“If you see yourself as an ingredient, it means you always have to be on the look out for other ingredients to work with and a recipe to combine them together. Think like an ingredient and you see you have to collaborate to get anything done.”
Charles Leadbeater
Maybe it’s because I love cooking, but the metaphor of “seeing yourself as an ingredient” suggests interesting ways to shift our view of ourselves and our relative importance in collaborative endeavours:
- What kind of ingredient am I?
- How much of me needs to go into the mix?
- What other ingredients do I need to connect with?
- What’s a good recipe for us to work on?
- What kind of experiment can we do with the ingredients we have on hand?
What shifts when you start thinking of yourself as an ingredient?