During these first weeks of this project, I have been thinking about the concept of Collaborative Creativity and what it means to me. Especially as a team leader (責任者) I feel a particular duty to embody this concept in my activity. Therefore, in this first post I would like to share some of my considerations on the concept of Collaborative Creativity by citing a very useful article that I’ve recently read. I will not be describing in detail the goals of our activity because I would like to save that for a later post.

The title of the article itself is very telling: “Creative Collaboration: A Reality, Not Just a Buzzword”. It is a title that I pledge myself to keep in mind during this project. As a very solution-oriented person I tend to dive headfirst into problems and seek the solution by myself: that simply cannot work here. As I’ve come to realize, Collaborative Creativity must not be just a title that we showcase at the forefront but fail to embody when it comes to the core of our work. It must be the key to every step we take as members of a team aiming to the same goal.

Whilst the old saying “two heads are better than one” applies in a creative process, “too many cooks spoil the broth” can also become a reality

My team is made up by seven members, of which three of us (me included) are assigned the same task. This latter sub-team is made up by myself, Simone (a colleague with whom I’ve been working for the past semester) and Tommaso (who just recently joined us). Up until now the task we’ve been assigned has required us to question our own knowledge and to engage in constant debate, which has revealed itself to be an extremely useful tool but at the same time a hard one to manage.

I personally think working in a pair with just Simone as I’ve done in the past semester would have made the debate an uneven one. One of us would have ended up inevitably overtaking the other. However, the presence of a third unbiased party allows us to always add an objective perspective whenever a disagreement comes up, and that is essential to achieve a fair result.  

Collaboration thrives when there is an openness to embrace new practices and thinking, but also when there are rules and leaders. […] Your team members should have similar levels within the hierarchy with clearly defined roles and play by the ground rules while the team leader is not losing the focus on the expected outcome.

Defining rules and roles is certainly a hard task, especially when you’re working with peers. I have been given this task of being the leader of a group of skilled students and I often still lack the confidence of putting my own decisions above those of others. Nonetheless, I won’t budge on what I consider to be the most important goal we’re supposed to achieve: the completion of an innovative learning tool that will empower students and allow them to learn Japanese with no limits or boundaries of any kind. I must keep that in mind whenever I design a specific task, make a comment on someone’s work or even when I do my own tasks. Every little (mis)step might end up making the content more or less accessible for the students who will make use of it.

I will talk more about our goal and how we’re trying to attain it in one of my future posts.

Thank you for reading!

Reference:
Gavrilut Teodora, Creative Collaboration: A Reality, Not Just a Buzzword, in “Creatopy Blog”, 2020, https://blog.creatopy.com/creative-collaboration/, 18/02/2021