Bracket @THECUBE

Our friends at THECUBE held their February CUBELUNCH yesterday. Each month they organise a get-together at their super sleek space near Spitalfields market in East London, combining tasty aspects of a light lunch with a different speaker for attendees, and members of THECUBE. Past lunches have been host to online-accountancy firm MyCake, and energy and wellbeing clinic for businesses and CEOs, E-Rejuvenation – both well-attended and well-received.

This time played host to Bracket, a company which provides support to creative individuals and provides a network for collaboration.

Collaboration is their key. Collaboration, you could say, is the bracket to support creativity. They act as a consultancy, offering live projects, events and training to get people off the ground. Recently they helped a small group of artists, Field, set up exhibition space in empty shops. In this project, Bracket really want to encourage other artists of all creative sectors to use empty retail space to their advantage. You may have heard of “pop-up shops” or “pop-up galleries” – this is what it is.

They also act as an agency. A commercial opportunity comes in to Bracket. This is then filtered down: relevant people in the network are chosen by whose skills are most useful to the project, and also whose skills will work best together; a collaborative project with a definite goal is born. A great way of using people to their full potential.

The intimate talk was led by Alison Coward, founder and director of Bracket, and member of THECUBE. She stressed that by any means, collaboration is not new – especially between creative people, wherein it has often been the road to success.

Where the magic happens

Why collaborate? This was the first question she posed. Well, in a nutshell: two heads are better than one. The sharing of resources, skills, and ideas can only acheive bigger things. It gives the opportunity to come up with new concepts never before imagined. Also, collaboration is quickly being gobbled up as the answer to otherwise organised projects that aid and contribute to social innovation. Ethical and environmental issues, and those of health and unemployment – to name a few – can be solved and brought to public attention through an innovative collaborative campaign. One man and his dog can’t do everything.

And then there are online tools. Tools that make working collaboratively easier than ever before. Social media at the forefront of the charge allows people to connect across traditional boundaries – boundaries which, before, would have been a hinderance to anybody wishing to even do something as simple as get some contacts in their relevant area of expertise. Before, hierarchical differences presented a sort of glass ceiling of contact, by which the more skilled, the more well-known, the more illustriously titled, the harder to get hold of. Twitter and LinkedIn have disappated these boundaries, and in terms of freedom of communication, an iron curtain has come tumbling down to much applause.

But it doesn’t stop here. Online tools go much further than just social media. So many things allow for the collaborative sharing, editing, and discussion of project work. There are whiteboard tools, like Dabbleboard, Twiddla, and Stixy, alongside software that allows live brainstorming like Mindmeister and Bubbl.us. These might all be news to you, which is a key issue in itself: something that you know and love, like Twitter, may not be loved or even well-known by any number of people in a collaborative project.

One of Alison’s biggest tasks, she says, is to pull people away from email; it isn’t reliable, it’s slow, and it can’t provide the same live collaboration that other, more streamlined methods can offer. So what can you do to drag people away from this, whilst also not alienating them by using online tools that they’re unfamiliar with?

Well, most importantly is to forget about the technology for the moment. Alison outlined a simple plan (which will surely earn you points for project management as well), whereby it begins with looking at people involved in the collaboration, and ends with selecting and using technology to communicate, edit ideas, and organise.

Trying to keep a group of creative people together – like herding cats

People come first. If you can’t work with people in your group, or you don’t get on, or it’s hard to communicate, or everybody does their own thing, or one person takes over the entire project, it doesn’t matter what skills you may all be blessed with – things will be a lot harder. Establish first what personality types you have in the group: you don’t want somebody who is great at coming up with ideas but who’s frankly rubbish at public speaking to pitch any ideas, do you? So you assign tasks in the project to fit the personality and skills of your group. Team roles must be clarified if, even before success, any organisation is desired. From here also you can gather how handy people are with certain online tools.

Meetings, for example, could be conducted over Skype, but only if the majority of your group either have it or know how to use it. Anyone lacking in experience with it can be weaned in by the rest of the group paying attention to keep them informed and mentored in using Skype. If somebody fails to use it, or doesn’t like it, and doesn’t mention it, not only does the individual fall behind – the whole collaboration could cave in. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

The most interesting section was about capturing ideas. Alison brought up the very real issue of having to organise creative people and getting some cohesion within the group. We’re solitary creatures, more often than not working alone, and creating from only one point of view. She calls this “herding cats”. It’s difficult because by ‘nature’ we’re not pack animals, though being humanly social can’t be completely drained us just because of creativity.

So how is it possible to get over this self-indulgent, uncooperative, lone-wolf kind of attitude? Put simply: how do you convince everyone to set a large percentage of their ego to one side? And then the task of herding cats begins.

Alison was happy to answer a question from a member of THECUBE about the problem of ‘getting over’ egos. She said it is difficult. It takes training and practice. However, this doesn’t mean you have to be always collaborating – people need space, and this doesn’t mean that you’re selfish or have an inflated ego. It’s just natural. All that matters really is your attractiveness as a collaborator; it relies on your work, how much effort you put in, how punctual you are with what you deliver. If you have those qualities of just wanting to knuckle down on the project and do the best possible, then ego shouldn’t come into it.

“You haven’t contributed a single thing to the mindmap!”

But, herding cats? May seem weird, but it’s a great concept. It means that good project management skills are needed to bond everybody into the group. It needs coordination, and for people to be easily trackable when not working in the same place. There are websites out there that also cater to project management, for example Basecamphq.com and Huddle.net. These can be used to organise the group – but don’t fall into the danger of allowing 1 or 2 people to be responsible for the entire project. Once this starts, responsibility is automatically lessened from other members, and it becomes less of a collaboration, and more like a three-legged race in which one person runs: things fall apart.

I think the most important thing that we took away from the talk was Alison’s emphasis on people. People before project, project before technology. She mentioned an interesting tool called Belbin which assesses the personality of a group through Team Role Theory: the idea that everybody has a certain part to play within a team. It’s definitely worth a shot. We aren’t all psychologists, so it would be interesting to see how members of a project would be ordered according to that theory.

Collaboration remains an intensive way of getting things done and delivering projects to a standard not possible individually. There are problems to overcome and challenges to be faced, but you are, after all, creative people. So, while it may seem difficult to leap a hurdle, the collective brainpower and innovation of a determined group can do wonders.

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More information about Bracket can be found at www.bracketprojects.co.uk

Visit THECUBE’s website and find out more about the unique coworking experience that it offers:
www.thecubelondon.com

Alison Coward is the Founder/Director of Bracket. Her background is in creative business support, working as a project manager, business advisor and university lecturer. She has worked in management positions for organisations such as Hidden Art, Contemporary Applied Arts and the Enterprise Centre for the Creative Arts (ECCA). Alison is a board member of Creative Capital, and was selected as a 2010 member of the Courvoisier The Future 500 network.