How we are with the book
Sometimes we’re needed to fill in the gaps to find clarity and perspective over what we’re making and why.
Last time, I wrote about potential and possibility using this Treasure hunting journey as an example, maybe as an excuse as well, in a way, to get myself into writing about what I’m making with my team.
I want to tell you how I’m with this project. How I’m struggling with balancing potential, possibility and sustainability. How we’re as a team with this project. How we’re doing.
I’m feeling growing pains everywhere; in myself, my baby, my partner, my team and all the projects we’ve been working on. And this making a book to celebrate our hometown project, isn’t an exception.
I think I’ve never felt so many contrasting emotions since I became a mom. Maybe I was never so open to welcoming emotions until now, let alone observing them as they are without judgement to be able to see through them, to use them.
I’ve been growing into a mom, a partner, a team member, a leader of a project; and all the roles begged me to practice vulnerability. I was never a runner, but I would hide away sometimes when I would get stuck on doubts, unable to be in uncertainty and to make decisions.
The thing is: when we commit ourselves to make anything meaningful to us, we’re also committing to a certain level of quality, hopefully shared as an expectation and a direction with the people we’re making it; we’re also committing to put ourselves in a vulnerable position to be able to work with uncertainty, with chaos, discomfort, and to make conscious decisions, to fail better at each try.
My team and I, we’re going through a painful moment; where we’re all wanting to commit to stay here, embracing the pain and working through what it can still be afterwards. But we’re all also at different levels, rhythms, struggling with our patterns, bad habits and doubts; sometimes stuck to aspirations; not knowing where to fit emotions; not being always honest about our limitations and wanting to do even more things; not taking care of ourselves as we should as a way to be prepared for the level of intensity and quality we need to achieve our goals; not knowing exactly where we each stand in the project; not sharing how we feel about it early enough and enough times along the process.
We know and we study all of this at the same time, using our projects as experiments and tools, to make questions and gather enough insights that would guide us through the next steps in everything we want to make together. And we’ve been sucking at this last part, failing to convert them into shared memory, perspective, and possibility even.
I’m needing to fill in some gaps between our proposal with this project, our aspirations for it, how we made it happen, where we’re with it now and where to go from here; as a team. I want to document, to create a memory of what we’ve been making and how; for myself and my team to have somewhere to go back and revisit the experience, to remind ourselves of how we came here, to mourn unmet aspirations, to remember challenges, to revisit decisions, to celebrate achievements, to find perspective and motivation, to gather insights and learnings, to heal and to recover from such an intense journey.
Today, what I’m sharing with you is also a follow up for my team on the last decisions we’ve made for this project, who I invite to read and comment with your insights and questions, contributing with your perception and knowledge.
I’m guessing that everything is a little more complex than what I’m most probably able to describe; but I’m giving it a try because it gives context to the decisions we’ve made, which are:
We’re pushing the books out to production this week. Both the english version and the second batch of the portuguese version. The last one without making any adjustments to the previous printed version; because now every week passed without pursuing it may mean months of getting to where we set we would get with this project: having all the books pre-order delivered; and because our team can’t afford any more delays, risking our motivation and will to keep making things together, for this project and any other.
We’ll keep selling books until we’ve all its production costs covered.
We’re lowering our expectations over the future of this project, and although we’re still entertaining the idea of a next phase for it and having more conversations on if we want and how we’re going to sustain it, we’re not adding anything else to our to-dos, besides maybe the EN launch.
We’re preparing a funding application for the GAL Oeste Costeiro - MAR 2030 program, to submit in the next couple weeks.
I’ve been leading this project within the team for the past year; which for us at Komuhn means that something is somewhat out of our proposed ways of working together, since we rotate roles quite often as part of our approach to becoming a stronger and more resilient team, building and sustaining meaningful long term projects.
We haven’t been rotating for a while now and this experience has both confirmed us the importance of this method for both the projects’ sustainability and quality of progress and for how we see ourselves as a team; and, in this case specifically, it gave me the opportunity to stay long enough to learn and go through the pains of leading a project in its different stages, studying the impact of my decisions in the project and in its both teams1, especially those I made by not making them.
This experience made me realize how vulnerability is essential for leadership, for organization, for connection, for healthy relationships and projects. It became so visible how I can’t go through any process without first getting in touch with my emotions and transforming them into fuel for making sense, for direction.
