How do you write a book together? You just do it…

How do you write a book together? You just do it… And that’s how you arrive at an expression that keeps coming back throughout the book: you just do things. Quite a lot of things, actually. You just do them.

Which is actually the opposite of what it sounds like.

When we say something ‘we just did it,’ we usually mean something that is actually not ordinary at all, even quite extraordinary. It may be part of everyday life, but we’re often not aware of it and we never really talk about it. And more often than not, we don’t have the words to describe it properly. ‘We just do it’ becomes a kind of expression for something we can’t quite explain. When you work together in a good way magic can happen. But we don’t talk about it.

I’m writing a short piece here about how you write a book together, but it definitely overlaps with other stories that will appear on this website – about intuition and collaboration, for example. And about how I knew I had to write a book. But for now, specifically: how do you write a book together?

It started with the moment I felt – really felt – that I was going to write a book. I had been playing with the idea for years. Twenty years or so.

At the end of 2023, Ellen Kleinlangevelsloo interviewed me. It was quite a challenging interview, covering two subjects at once. She interviewed me for two hours and out of that came a perfect article. Truly perfect. I didn’t need to change a thing. She understood me completely – and I know I don’t always speak in neat, coherent sentences.

And there it was, the first thought about collaboration: what if I asked Ellen to write the book for me?

After that first intuitive impulse, I let some time pass. I needed to be sure I really wanted to do it. Writing a book is not something you do lightly. It’s a lot of work. In May 2024 I sent her an email, asking if she’d like to do it.

Ellen said yes, and that was the start of it all. The conversation immediately turned to: how are we going to do this?

That was step one. There was a foundation for a book: I had the experience and ideas on the subject, and Ellen is a true professional – a writer, content manager and an independent creative thinker.

My second thought was: I need Piet on board. Piet Roodenburg is a friend, a former colleague and above all someone with whom I have always been able to work, think and puzzle things out in a remarkably productive way. In the process I’m describing here, he is my sounding board – the person who always brings structure – and working with him I know I won’t miss anything in a line of reasoning. That is indispensable to me, and gives me a great sense of security. It’s telling that I didn’t doubt for a second that he would say yes.

I think it is also important that Piet and I both have an in depth knowledge of both intuition and leadership but on the other hand we have complementary characters and complementary areas of expertise around leadership and personal develoment, so that between us, we cover a lot of ground. We work well together and have proved this time and time again.

Step two: the team was complete. And somehow, it had all just fallen into place. I’ve always trusted that when your team is right, things more or less take care of themselves after that. I imagine that will resonate with other leaders.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to do – quite the opposite. That’s when the real work begins! But it does mean you’ve created the conditions to do the work you’ve chosen to do.

So how does it go from there? Did we already know everything that will be in the book?

The answer is a very clear no. Of course I knew some things: that it would be about leadership and intuition, about leading with your heart and about personal development. But how exactly those themes fitted together, we didn’t yet know.

We also had a foundation in research that Piet and I had done for De Baak at the turn of the millennium, on how leaders learn. That told us a great deal about the importance of intuition – in your everyday leadership as well as the bigger picture – and about the different dimensions of leadership, ultimately captured in the Three Dimensions model.

And so we got to work. We met in person once, but mostly worked through Teams. Which, somehow, worked perfectly.

In the early sessions, Ellen always came well prepared with questions. We exchanged documents and experiences from the first study. Ellen recorded everything so she could listen again later. That continued until, I think, all the factual material had been shared.

We were also honest about the things we didn’t know, and it didn’t take long before we had the idea of interviewing leaders of today as well – people we knew for certain were highly intuitive – and to really grill them about  how that worked for them.

So together we began drawing up a list of people and a set of questions, to eventually conduct and work out the interviews properly. All three of us were involved. It was an enormous amount of work.

In the meantime, Ellen had also developed a method for working out together what kind of book it should be – the BingeMarketing methodology. That turned out to be enormously useful. It led directly to the concept for the book as it now stands: a kind of detective story, searching for the truth. With informal fragments in which ‘Benita tells,’ frameworks for the personal stories, and plenty of quotes from the interviews.

On the content side, there were a few real puzzles to solve. But you get there in the end. You can push them aside for a while – some somehow resolve themselves, and some you have to grab hold of and chew on until the answer comes. It’s a fairly mysterious process, and everyone does it in their own way.

Each time, Ellen would write a section. Piet and I would read it and give feedback.

Eventually we felt we had roughly two thirds of the book written, and I decided it was time to find a publisher. We had been thinking about it for a while, but it was time to make some decisions.

As it turned out, you can start looking for a publisher much earlier in the process. We didn’t know that.

With the help of good friends and advisors, we eventually found our way to Santasado. Definitely the right choice. From that point on, Laurens Molegraaf joined as a full member of the team, alongside his role as publisher and de facto project manager.

And that, dear friends, is how we wrote a book together. Somehow, we just did it!