Speaker B compares co-creation to back-alley improv: after a stiff formal meeting, Patrick, John, Virginie, and others reconvened on a sidewalk and built ideas together like musicians playing a tune. Each person's contribution was picked up and developed by the next, with Virginie gently orchestrating the flow into something coherent instead of chaotic.
How about you, Jonathan? How would you describe your co-creation experience?
I think it was like a back-alley improv session in the best sense. And that could go wrong, but I mean in the best sense. It was as if— and I think we've all been to these meetings— you're in one of those meetings where there are people from lots of different organizations coming in and, uh, things go wrong in the meeting and it gets kind of crazy. Um, and everyone is thinking that, but you're not able to say anything in that moment because, you know, you've got to honor the client agreement and all that. Uh, but then you go down the elevator and you walk out onto the sidewalk outside of that office building, and you happen to see a couple of the people who were there in that meeting in the other corners, and you each exchange a look. And you know what that look means. It means, what the heck just happened there? And even though you haven't really had a direct one-to-one conversation with those people before, there's something that happens where you all say, yeah, That was really messed up. I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that. And I feel like we're coming out of a business experience, which, you know, there are a lot of things that are messed up, but then the question is, what do you do with that? You know, because you could just have a gripe session where you go to a bar and you drink a little too much and you just complain about how everyone's messed up. But it isn't that the people are messed up. It's that the process is messed up. And instead, what we've done is to go into that back alley afterwards and, you know, get out our instruments and we started to play together. And we're not all coming exactly from the same position, but what we hear are themes, like musical themes, coming from Patrick, coming from John, coming from you, Virginie. And what I've enjoyed about this is the ability of each person to pick up on that theme and then go, and then play with it and develop it and say, oh, this could become that. And somehow we're all following to make it a tune and not a raucous thing that everyone wishes would stop. So that's been something that I think is due to Virginie's gentle orchestration behind the scenes. That's a special skill that you have.
Thank you. I like the back alley metaphor. I think it feels very true.
