The Collaborative Team
Seven key characteristics of effective creative teams:
l Innovation emerges over time. Successful innovations happen when organizations combine just the right ideas in just the right structure.
l Successful collaborative teams practice deep listening. Most people spend too much time planning their own actions and not enough time listening and observing others.
l Team members build on their collaborators’ ideas. When teams practice deep listening, each new idea is an extension of the ideas that have come before.
l Only afterwards does the meaning of each idea become clear. Ideas don’t take on their full importance until they’re taken up, reinterpreted, and applied by others.
l Surprising questions emerge. Most transformative creativity results when a group either thinks of a new way to frame a problem or finds a new problem that no one had noticed before.
l Innovation is inefficient. Improvised innovation makes more mistakes, and has as many misses as hits.
l Innovation emerges from the bottom up. The improvisational collaboration of the entire group translates moments of individual creativity into group innovation.
Conditions for group flow:
l The group has a specific goal to achieve or problem to solve.
l Everyone is fully engaged in deep listening in which members of the group don’t plan ahead what they’re going to say but speak in response to what they hear.
l The group is focused on the natural progress emerging from members’ work, not on meeting a deadline set by management.
l People are in control of their actions and their environment, when they feel autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
l Each person is feely able to build their ideas on those just contributed by others.
l All participants play an equal role in the collective creation.
l All the players share an understanding of the group’s goals and share a communication style to respond mutually to each other.
l Conversations are continuous, freewheeling, and spontaneous.
l People listen to what’s being said, accept it fully, and then extend and build on it.
l Tensions are in balance: convention and novelty, structure and improvisation, critical and freewheeling thinking, and listening and speaking.
Traditional brainstorming, which aims for volume, does not work. When groups are asked to suggest good, creative solutions, they have fewer ideas but those ideas are better than those generated using traditional brainstorming rules.
l Don’t use groups for additive tasks—tasks that people could do separately and then sum up. Instead, use them for complex and improvisational tasks.
l Keep groups to the minimum number of members required; this will reduce social loafing and production blocking.
l Use a facilitator who knows the research about what brainstorming formats work the best, and who knows how to help the group avoid production blocking and social inhibition.
l Because complex and unexpected innovations emerge from innovative groups as a whole, group rewards need to be in place.
l Allow the group to alternate work with frequent breaks, and switch constantly between group and individual activity.
l To take advantage of increased innovation of diverse groups, compose groups with complementary skills.
l Keep in mind that group members who are low in social anxiety and who enjoy group interaction will perform better.
l Brainstorming works best in an organization that enjoys a culture of innovation where brainstorming meetings are held so often that they’re just part of doing business.
The Collaborative Mind
The creative sparks are always embedded in a collaborative process with five basic stages:
1. Preparation: This involves a period of working hard, studying the problem, and talking to everyone else working on it.
2. Time off: The team member changes context and engages in other activities— often in conversation with others.
3. The spark: During time off, a solution appears; but that solution is deeply embedded in the knowledge and social interactions of the preparation and time-off phases, and it builds on sparks that others have had.
4. Selection: An “Aha!” feeling that doesn’t always mean the idea is good. Creative people are very good at selecting the best ideas for follow-up, or they collaborate with others in selecting them.
5. Elaboration: Working out the idea typically requires a lot of additional ideas. Bringing them all together always requires social interaction and collaboration.
Some myths about creativity have been contradicted by experimental research:
l “We’re blocked from creativity by our past experiences and our unwarranted assumptions.” To the contrary, eliminating the false assumption only makes the problem slightly easier.
l “When you break out of your fixation, the solution should come quickly and easily in a spark of insight.” Instead, the “outside” hint opens up a new problem-solving domain, but that domain also requires expertise and prior experience.
l “Insight solutions are independent of prior knowledge.” In reality, training in similar problems helps immensely.
Insight isn’t different from everyday thought; it moves forward, step by step, and even when we’re not consciously aware of what our minds are doing, we’re still using everyday brain processes.
Collaboration makes the mind more creative because working with others gives you new and unexpected concepts and makes it more likely that your mind will engage in the most creative types of conceptual creativity—combining distant concepts, elaborating concepts by modifying their core features, and creating new concepts.
Indirect speech, unlike explicit speech, is impossible to understand out of context. This context-dependence is called indexicality; the most creative speech is highly indexical—deeply embedded in the immediate social context. Indirect statements open up more possibilities for the listener, and resulting conversation becomes more a collaborative creation. Ideas that open possibilities contribute to innovation by making it easier for ideas to be reused to solve a different and unexpected problem elsewhere in the organization.
An organizational culture that fosters equivocally, improvised innovation, and constant conversation is a recipe for group genius.
The Collaborative Organization
Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company. Just the opposite: Innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.
The culture of collaborative organization is based on flexibility, connection, and conversation; improvised innovation is standard business practice. Companies that use smaller teams and fewer hierarchical levels are more innovative.
If innovation is linear, the idea stage can be separated out and placed in a more creative unit of the organization, and the execution can still take place in a more traditional bureaucratic structure. But although separation can be good for short-term creativity, it interferes with long-term innovation: An isolated “skunk works” usually has trouble communicating with the rest of the organization because innovation requires collaboration across the company.
The most transformative new products and systems emerge from many small sparks of insight. Successful innovative companies keep those small sparks coming from individuals throughout the organization, each spark coming from individuals throughout the organization, each spark inspiring the next one.
The most innovative companies do ten things that foster collaboration and innovation:
l Keep many irons in the fire. Allow ideas to be tested quickly, less promising projects to be terminated early, and make all new sparks visible so that other teams can adopt them.
l Create a department of surprise. One way that collaborative organizations recognize emerging ideas is with “idea marketplaces,” autonomous teams that identify radical innovations. These “departments of surprise” search for ideas throughout the company and are responsible for commercializing them.
l Build spaces for creative conversation. Open spaces feed into the natural flow of collaborative innovation—helping ideas to move from one area to another, allowing spontaneous conversations to emerge, and strengthening informal information-sharing networks.
l Allow time for ideas to emerge. Low-pressure situations allow for collaborative conversations to unfold, and that’s where innovations emerge.
l Manage the risks of improvisation. When people are improvising, they must take time away from planned projects, improvisation can make it impossible to sustain a central vision and long-term strategy, and too many new ideas might bubble up.
l Improvise on the edge of chaos. The most successful innovators use limited structures, not too rigid to prevent emergent innovation but not too lose to result in total chaos.
l Manage knowledge for innovation. The collaborative organization excels at transferring to other groups the ideas that emerge from good improvisations.
l Build dense networks. When information is shared through collaboration, and decision making is decentralized, there’s no need for a hierarchy to gather and channel information to a single decision maker. Instead, the manager is a catalyst and facilitator, acting as a connector between groups, a cross-pollinator and carrier of knowledge.
l Ditch the organization chart. Create loosely coupled organizations.
l Measure the right things. First, count the proportion of time spent on small exploratory projects (more is better). Second, measure the average the average length of a project before being terminated (shorter is better). Third, examine how well the organization celebrates and rewards failure.
Collaborative webs are more important than creative people.
l Each innovation builds incrementally on a long history of prior inventions.
l Successful innovation is a combination of many small sparks.
l There is frequent interaction among teams.
l Multiple discovery is common.
l No one company can own the web.
To release the innovation potential of society:
l Reduce copyright terms.
l Reward small sparks.
l Legalize modification of products for personal use.
l Free employees from noncompete clauses.
l Impose mandatory licensing.
l Pool patents across companies.
l Encourage industry-wide standards.
