Image: flickr.com
Never work with your friends is touted as one of the golden rules of business but the advice doesn’t hold true for creative collaboration.
One study found that collaborations based on friendship have more intense social activity, frequent conflict resolution, effective task performance, greater equality, mutual liking, closeness, and loyalty. Another study also found that friends collaborating is associated with productivity, learning gains, and social and emotional growth.
​Working with friends is not without its challenges. ​For one thing, a friendship with your work collaborators can decrease productivity ​because friends are prone to engage in more off-task behaviour – in other words, friends enjoy each other’s company too much.
There is also an observed tendency for friends to disagree on topics of low importance, yet find it difficult to critique ideas when it comes to important decisions, even when debate would be more useful to the success of a project.
But many iron out the kinks and make friendship collaborations work. Speaking at the recent Craft and Design as a Career session at Craft Cubed, Lee Darroch and Vicki Couzens how they been successfully collaborating for over 20-years working with Indigenous communities and developing art projects.
‘The basis of our collaboration is a long standing friendship. To me that is really important. We are good friends and I also collaborate with people who are family. Working with people that you meet and click with is key,’ said Darroch.
Also experiencing first-hand the benefits of friendship collaborations is felt artist Cat Rabbit and animator Isobel Knowles. Together they are the creators of Soft Stories, which publishes children’s books, creates animations and creates regular exhibitions.
Meeting through mutual friends, the two had a mutual love for creating imaginary worlds and their first collaboration was an animation Owl Know How, which led to being approached by publishers.
Being good friends ‘makes it easy’, said Rabbit.
‘A lot of the time craft can be quite isolating – you are doing your own practice and working alone in a studio, so it is great to sometimes bring someone else into that world and just work together.’
Knowles agrees and enjoys being able to share the ups and downs. ‘With that companionship, one of the great things is that when you have successes, you have someone to get excited with you – and when you have problems, you have got someone who knows exactly where you are coming from, has an equal investment and equal motivation to sort it out.’
Two heads are better than one
Much like any collaboration, working with friends means that you can play to your different strengths, as well as share skills and learn from one another.
Working on projects that are quite labour intensive, Knowles and Rabbit find the partnership and skill-sharing useful.
‘It can be a bit of give and take. You might give up some of the ideas you have but you get to have two people’s influence, which can be an exciting mix,’ said Knowles.
Here’s how to find that balance and successfully collaborate with friends.
1. Start small
There is always going to be a certain amount of risk when you enter into something with another person, but Knowles and Rabbit advice is to start small.
‘It wasn’t as if we sat down and said we are going to work together for the rest of our lives,’ said Knowles. ‘We started with one project and what turned out to be a good relationship.’
2. Communication key
