How to set expectations and manage creative control

Chris Anderson of TED may have said it best, “Every meaningful element of human progress has happened only because humans have shared ideas with each other and then collaborated to turn those ideas into reality.”

Collaboration is the lifeblood of storytelling, because great stories come from and are developed and shared by communities of people. You can trace storytelling itself back to its roots in sharing information and cultural heritage across generations of people who added to and developed their ongoing stories. Great voices tell great stories, and the more voices you can bring together, the stronger your narrative becomes. 

Any collaboration is a dangerous endeavour. I say that because I know how strong willed and hard headed creative people can be. Creative people like myself. Oh, don’t worry - I have no illusions about how stubborn I get when an idea takes hold. I am an only child, after all!

I may be a stubborn child, but I also know that when you have competing ideas and competing inspirations, different approaches and methodologies, there is always going to be ground given and ground taken. I have been producing films and building stories for years now, and in that time I have learned this: no matter how well you are working together in any form of creative collaboration, there will always be some level of friction when you have two people who are passionate about what they’re making. 

And passion is good! You want that! Friction can be a really great asset if you set things up right from the beginning. You can tell when a piece of work has come from that place of great passion, because it has a spark that makes it stand out, a spark that makes it resonate with everyone who touches it. But that passion doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it can be a difficult balancing act. 

I know from my own experience of coming together with creative partners, that when you combine passion with paradigms, a struggle for creative control can develop. Even if you’re not conscious of it, not pushing each other to fight over it, there’s still going to be a natural competition between your visions. 

It comes down to the DNA of the project. 

A collaboration, on any story, is going to depend on a foundation of shared and common ground. It works when people can recognise the reasons they’re working together and have a combined understanding of the project itself. If you’re clashing on the very definition of the story before you even reach the execution, that friction can turn into an all-out fight for creative control. 

I have always taught that you need to understand the DNA of the story you’re telling. What is it really about? Why is it a story that needs to be told? Who has ownership of that story? What does it, and what can it mean for the people it reaches? When you’re living inside a narrative, day in and day out, it can be easy to lose track of some of these questions, while you’re weaving the ins and outs of the story itself. But they’re integral to what you’re creating. 

When you can get to a point where you all agree on the answers to those questions, you have room to move on any points of creative control; you’re all pulling for the same goals, because you’re aligned on the story you’re telling. That’s not to say that friction won’t still arise - but you’ll have a framework to handle it. 

There has to be a willingness to compromise everything except the DNA.

Collaborators can’t be so caught up in their individual approaches and concepts that they can’t budge for each other. I actually believe that compromise is an important element of creative storytelling and creative work; there is no truth to the idea that you need to be a difficult genius in order to make something great! 

But that said, compromise can’t happen at the expense of the DNA of your collective mission. When you’ve agreed on the core of the story, when you know what you’re going to tell, you can’t chop and change the DNA in order to make the execution easier. 

The good thing is that when you do have that shared understanding, you’re more able to recognise what is extraneous and what simply does not matter. There’s something wonderfully freeing about being able to say, “well, that’s not going to change the story we’re telling, so I am happy to let go.” Being able to give that ground to each other, knowing that the important ground is firm and fixed is going to give you the capacity and the margin to be more flexible in how you work and what you produce. 

This can come across in almost every element of the story and how you bring it to the world. And you might actually find that there are opportunities in being able to sacrifice each other’s instincts in the pursuit of preserving the DNA of the story. 

It’s important to set those expectations early. 

You can agree - from the outset - that you’re going to wind up struggling with each other. That’s a healthy thing in a creative partnership, to set the expectation that “thoughtful disagreement,” as Ray Dalio calls it, is a beneficial part of the process, and to be up front that you recognize a problem is going to arise at some point. I have built out a methodology for setting expectations with clients, and it's something I engage in for every film project I direct and every workshop I teach. 

It’s a methodology designed to help you express the boundaries and dimensions of your project in a way that is clear, concise and easily understood. I do this through a process of intent-setting — finding the intellectual and emotional notes that we want the audience and story participants to take away from the story. For me, this exercise is about reaching deep into a project and identifying the threads that truly matter, and then using that to define the expectations and, ultimately, the most intentional execution.

Ultimately - knowing those expectations and understanding them means that it won’t ever feel like your collaboration is falling apart as soon as a roadblock rears its head. 

Setting aside the time to work through those expectations together also gives you the opportunity to look at what you expect from the story itself, and start to delve deeper into the questions above. If you’re allowing a period of expectation-setting ahead of time, and treating it as a part of the creative process, it becomes less of an obstacle and more of a prompt that can give rise to new and better ways of working. 

You don’t know what the cracks are in your own expectations until someone you trust enough to partner with trusts you enough to point them out.