NETRoots R&D | Reflections & Revolutions: My Creativity Moves Best in Collaboration

My Creativity Moves Best in Collaboration

My Creativity Moves Best in Collaboration

The question from our R&D session I keep coming back to is how to make this work deeply, in a way that reflects the methodology I'm developing, working across intersections, and how does it feel in your body? How do you know you're doing it?

What I want to hold onto is that the medicine we need is often inside the stories themselves. This story tells me something about myself as I hear it and feel it. I heard this retelling and it made me think of this other thing, and that connected to this third thing.

That's how sparks fly. That's how we begin to map our own connections and the ecosystems we move in. The story shower isn't only weather, it's also a mirror, a key, a doorway. The recognition is the medicine.

On the heels of attending NPN's 2025 conference and joining session two, a connection surfaced. "Story showers" landed for me inside the larger frame of Stormshaping, NPN's 2025 theme: Adaptation, Resistance, Reimagination. Stormshaping calls us to not simply weather the storms but to reshape our world through collective strength, imagination, and solidarity. Storms carry a negative rep, but ecosystems shape storms and storms shape ecosystems back. The practice is learning to move with the weather patterns of our lives, our work, our environments, not against them. Stories carry the same elemental force as storms. They clear, they destroy what no longer serves, they re-orient us, they connect us. The story shower C.U.T.E. described creating could be a tangible way we pilot that. Step into a localized weather of narrative, let it move through you, and you're rehearsing on an intimate scale what coalition does at a collective one. Story showers could be an embodied form of practicing and experiencing Stormshaping.

One body at a time, one story at a time, building the muscle memory for how we move with disruption and discover new outcomes.

I left the R&D session wondering what sound and noise patterns people will experience inside the story showers. The texture of the audio is going to shape the felt sense of the encounter as much as the content of the stories themselves.

Claudia's framing of civilization's cycles of collapse and rebirth, the need to preserve and share stories through networks that resist erasure, stuck with me. It made me think of the Maya, who held that worlds have life cycles, and how our organizations and ensembles hold that same wisdom, whether we name it or not. So much of the practice of collaboration is bearing witness and remembering, and returning to ancient wisdom- using portals to remember and return. The meeting point and place of old and new technology, that’s what the portals are.

I also appreciated the pacing in the second half of session two. Scarlett Kim used the fast pace as a creative tool to prevent over-analysis and promote spontaneous expression, and it made me think about how devising sometimes has to be quick and dirty: get the first bad draft out, trust your instinct, refine and make sense of it later. That permission to move before you're sure is itself a design principle. Time, texture, speed, small, large. Underneath all of it was the permission to fail. The room metabolized difference into momentum, especially around the framing of failure as a forward-looking value, and sometimes a necessary catalyst for transformation.

Between session one and session two, the work moved from atmosphere to architecture. Session one built the world. Session two began to pull it into form, and that shift, from generative to convergent, is where I tend to come alive.

My creativity moves best in collaboration.

Session two reaffirmed it. I experienced once again that this is where the connections I carry quietly become visible, often because someone else's idea brushes up against mine and I see the parallel for the first time, or a different articulation makes me go aha. or the “this too, I know to be true” resonance that inform my practice and work so developing ideas alongside people is a creative need of mine, not a nice to have a need.