Collaboration is Hard - Here's How to Learn How to Do It Well, with Songwriting as an Example

Collaboration, as it turns out, is not as simple as many may believe. It's a skill that needs to be nurtured, developed, and perfected over time. This holds true in various aspects of life, and one unexpected area where collaboration shines is in the world of songwriting. In this blog post, we'll explore how collaboration plays a crucial role in songwriting and discover valuable lessons that can be applied to other fields as well.

The Power of Collaboration in Songwriting

Solo songwriting can yield decent results, and an individual can produce some good songs. However, to create truly great music, collaboration is required.  Great music, often considered a masterpiece, can only be achieved through effective collaboration.

It's not just about co-writing lyrics and melodies but also working together on arrangements and collaborating with musicians and vocalists.

Learning from Daisy Jones and the Six

The television show "Daisy Jones and the Six" portrayed the co-writing process accurately. It demonstrated that collaboration is a challenging endeavor. Trust is the foundation upon which successful collaboration is built. Learning to trust your collaborators, their ideas, and their expertise is an essential part of the process. This is a work of fiction, loosely based on Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac. It's a good show. 

Practice Makes Perfect

Collaboration is a skill that requires practice. In the world of songwriting, songwriters actively seek out songwriting groups to hone their collaborative abilities. These groups often provide prompts and encourage members to work together on a song. It's through these experiences that songwriters learn not only how to write good songs but also how to collaborate effectively.

Letting Go of Control

One of the most critical aspects of collaboration is being willing to let go of control. Collaborators must be open to sharing their ideas and embracing the fact that their project may take a different direction than originally intended. In fact, you often have to let your project get torn apart and put back together in a different way.

I find it's helpful to remind myself that I can always revisit my original ideas at a later time. I'm not losing anything; I'm simply opening myself up to other ideas. I'm adapting, evolving and learning something new.

Embracing Revisions and Experimentation

Songwriting is a craft that often involves writing an entire song only to extract a single line that can be used to create an even better composition. This process reflects the importance of experimentation, openness to being wrong, and a focus on the final product over personal ego. Sometimes, the best ideas come from the most unexpected places.

It's Okay to Write Crap

Lastly, it's important to understand that it's perfectly okay to write subpar material. In fact, writing less-than-stellar songs is a valuable part of the learning process. These "less successful" attempts serve as stepping stones to better work and contribute to personal growth and development as a songwriter and collaborator.

Conclusion

Collaboration is indeed challenging, but it's a skill worth mastering. Songwriting exemplifies how learning to collaborate effectively can result in exceptional art. By seeking out collaboration opportunities, practicing the art of letting go, embracing revisions, and being open to experimentation, individuals in any field can enhance their collaborative abilities and, in turn, achieve more remarkable outcomes. So, whether you're a songwriter or a professional in any other area, remember that collaboration is a journey that leads to greatness.

Changing Directions - and Asking for Help

 One of the great things about being human is - we can change our minds. If our situations change, we can - change. If we are failing? We can change.

That doesn't mean that change is easy. It isn't. First, we have to admit, what we are doing isn't working. Maybe it never worked. That's hard to admit sometimes. But it's the first step to being able to change what you are doing.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. My husband is nearing retirement. We are now thinking about what we want the next phase of our lives to be. And I've had to admit to myself that I have failed to meet the goals I had set for myself. I wanted to change the way harassment and bullying is taught so that we use - science - so that we can actually fix the darned problem. I've failed to do that. Not for lack of trying. 

I also failed to get my company, Humanist Learning Systems to the point I wanted to get it to. I've decided that is ok too.  What I really like doing is content creation. Creating the training programs and sharing them. I'm lousy at marketing and sales. I need help in that regard.

What acknowledging these things has allowed me to do - is to go out and find partners that can help a) promote this work and b) run the parts of the business I don't enjoy so that when we retire, my work will continue to be taught.

The amazing thing about having done this? I'm making more money than I did when I was doing it all myself. And, I will be saving money because I won't need to manage my own learning management system myself. 

I'm pretty excited to make more money by doing less of the annoying work and more of the fun work. But to get to this point, I had to admit to myself, I was failing to achieve my objectives. I also needed to set out clear objectives for what I want to do and have in the future. 

If you want to take any of my online courses visit- https://humanistlearning.com/  You can take a certified course for continuing education at my partner LearnFormula, you can view the videos at Vimeo, or you can get them as a book, ebook or audio book. 

Thanks for your continued support. PS - if you want to view any of my course videos at Vimeo - check them out below.

Change Management Failures

It seems like my entire career has been about managing change in some form or another.  I have been involved in several start ups and have transformed volunteer systems and business systems.

For instance, When I started at the LASPCA I inherited10 volunteers whose job was to spy on staff. In three years I grew the program to over 500 volunteers donating 20,000 hours a year in every department in our agency.

In business, I helped take an acquisition department doing 2 deals a month and helped turned it into a half billion dollar company completing 8 acquisitions a week because we changed our processes successfully. We used to get wannabee consultants come in – and when we asked them how many deals they could close – most said 2 a month. We were doing 8 a week – the average price of the deal was $250k. At one point I calculated that my team was generating $12k in new revenue for our company every hour.  I’m good at this.

I was recently approached by a reporter who wanted to know more about my experiences with change management Here are her questions and my answers.

1) What is the worst change management failure you have witnessed?

