From collaboration to co-creation in Interfaith and inter-cultural work by Justine Huxley
What’s the most exciting experience you’ve had collaborating across differences in faith, culture, and ideology? Have you ever entered into collaborative relationships and been truly surprised by the result? What enabled those experiences to happen?
In a group I facilitate at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, in London, someone recently asked, “What’s the difference between collaboration and co-creation?” Here is the answer I liked the most: In collaboration, you and your associates work together. You start off with an idea of what you want to achieve, and the result is not too dissimilar from your original idea. In co-creation, you and your collaborators are inviting in an extra element – the ‘field,’ the interrelated system around and within us, the web of life, or perhaps God (insert whatever language you use for That which is beyond yourself) – and the result is something new, something none of you could have predicted.
That description echoes my experience of working with what is called Emergent Design. There is a quality of aliveness, of being in new territory, of holding a space for something beyond ourselves to bring itself into existence, of reorganizing us and our relationships, bestowing results according to a deeper wisdom that we cannot access on our own. It is a much more exciting way to work. As my fellow co-creator at St Ethelburga, Debbie Warrener, says, “It invites more humility and less attachment to particular outcomes. It’s a way of listening to a wider deeper dimension in the creative process. Consciously bringing this in can be a powerful way to bridge differences and gently sidestep egos, competition, and more personal triggers that can come up when working closely together with others.”
Principles of creative emergence in interfaith work
How can we engage creative emergence and how can we co-create rather than simply collaborate as we do our interfaith work? What is the real importance of co-creation and emergence? Surely it must be that it enables us to create from the new now. We are at a time in human history where we cannot afford to keep endlessly damaging life. We need a new perspective, a new paradigm, rather than recreating the same problems by thinking and acting in the same way.
Emergence takes us into new, co-creative space. When we connect to the non-hierarchical patterns we find in nature, when we step outside our habitual human hubris and acknowledge what we don’t know, and when we listen deeply to the interrelated ‘field’ we live in, subtle, important change can happen. It can take us beyond our fixed and limited ideas and allow a life-force into the space that can reorganise our reality in new, sustainable ways.
Fundamentalism and barren secularism sometimes seem to trap us a world where meaning is being eroded and we are fast becoming spiritually bankrupt. The world of faith and practice needs to find ways out of the trap. And as spiritual people, these new tools ask us to surrender into the deeper trust of ‘interbeing,’ that is, supporting people to collaborate across our differences for the good of the whole. My hope for the interfaith world is that we allow ourselves to open up more deeply, be reorganised according to a greater will, and be shepherds of the new.
The principles of creative emergence and clear examples of a process that worked and another, not run along co-creative lines, that didn’t work are in the full version of this article at: www.livingspirit.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/collaboration_to_cocreation.pdf.
Justine Huxley is Director of St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation & Peace in London, where workshops are run on co-creation and emergent design. www.stethelburgas.org
