Honeyguide | Sweet Collaboration

An African proverb goes like this:

If you want to go fast, go alone.

If you want to go far, go together.

That idea shows up a lot around Flying Solo. It’s almost an inside joke how often we talk about collaboration. And no, it doesn’t mean suddenly building a huge team inside a one-person firm. It also doesn’t describe talking back to yourself.

It’s a conscious choice to shape even a solo practice around a collaborative culture. And that choice shifts how we work.

Daniel Coyle, in The Culture Code, describes strong cultures as places where people feel safe to contribute, where roles are clear, and where progress comes from shared effort rather than lone heroics. That applies just as much to a sole practitioner as it does to a large studio.

The honeyguide understands this instinctively. It holds valuable knowledge, but it doesn’t hoard it. On its own, it can find the hive—but it can’t reach the reward. Only by sharing what it knows does the work actually succeed. And share a sweet victory with its team.

When we practice this way, the architect can act as a guide to a new future that our clients can’t achieve alone. And we can’t put our plans into action without the rest of the project team’s purpose, funding, and action.

It may feel like it slows us down. In the end, we make it farther by working together.