Good collaboration

Miriam Eric Suzanne explores what it means for design to be collaborative without being authoritarian, and lands upon models more commonly talked about in infoshops than product orgs. She writes, “good collaboration [is] more involved and messy than voting, or tallying a majority opinion. It requires deep engagement, and shared ownership of a vision. Let’s call it anarchist, maybe, with an emphasis on mutual aid?” I think that’s exactly right and also instructive on several levels: when we say that a team isn’t a democracy, we’re often thinking of the most anemic version of democracy: an annual ballot, with no other organizing or collective action in the months between. But real, active democracy—the kind that is largely absent from public life in the US and elsewhere—involves more inquiry, negotiation, compromise, and consensus-making. And it’s those skills that have atrophied on many of our teams, and in most of our streets. Happily, today is always a good time to practice something new.