Aboard the learning boat: How to walk out of a meeting

I would never trust anyone who told me that they always achieve their New Year’s resolutions. Anyone who claims that must either have very few aspirations, be lying, or be worryingly closed to life's little distractions.

This year I made mine walking along by the Thames. Actually this year I think I have a decent chance of getting close to achieving it too. I have resolved to learn how to be a better collaborator.

You can come to my aid, in fact, by doing something surprisingly simple – gather some people you work with, a team that you will be collaborating with this year, and walk out of a meeting.

In the interests of your job prospects though do read on first.

I have some degree of determination of course, but the main thing I have in my favour with this year’s resolution is a boat.The Learning Boat floats in a dock in Battersea. From small beginnings a few months ago the project has grown into something quite special. The idea behind the Learning Boat is to gather together a diverse range of people, in order to explore what it is to live and work better. In one respect it is a floating co-working space with a really wide range of companies onboard – from people working in the arts, media, sustainability, CSR, academia and far beyond. In another sense the Learning Boat is a place to gather ideas as much as people, and see what happens.

Aside from the space people share, everyone involved takes on an enquiry question. For me it is how to achieve my resolution: How can I be a better collaborator?

Also yes – it is actually a real boat. In an age where so much is virtual and mediated, people are often surprised that there is nothing metaphorical about the Learning Boat. We know there isn’t – sometimes it leaks.

Over the forthcoming weeks, different members of the project will be sharing some of their thinking, the progress of their own enquiries, and the progress of the Learning Boat project on the ArtsProfessional blog.
So here’s how you can help me – walk out.

Most people in the arts have had a tough time in 2011. In 2012 they know they need to collaborate. It might be brainstorming, it might be facilitated, it might involve a flipchart. What it will definitely be is a bunch of you in a room sealed from the world for a period of time.

This year, aside from a certain games festival in East London, is also Dickens’ two-hundredth birthday. There is something worth noting in the great man’s creative process – it is called walking. While he was writing Dombey and Son Dickens was walking fourteen miles a day. As he became engrossed in drafting A Christmas Carol he wrote that he ‘walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed.’

In 2011 all kinds of people were beginning to unpick the way collaboration works, or is supposed to work, in organisations. For a start take a look at the big corporates going ‘email free’ and avoiding all the mis-communication, wasted time, and bad collaboration that happens in inboxes.We need to take the same approach with meeting rooms. The idea that because you get a bunch of people around a table they are going to collaborate effectively is a myth. The unspoken fact we all kind of know is this: most meetings are not creative. So maybe we should look for some alternative ways to get ideas flowing.

So take your team and walk together.

I imagine you can talk and walk (unless you are daytime TV presenters). Hell, you can still write things down (if the number of people I walk into while they are texting are anything to go by). The most important thing is you get out and you think together, discuss together, outside of a little room (some might say box). Where big open thinking is involved, the kind you need when you want to write a genre defining novel, then the street is a better place to be.

What better statement can there be for the year ahead; what finer way to say we are not just going to do things better but we are going to do things differently, in 2012?

Oh, and how does this help me? Well, tell me what happens, together with any other tips you have for unpicking collaboration in creative organisations at my email address below. I’ll collect your ideas together and see if they work within the Learning Boat.

So let this be the first thing you learn in 2012 – if you want to be a better collaborator: walk out.