Compassionate Collaboration in a Time of Crisis

This article was originally published on LBB Online, 26/02/2025. Read here.

One could argue that making commercials as the world burns is a deeply frivolous exercise. Truthfully, one could argue that at the best of times.

But when done right, making commercials is joyful, inspiring, and elating. When finished, commercials can show us what happens when crucial messages are heard, universal truths felt, creative risks celebrated, or stomach-churning, pants-filling side effects known. Yet it's in the making of these things that I find the perfect avenue for my most highly-valued act: compassion through collaboration.

So as we blame one another for the burning of a world we all have contributed to, allow for one more frivolous exercise: let me share how compassionate collaboration has transformed my creative process, and see if it can do the same for your leadership approach.

I promise afterwards you can send me all the flaming hate mail you want.

Let's first agree: compassion = kindness + action.

My mum is Fabian Dattner, a world-renowned leadership expert. Anyone who's ever spent more than a "hello" with me finds this out pretty swiftly. I owe my existence to her in more ways than one. A framework she inspires leaders to come back to is: What's good for Me? What's good for You? What's good for We?

As just about everyone stares into a future rife with the seismic promise of one crisis or another, it seems to me we are going to need to collaborate our asses off if we are going to have any hope of getting through even one of them.

Therefore, embodying compassion through collaboration — in my opinion — is exactly what our world needs right now.

Compassion drives every choice I make as a director, because collaboration is an act of generating a safe space.

I remember years ago, standing with a fellow director outside a studio that housed a bunch of us. There, under a roasting Aussie sun, we discovered that we were both pitching on the same client.

"Oh no! My competition!" he said half-jokingly, scuffing his feet against the baking tarmac, looking away.

"Not at all, man," I countered, in an effort to make a sudden awkward evaporate. "In it together. Where one of us wins, we all win."

He smiled like he didn't quite believe me, but it did help cool things off.

In that moment though, I realized I believed it: community over competition. Make safe the space that feels fraught. We win every time.

Without security, collaboration can't flourish. Without collaboration, creativity can't flourish. Without creativity, solutions can't flourish. Authoritarian vision can flourish, and creativity might obey, but ask the people who swear to never work with assholes again and you might see the impact of the absence of compassion.

So yes, compassion drives every choice I make as a director, but it's not always from my own wellspring.

Last year when I was given boards for a commercial to pitch on, I had vented half-heartedly to my producer about how undercooked the script was. My producer could have agreed and added to the foment, but instead she gently reminded me that we have no idea the amount of pressure creative teams can be under from their higher-ups, good ideas whittled down to the equivalent of a half-drunk can of tepid LaCroix.

Right away I found my vent sapped of steam. Instead, I was encouraged anew to burrow down into the core of their aspirations, rebuild the concept, and deliver it rewritten but in honor of their intentions and journey. I ended up with one of the best decks I'd ever pitched, won the job, shot three of the most ambitious days in recent memory, and gave the team spots their client decided to buy Super Bowl and Oscars air time for.

Help authors of a half-baked idea see what can be. Ask questions. Answer the ones you are equipped to answer. Help bring all their own ambitions, dreams, and desires to it, and whatever project you're shaping will find a shelf life beyond all estimates.

The same might be said for any movement, really.

I wrote and shot a commercial for the stage show Hamilton a couple of years back, and I made it our mission to be a purposefully diverse cast and crew, so that everyone could look from one side of the camera to the other and see faces like their own reflected back.

It resulted in the most electric, professional, and productive shooting experience I'd ever had — and with an unstoppable spirit of compassionate collaboration to match.

But it took some discussions along the way, fears that we'd hire based on skin color over merit. For those unused to it, DEI gets confused with tokenistic affirmative action. But at its core, DEI is all about benefit (or "profit" for those in the back). The deeper the well you can call on to understand a problem, the better your ways of knowing what can come next — a factor that lies at the heart of collaboration. Better ideas come with as broad a chance of ingenuity as possible: I'm 6'8" and a bit. If I was influencing all the countertops in the world, my old 4'6" landlord could never have reached her stove, and I would have suffered for lack of her delicious home cooking.

It's exactly why I make sure my TikTok algorithm keeps serving me black and brown and trans and queer, because my education is so much richer. It's exactly why I love writing stories and casting faces that reflect existences beyond my own, because the narrative possibilities are so much bigger. It is exactly why I love working with women and PoC DPs, because when we both frame up a scene through one eye, it's binocular via two very different vantage points.

Diversity in perspective, diversity in ideas, diversity in benefits.

Mostly though, at the heart of all collaboration lies the need to have compassion for yourself.

Work on having compassion for your struggles, your fears, your failures, the moments you feel lost or the moments you feel cornered. Develop compassion for your ambitions and compassion for your first halting steps towards those ambitions. Even compassion for the times you don't feel like being compassionate, remembering that in the end your highest form of self comes in a compassion-shaped box.

Because what happens when compassion rules supreme? You feel heard. I feel heard. You feel safe. I feel safe. You are empowered, I am empowered. Your world prospers, My world prospers, Our world prospers.

I, You, We.

Compassion — ultimately — makes safe the great unknown, because it's ok for us all to fail as we work towards the lessons we need to learn. For when we are ok with failure, we are capable of taking risks; we open up to new ideas, inviting solutions from beyond our comfort zones to make the great and seismic future safe to explore.

And in a world that feels (depending on which side you're on) either on fire or at risk of fire, that is everything.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Agree? Disagree? Vehemently either way? Let me know!