Besides Komuhn and Largo2, this is our longest project so far and it has been also affected by our growing cycles and challenges as a team. It’s also a self-proposed project, as most of our projects; we’re our own and main clients. This adds another layer of responsibility and complexity for a team’s organization.
For a long term project to progress and a team to thrive with it, a lot more is dependent on its organization than on its production. About ⅔ is on managing the team’s expectations, energy and motivation: revisiting proposals, discussing challenges, making decisions, documenting, involving everyone participating in all its developments. Next is doing it all again, and again, as everything changes at a higher speed than we can most of the time fully process and comprehend.
Although it doesn’t feel like we’ve been doing a good job at it lately, because we've been so involved in the making and neglecting its organization in phases - sometimes more consciously than others; that’s how we got here.
Here means:
As we often say, to bring perspective on the challenges of a long term project:
This book survived almost five years and two wars and their direct consequences on the production budget.
It endured the birth of three beautiful babies in the team.
We started with a publisher and became one in the end. The book is a self-publication to keep the quality we were aiming for and its final cost at 19€. We had to take care of part of its promotion, sales, handling (glueing maps to covers and assembling the books in a bundle) and delivering the books as well.
The Portuguese version of the book is in our hands.
We’ve started many conversations about our community’s identity as was our intention with this project.
The english version of the book is in the making, almost too late to still publish it this year.
The team and our most dear project Komuhn are fighting to breathe, for building capacity to sustain how we want to come together; struggling with motivation and confidence.
I would also add now that the book outlived a team crisis.
Making this book has taught me more than I could ever imagine. Having it in my hands doesn’t feel enough just yet. I want more for it and I also want more from it. This is also a scary feeling, because it’s challenging; and addictive to some extent. I may just get stuck there and lose track of what we wanted to achieve with it in the first place and how it stands in connection to everything else we’ve been wanting to make together as a team. And what I want above everything else at this moment is my team to:
Feel proud of what we’ve achieved, which is matching our goal of having both versions of the book out;
Transform the disappointment into resolve, instead of compensating them with adding more parts to the project; by coming here, gathering insights of the process, documenting and sharing it. Some of the disappointments were:
The project became unsustainable for our team to pursue it without it costing us a level of investment in capacity that we didn’t have and that would have the progress of Komuhn on hold. And we didn’t make the questions we needed to in useful time to predict, adjust our capacity and/or find other solutions to make it happen.
Not finding enough partners to support and sustain the project and realizing that the city doesn’t have the resources to sustain it yet. And maybe never will.
We weren’t yet able to pay all the translation, revision and production costs.
We haven't met all our expectations on quality, ie:
We couldn’t keep the full team present, motivated and involved in all its phases.
We didn’t update the PT version for the second printing, with the corrections we wanted.
Work with the pain of going through with it until where we’ve set we would, by committing to publish both versions (PT and EN), deliver all the books that were pre-ordered by our supporters and partners, and by making sure we pay all the production costs by finding a few more partners and selling the remaining books.
Now, I’m feeling both sad and confident about the decisions we’ve made, which have us prioritizing our team within the project itself. And this means that, in practice, we’re also dealing with the pain of having one team member being brave enough to break a harmful pattern of our team for us to keep upgrading our ways of working together as we decided we wanted to - which is also what brought us together in the first place. By reducing to the bare minimum any expectations of his involvement and participation in the project, which often means that he takes over because he has more experience with everything, he’s forcing us to organize, make decisions and assume full responsibility for them, making proposals for how to deal with its consequences and making sense of what we’re doing and why. We’ve to learn how that is affecting and contributing to the project, the team, and ultimately, Komuhn, which is still patiently waiting for us to make a decision to pursue it with the needed intensity to become tangible; while we look after ourselves in the process.
Sometimes we’re needed to fill in the gaps to find clarity and perspective over what we’re making and why.
Not every story has that one creamy, delicious finale; maybe most of them don’t, and for sure half of those stay adrift waiting for the next page, or someone to pay attention. I suspect that meeting endings isn’t the reason why anyone reads anything; nor makes anything. And that’s where I want to be; to where we get to find ourselves in the process of reading, working, eating, playing, sleeping, caring; making anything that we (humans) do. It’s where I want to stay.
This is a neverending story.
Komuhn is composed by me, Kako, Pedro, Riikka and Tita; and the project’s team by all of us and all its direct collaborators: Ângela, Hélio, Marco e Rui.