Every attempt to stop harassment in the workplace ever. Seriously – every major company does training and it doesn’t change anyone’s behavior. We are doing this on a national level. We have laws to do this. And … it has totally failed to create any meaningful behavioral change. We even doing online training now – still doesn’t work.  And yet – we still do the same thing over and over again – despite it not working.

Why do most attempts at change fail? Because the people leading the effort don’t understand the process of how behaviors are learned and more importantly unlearned. They plan for the best – roll out the new product or system and it’s not adopted.   There are several reasons for this.

First: Failure to understand the needs of the customers.  My father – Christopher Shaw, editor of the Sigplan Notices, once said – “design a system even a fool can use and only a fool will want to use it.” If the system doesn’t work right for the real people using the system no one will use it.  Failure to do your research and build a better system means failure. Before you even start – you need to make sure what you are asking people to do makes sense.  I have literally had people come to me to propose systems that don’t work. At all. Not even during the showcase. I have no idea what they were thinking, but … if your system doesn’t work better than my existing system and you don’t even know that your system doesn’t work – you are an idiot.  (*Sorry – pet peeve – I once had a team come in to pitch a GIS analysis system and the maps they showed me were brown. Like – a brown screen. Not a map – just – big brown rectangle with no distinguishing features – just – brown. I had to ask them to create differentiations between the layers just to see if what they were telling me their system could do, it could do. Not surprisingly – it couldn’t.)

Second: Failure to treat your humans as humans. This may come as a shock – but humans aren’t robots. You can’t just – reprogram them.  They have insecurities, prior knowledge base and most importantly habits. Habits are hard to break and we resist changing them unless we absolutely must. The reason people are still using XP is because the cost of changing is greater than the reward.  Microsoft had to stop supporting the software and people still didn’t change.  It doesn’t matter that 10 is a pretty cool operating system. People are only changing when their computers stop working.  In order to get people to adopt change you have to a) stop allowing the old thing to work and b) make the rewards for the new thing great enough to overcome the cost of doing things the old way.

Third: Repetition matters.  There is a saying in marketing and sales – you have to expose your customer to something 10 times before they even start to pay attention. The same is true with habit formation and change management is ALL about habit formation.  When you are helping people transition from one system to another – you have to provide repetition for people to learn what you want them to learn. Some examples of this. My sister works at a hitech firm out in LA. Large – 10,000+ employees. They changed their email system and for 3 months, the training department sent out reminder emails with information about what the new system could do and encouraged people to try out the new features. This repetition worked.  I am currently using Windows 10. I don’t browse in Edge though and every time I open up Chrome – Windows reminds me to try Edge. This repetition is a way to encourage me to use their system. It hasn’t worked yet – mostly because they disabled flash apps and there are things I can’t do in it. So – system failure.  A final example of repetition in tech adoptions. I have been playing Breathe of the Wild on Nintendo Switch. Whenever a screen change occurs we get “tips” about how to use the system better. How to fight bad guys better. Customers can’t be expected to remember all the whistles and bells put into a good system, so these built in reminders help. Eventually – I try out these things and add them into my repertoire of knowledge on how to use the system.

 2) What is a "low hanging fruit" / easy win that companies often miss in change management?

There are early adopters and laggers in any change management process. The low hanging fruit are the people with the least invested in the old system. People willing to try something new. These will give you the first chance to see how the system works in the real world with real people and give you feed back so you can tweak it and make it better for the next set of adopters. One of the mistakes companies make is they roll it out – hoping everyone will adopt it and don’t bother to do early testing with real people. Your low hanging fruit of early adopters are great beta testers and are usually kinder to you when the system needs tweaking.

Even with behavioral change – I roll it out in stages.

3) For tech leaders/executives, what is the most significant blindspot/misunderstanding of change management?

Humans aren’t robots. You can’t just reprogram us. We resist change. This doesn’t mean we are bad people or stupid. It just means we are instinctually programmed to resist change and there are number of behavioral reasons why change is hard for us. Understanding that resistance is a normal part of the process helps leaders view what is happening when staff resist as normal and not something to worry about. It’s something to work through. Plan for it. And if you don’t understand the science of why people resist change and what that looks like in real life – learn it.

4) What is an "early warning sign" that change management is likely to fail or produce poor results?

Arrogant managers who don’t bother to get input from various people to even know that what they are proposing is stupid. For people to adopt change  - the new way has to be significantly better than the old way and it has to solve a real problem that the old way has.  If you are too arrogant to find out you may be an idiot – you will set yourself up for failure. Good managers understand that they don’t know everything and seek out input so that their decisions are informed by real people and reality and not just their inflated ego.

Arrogant managers also fail to understand why resistance is happening. They tend to take the resistance personally – when that’s not what is happening at all. Humble managers understand that resistance is normal and something that has to be worked through. Arrogant managers throw their hands up – decide everyone else is an idiot and give up.

For me – the angrier and more arrogant a manager is about the change process – the more likely the change process is going to fail.

When I know for sure it’s going to fail is not from the “backlash” the change creates, but from how the managers are responding to that backlash. Again, the backlash is normal. Good managers and leaders help their teams work through it. Bad ones – get angry and give up. And that’s when I know it’s going to fail. Backlashes in behavioral science terms are called extinction bursts or blow outs. They are akin to an explosion. They can get really bad and really nasty. And all of this is normal. It’s part of the change process. It’s what change looks like – always. People who don’t understand that – fail.

If you want to learn more about change management from a behavioral perspective - take my course Why is Change So Hard which discusses how to get old behaviors to stop so that new behaviors can be adopted.

 https://humanistlearning.com/change1/