It’s a wondrous world. Just finished Michael Ondaatje’s book about his conversations with the seminal film editor, Walter Murch, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. A companion to Murch’s own book, In the Blink of an Eye. Two books; each shedding new light on my understanding of collaboration. In my previous post, I referenced Murch’s take on cultural diversity and innovation and how it complement’s Steve Job’s legacy. 
Another Murch lens that I find inspiring is his view of collaboration as a creative process, in which collaboration’s true potential, its ultimate value, only reveals itself with time. In Murch’s own words:
One of the reasons I lobby for the increased collaboration of everyone who can have a voice on a film is that through collaboration you add facets to the work. The work is going to be seen by millions of people, over many decades and under very many different circumstances, and even though the film is a fixed things, you want it to be multifaceted so that different people will see different things in it, and come away rewarded.
The best, easiest way to get that multifacetedness is to allow the collaboration of lots of people, as well as Chance, which is sometimes Fate in costume. Each of those moments of collaboration, each contribution by someone other than the director, adds a slightly different perspective to the work, some chisel mark slightly at an angle to the central vision. and each of these moments, these facets, has the potential to make the work sparkle in a creative sense, and make it more accessible to a greater variety of people over a longer period of time.
Collaboration + Chance. Order + Chaos. Hand in hand. Brilliant. Can you see how this applies in your world?
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