I had a very interesting realization yesterday about the essence of the co-creation process, which surprised me deeply.
I have a business centered around innovative co-creation processes and their endless mysteries and possibilities, so it is rare for things about co-creation to truly surprise me now.
I have been 'teaching' authentic co-creation and radical innovation to people, organizations, and even decentralized networks before I consciously understood what I was actually doing.
I built a business to continue on this specific path. My main goal (or dream) was to teach everyone interested in how we co-create a holistic system that makes sense and is coherent with who we truly are.
Recently, I realized a perplexing and interesting truth about my own life's purpose and the true reason I created a company to endlessly experiment with the concept of co-creation in all its forms and shapes.
The truth is:
The real co-creation process is unteachable.
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Co-creation is a process you need to practice repeatedly. You must become a real 'scientist' about yourself and our shared reality if you want to consciously develop your skills and authentic capacities while co-creating with others.
It's very similar to sex.
You can watch all the porn you want or listen to the personal experiences of all your friends, but there's no way you'll understand what it's about or become good at it if you never actually practice it with another human being.
You cannot know in advance if you will like it or not, or how pleasant it will be. You cannot know how good you are without asking and listening to what the other person has to say about your shared experience.
It's never the same for everyone. There is no magic recipe that will work for everyone the same way. Not everyone is into the same things, and not everyone wants to experiment in the same way.
Nothing and no one can teach you how to have sex or how to be good at it without you actually doing it, practicing it, and co-creating your own ways to give pleasure to yourself and your partner.
Co-creation in business (or anywhere else) follows the same logic.
How do you see and engage yourself in this process with others? How do you talk about it? What are your 'conditions' for co-creating with others?
What you can contribute and gain depends on your personal experience and the perspectives of the people you co-create with.
Each experience of co-creation is unique.
Like with everything else in life, there are some patterns, strategies, and tools that work better than others. But ultimately, you engage with chaos and the unlimited power of collective manifestation.
How it will go and what might come from the process of co-creation is unpredictable and highly uncertain.
The more complex and larger the 'co-creation' projects you engage in, the more risks and insecurities it will represent for you and, in some cases, for the entire system.
When you co-create for real, you consciously collaborate and play with the law of chaos in our shared reality and in your deep 'personal' systems of consciousness.
Co-creation changes you personally. It also changes the people you have been co-creating with and even our collective field of awareness.
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When I help organizations better understand and master the co-creation process, I have no choice but to embark on the consciousness journey with them. I feel the intensity of what we are doing together and face the unknown repeatedly, not knowing 100% what will happen.
Doing what I do and offering what I offer to my clients is very vulnerable and intimate for me too. I change internally and become someone else after each successful iteration of a proper co-creation process.
I don't teach anything.
I create contexts, spaces, and occasions to humbly share what I know, see, and sense from my personal experience with others. I wonder with my clients to find the most efficient and coherent way forward to answer our original intentions. But I honestly don't know more than anyone else about the actual solution to our problems. I fully surrender to the unknown and the fragile when I do co-creation projects or innovation processes with people.
I deeply experience this process with them, and it's very vulnerable for me too. I learn what emergence and the real magic of this particular co-creation experience truly are.
"Why would we invite you and pay you to come to our business co-creation party?" one might wonder.
A very fair question.
The main advantage of having me there is that I have been involved in complex co-creation processes in many different forms. I have a lot of experience navigating the unknown waters of innovation and wild creativity in business affairs.
I have seen a lot. I have experienced what works and what doesn't. I have played with many systems and networks to the point where I am no longer scared of co-creating with others.
I know those waters and feel at home there.
And I never get on the 'innovation boat' if I don't have enough confidence that we will survive and benefit in some way from our strategic co-creation process.
No matter how much money you offer me or how interesting your project sounds, if I don't see a way to navigate out of the 'chaos' phase of the co-creation process you offer me, I will not take you as my 'client' or collaborate with you.
My experience, knowledge, and personal integrity to be radically honest with you are why you would pay me.
To ensure that your co-creation process or any kind of innovation strategy does not harm your organization or business community more than it could potentially benefit both you and your entire professional ecosystem.
If we imagine navigating in the boat of co-creation together, you could see me as a flashlight that, if needed, will illuminate and show you things that are important for you to know, feel, and process to make your co-creation process more coherent, safer, and faster.
Co-creation is wild and very emotional for most people.
Our unlimited creative potential and the structure of internal power dynamics are the main invisible 'influencers' of how we do business together and our capacity to innovate.
It often takes an 'outsider' to your organization to see with precision the deepest incoherencies in your business strategy and feel the most repressed systemic trauma in your organization.
I am this 'outsider' to your organization, network, or community. I can show you the colors and textures of your own business affairs and their interdependencies that you probably don't even suspect are there.
I work and navigate in the very deep roots and structures of your organization and our collective system simultaneously.
I can show you with clarity and simple logic why your clients, team, or business partners resist any change you try to implement and how you can change it by efficiently collaborating and coherently co-creating with others in a more authentic and fun way.
I see real innovation and creativity as deeply interdependent and interconnected with our resistance to change.
This can be simply explained by the fact that the only 'blockages' to an authentic co-creation process are our past traumas. This is why emotional resistance to innovation is so acute for most of us.
This is also why co-creation processes should always be trauma-informed.
Personal changes and innovations are entangled with personal wounds and levels of trauma.
System-level co-creation, innovation, or change is entangled with systemic or collective trauma.
If you think your father's betrayal in childhood was emotionally difficult for you to get over, trust me, you don't want to know how it feels to sense the suffering of patriarchy or colonialism-related wounds in your organization with your teammates without knowing what to do with it.
The collective-level trauma, if not handled with care, wisdom, and tenderness, might consume your entire business and destroy everything around you.
This is how some 'innovations' might kill your business, while others might make your entire team a new world leader in a completely new field by co-creating something unique and meaningful.
Innovation could heal your organization and even your network from its deep systemic trauma, making the people you work with healthier, happier, and more performant. If you have the courage to engage in authentic and responsible co-creation processes with others, you can potentially change the world.
You learn together with everyone else in your team, network, or community what the co-creation process means to you, how it truly works, and how you can do it more collaboratively, coherently, and enjoyably with others. You create your own methodology, tools and strategies that works the best for you and in your own reality.
Authentic co-creation is not teachable and cannot be put into any kind of 'formula' that will work every time.
Co-creation is contextual, experimental, integrated, and consciously processed in our shared and personal consciousness in unique ways each time.
We learn together as we go. We try something. We talk about it. And we restart until we find a solution that makes the most sense to all of us.
This is how we wisely use the co-creation process and innovation strategies to manifest the system and the shared reality we all want to experience together.
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