Last week I articulated four preconditions which collectively create the ecology of collaboration: familiarity, trust, curiosity, and initiative.
Familiarity is a natural outcome of shared spaces and experiences. It’s the result of working alongside others, of overlapping routines, and of chance meetings. It is strongly shaped by institutions: our families, our schools, our places of worship, and our workplaces. For many, this works out reasonably well. For professional artists and creatives, though, it’s not sufficient.
If we let them grow organically, our networks tend to reflect our own limited perspectives and those we have inherited from our disciplinary traditions. Instead, building familiarity should be a deliberate process—an act of cultivation that involves expanding our circles with care, continually forming new relationships, and thoughtfully shaping an environment where meaningful collaboration can thrive. We need to go beyond what forms naturally and take an active role in creating relationships that would not otherwise take shape.
This shift from passive formation to intentional cultivation is something I’ve explored in my own work, particularly in teaching environments. For the past 15 years, I’ve watched how students—whether musicians, visual artists, or dancers—tend to build strong personal relationships within their own disciplines. This is natural, unavoidable, and essential for young artists who are confronting the major challenges of their craft for the first time.
These disciplinary communities, however, don’t always create the conditions for transformative work. They often lack perspectives needed to reach a wider audience. They litigate and re-litigate old disputes. They repeat the bad habits of their teachers. They accept the arbitrary boundaries they were presented with. These things don’t happen all the time, but they are common pitfalls of artists whose networks are mainly comprised of those doing similar work.
Building Intentional Networks
Creating a network that supports impactful collaboration involves more than simply meeting new people. It’s about understanding what’s lacking in our existing circles and making a serious effort to introduce voices that will challenge us and expand the conversation. This process requires a willingness to seek out those who operate in different contexts, and to foster connections that might at first seem remote or irrelevant.
Instead of thinking of networks as something that grow naturally through proximity or through shared interests, we can reframe them as environments that require thoughtful design. Networks are the environments that provide us with the aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional material we must ingest in order to grow and thrive as artists. If this material is homogeneous, that’s a problem. Just as we might organize a physical space to encourage spontaneous interactions, we can shape our professional and creative circles to invite a wider range of ideas and experiences.
A Wide Funnel
Not every connection will lead to close collaboration, and nor should it. Impactful projects often emerge from a broad funnel of contacts, filtering down over time to those few who will become deeply involved. This funnel is necessary because the most transformative collaborations often come from unexpected sources. The contacts that enrich our work are not always the ones we predict; they are those who challenge our assumptions or offer entirely new points of view.
Building a deliberate funnel means looking beyond the networks that form on their own and asking: What kinds of people aren’t I meeting organically? Who do I need to know in order to see this project through a different lens, or even just to get it done? It means creating spaces—whether events, gatherings, or individual meetings—where we can find these missing people. Even if many of these interactions remain fleeting, a few will take root, evolving into connections strong enough to support the rigorous demands of true collaboration.
In practice, this can require something that doesn’t come naturally to most of us (it certainly doesn’t come naturally to me): we have to find ways to initiate conversations with people before we have specific projects to propose. In practice, I have found people enormously open when I present myself using the following logic: “I am passionate about X” / “I am interested in connecting with more people who are passionate about X” / “would you be open to having a conversation about X”?
Speaking to a Broader Audience
This has an important ancillary benefit: those who engage with the world on multiple levels will make work that stands out from those in their discipline who do not. In my own field—music composition—I have encountered many composers who have truly mastered our craft and, in the process, earned considerable recognition within our field. But some of them nevertheless struggle to create work that speaks to the full range of constituencies with whom they must collaborate in order to build a sustainable career: performers, administrators, critics, funders, and the public.
Expanding familiarity helps move our work beyond the internecine squabbles of a single discipline. Truly impactful projects speak to a wider audience (even if not a numerically large audience). They resonate with those outside our immediate artistic circles. To reach this broader public, we must first cultivate networks that help us think beyond the walls of our small, if beautiful, gardens.
This is where familiarity and collaboration intersect with the idea of relevance. By engaging meaningfully and regularly with people from different fields and backgrounds, we ensure that our work becomes part of a larger dialogue—one that includes more voices and speaks to more experiences.
Cultivating Networks with Intention
Creating familiarity with a wide range of people doesn’t mean forming deep connections with everyone. Many relationships will remain at the acquaintance level, but their value lies in the breadth of perspectives they bring into our sphere. Familiarity, in this sense, is about allowing our work to be shaped by the exchange of ideas and ensuring that when we do find the right partners, it’s based on more than just shared proximity.
This approach requires patience and persistence. It means following up on a conversation that left an impression, making time to connect with someone whose background seems foreign, or attending events that have no immediate connection to our own work. Over time, these interactions build familiarity that allows for openness, vulnerability, and the willingness to take creative risks together.
In Conclusion: Building the Foundation for Real Impact
Familiarity is the first step in creating a collaborative environment. We don’t work with people we don’t know. But it’s not just about knowing more people: it’s about trying to understand them and creating connections that are strong enough to support both the successes and challenges of working together. By approaching our networks with intention, we create a foundation of familiarity that allows trust, creativity, and innovation to take root.
With this foundation in place, we can then reach beyond the concerns of a single discipline and into a broader public dialogue. This is where the true impact of our work emerges—not from simply engaging more people, but from creating projects that resonate more deeply because they are informed by a wider, more diverse set of voices and experiences.
Next week, I’ll think about how we move from familiarity to trust.
Scott