Creative Friction

There's a pattern that I've seen show up again and again in pretty much any creative process—whether it's in startups, education, or my own collaborative work—which can be somewhat counter-intuitive.

That, when you hit a point of friction, you need to keep pushing even harder, almost as if you're trying to drive through a wall.

The reason for this isn't that you're attempting to brute force your way through the wall, it's that the willingness to consider that there's even a path forward will take you through an experience that will help you find a way around it.

My friend Jon Kolko wrote about this years ago in his essay: Simplicity on the other side of complexity:

The place you land on the right—the simplicity on the other side of complexity—is often super obvious in retrospect. That's sort of the point: it's made obvious to others because you did the heavy lifting of getting through the mess.

I saw it come up again in this wonderful Actors on Actors dialogue between Sandra Oh and Kerry Washington.

Sandra says:

There would be scenes that I would just go, I don’t know, 10 rounds on, and I know I was difficult. And I really respect all the writers there who rode it out with me.”

“What does that mean, you would go 10 rounds?” Washington asked.

But just the friction itself, a lot of times a third thing would come out, and it would not be in my sight of consciousness at all; it would take that pushing against someone equally as strong. I started to learn how to trust that.

This is one of the hardest things to do because it requires a tremendous amount of trust and faith between collaborators.  You have to both understand that the pushing and the relentlessness isn't coming from a place of dominance or stubborness, but hope that another idea, option, or direction will emerge.

And the pushing is such a necessary aspect of the process because you can't achieve the same outcome alone, it'd be like trying to push a string.

Unfortunately, like most things in life, just being willing to dig in isn't a guarantee of a successful outcome.  And so, to make this a repeatable process, you need to have fostered a true partnership—one that can not only sustain that friction, as Sandra calls it, but one that can survive it even when it fails to produce a better option.

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