have shadow dominion or would lack a power organising principle and be weak. Most likely there would be a bit of both.

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Putting all this together we can now see the foundation of the gift community principles, especially the first three. The last two should also make sense but could benefit from a closer look, which we will get to in due course.

• Creative independence. Direction and decision making always belong to the single person who is the source of an initiative. This is about the gifts we have.

• Voluntary support with commitment. Strengths combine through voluntary support of each other’s creativity. There is no need for or place for authority, but we honour our commitments. These are the gifts we give.

• Spontaneous harmony. The unity and direction of the community emerge spontaneously, never through planning or authority. The power of the system emerges from itself.

• Trust-work. Trust is the bond that replaces authority. It must be actively and skilfully tended to. Trust can be broken easily and unintentionally, so the work never ends. The work is mostly listening.

• Positive reciprocity. When gratitude is expressed directly as a return gift there is a cancelling out and a loss of momentum. Instead we pay it forward with a gift for someone else. Gifts never stop moving and return to us from unexpected directions, energising the whole community.

Hopefully it is becoming clear that these principles could lead to a vibrant and joyful creative culture, largely free from dominion, a source of strong human connection, and a place to both develop and to share our gifts.

But could such a community really become a powerful and profitable source of economic value production, outperforming a tightly integrated and controlled company? It’s a big idea and it’s definitely speculative. We will need to look at systems bigger than simple partnerships of two, and get back to the idea of a naturally emerging competence hierarchy. That’s what I want to write about next.

🐘