Round it comes again. This idea that somewhere in the greatest achievers in art and sport lies a dictator who feels no imperative to be consistent with protocol. I hovered over the keys at the automatic cultural need to pre-fix dictator with 'benign' there, so heavy is the term with negative connotation at this phase in human history.
Alternatively, 'dictator' can denote the one with the final say, the decision maker, the one controlling hub through which masses of factors travel, it doesn't have to mean political evil by default. We miss out on a lot in our cemented categories of thought.
Ask Mike Brearley, for example, about captaining a cricket team. If you can't find him, ask M S Dhoni about his Chennai Super Kings. Each player in their teams, each participant adds colour to the picture, and the weirdest combinations can beat the world. The smallest of alterations to the mixture can bring harmony in the right hands. Billy Beane might also demand inclusion here for a US reader as someone whose visionary sporting philosophy outreached his sport.
Within the role (of captain as with artistic collaborator) is a capacity for understanding human beings in their true individual natures and harnessing and balancing these natures with countless other variables in a mutually creative direction.
Formal education currently offers very little training for developing these skills. Studying your fellow man and woman is everything, and intuiting how to apply what you discover and sometimes, how and when to do nothing but leave conditions to play out for themselves.
This captain or collaborator keeps mixing colours, clear ones and oblique, sometimes with method that seems ineffectual or even futile to bystanders. It's pretty easy to start applying this beyond sport and art too once you start but it is sport and art we practice through, where the dangers matter less and where we more readily accept a certain brand of inventive 'leader'.
Widely regarded as cricket's most cerebral leader and one of England's most successful ever captains, Mike Brearley managed the feat with the largest of sporting egos and clashes of personality, and in harmonising them took on the mantle of the Wellesian or Orwellian unity maker, manipulating ever changing conditions within the frame of his own ultimate vision.
At times, he would just introduce his prime 'colour' (Botham with the wind at his back, or Willis with the bit between his teeth in the most famous moments) and watch it change the overall picture (of a cricket match). But far more often, he would have to choose and assess and alter minutiaes of shades (lesser mortals and game plans) without any discernible result as conditions changed around him, and trust in himself over the long haul amidst the grumbles. Amid the tinkering, his was the final say, and others followed him.
So, ask Mike Brearley to assess the successful artistic collaborator. He will see in him or her the ability to keep processes running simultaneously, some judging, others modulating the judging parts, some remaining open to freak encounters, others tempering the system as a collated whole by keeping alive a psychological overview of their collaborating partners or team-mates, knowing from experience and instinct when what is ostensibly wrong in its current form might become right through the work of your colleagues, sometimes without any intervention at all from you.
Sometimes, then, in this role as a dictator of good intention, doing nothing with your eyes wide open is the best step forward. An overly keen need to impose conditions or defer to what has been acceptable in the past can be even more damaging than embracing the dictator inside us.