Freestyle Love Supreme is an improvisational hip hop group, co-founded by Anthony Veneziale and Lynn Manuel Miranda. Starting as a improve hip-hop performance troupe, it has gone all the way to Broadway, Las Vegas and a television series.
Freestyle Love Supreme now has an educational offshoot, Freestyle+ which trains people on how to open themselves up, sharpen their minds, and improve their creativity through the principles of freestyle rap. Freestyle+. Does amazing work and has even developed technology to help focus cognitive skill building in adults. While that is very interesting, I'm more interested in how the performance unfolds and rather than the impact it has on the individual, the impact it has on the group and collaboration.
Typically five people take the stage when Freestyle Love Supreme performs. One person is the beat box. They lay down a rhythm with their mouths, creating a pattern that the rest of the group responds to and interacts with. Like other improvisational performances, the troupe take acknowledgements and suggestions from the audience and they weave those words and those ideas into a freestyle rap anchored by the beatbox’s rhythm.
One of the amazing things that happens here is that they do this together. This is not just one person rapping. They tell stories in a rap that connects and extends each other’s verses. They reach back into previous moments in the performance and resurface ideas into the current moment. Through all of this, there is a magical collaboration going on, and I say magical because it's different than anything I have seen or heard discussed about collaboration.
Freestyle Love Supreme creates a collaborative product the spotlight shifts from person to person. The focus is not on the group, but on the individuals. Conversations about collaboration often miss what Freestyle Love Supreme gets: collaboration is not just everyone putting a unified goal ahead of their own goals. Collaboration best is when we take our individual goals, bring them together and work towards them and a collective goal. We take our individual performances and weave with each other to create something greater that accomplishes more than we can accomplish by ourselves, but also doesn't ignore what we want to accomplish for ourselves.
Creating success through spotlighting one another is a strategy that has academic support as well. Researchers examined strategies to win at an economic game and found that when the players were in teams, the highest score was achieved when the team worked together to elevate one member.
The example of Freestyle Love Supreme was part of my inspiration for Authentic Collaboration (so much so my first idea was "Supreme Collaboration"). Their performances serve as an example of celebrating and elevating individuals in the group while achieving the shared goal. How can you do this yourself? It takes some specific actions:
Knowing the shared goal and your own
Being willing to take the spotlight and share your ambitions with the group
Being ready to support your team in their individual goals.