How Group Collaboration Works in Real-world Situations

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The most recent research on the collaborative nature of the mind suggests that although an innovative insight may feel like an “Aha!” style flash of inspiration, the chances are the true roots of your new idea lie in collaboration rather than a solitary creative leap.

If you’re honest, you’ll admit that your flash of inspiration is an amalgamation of your previous analysis, hard work and discussion with other people who have each added little tweaks and inputs.

This is good to know. It means creativity isn’t magic or mystery, but is a process that can be followed and used by anyone, regardless of their innate personal creative capacities. Using collaboration, everyone can generate more frequent insights.

Psychologists who have studied the discovery of new ideas in depth have found there are five basic stages embedded within the collaborative process:

1. Preparation: An intense period of working hard to study the problem and learn in detail what others have done in the past to try and solve it.

2. Time Away: Enganing in some entirely different kind of activity or even having a conversation with other people who are working on different problems.

3. The Spark: A potential solution appears, but that solution is embedded in the ideas, know-how and interactions other people are using.

4. Selection: This is where is a distinct “Aha!” feeling that doesn’t necessarily mean the idea is good, only that it is new and somewhat novel.

5. Elaboration This is where the idea is fleshed out more thoroughly and all ancillary and integration issues are considered and collaborated on.

The preparation, selection and elaboration stages are already upite widely understood, but it may come as a surprise to learn that taking some time off in order to generate the spark of insight is also required. The reason for that lies in the fact that the human mind actually uses group genius and collaboration to generate what might appeat to be individual sparks of brilliance. To be creative doesn’t mean rejecting convention and forgetting what is known. Instead, it combines past experience and existing concepts in new ways. Time away from the more pressing demands of the present is most often required for genuinely creative thouhgts to come to the surface and get picked up on.

To take a few examples of these five stages in action:

Example #1–Cash Machines

In January 1976, John Reed, senior vice-president of Citibank with responsibility for the consumer banking division, was resting on a beach in the Caribbean. He took out his notepad and started jotting down a few ideas on how to grow Citibank’s business using a brand new technology no other bank had taken a gamble on yet–automated teller machines. Reed came up with the idea of setting up a national network of street-level cash machines that consumers could then be educated to use with benefits to both customers and the band. Hand in hand with this concept, Reed also envisaged the idea of marketing credit cards nationally rather than regionally as was the norm at that time. When Reed got back to his office, he wrote up the ideas that occurred to him on the beach and circulated it to his senior management team. As a result, when Citibank’s ATM network became available in 1977, they were years ahead of every other New York bank. Citibank was able to double its market share and generate a lead in the marketplace that it took a number of years for its competitors to catch up with.

While Reed’s creative spark came when he was at the beach rather than at the office, it actually was the amalgamation of four different collaborative developments:

The cash machine had already been invented years before.

Citibank wasn’t the first to install an ATM–other had already dipped their toes in the water.

By the early 1970s, Citibank had already installed a network of early generation machines in all its branches, but these were used by the tellers only. Reed’s idea was to take these machines from behind the counter and put them on the street.

The concept of a nationwide credit card network had already been under discussion, but the time had not been right for it to be implemented yet.

In total, Reed’s real creative spark was to bring these different ideas together to change the way Citibank was structured and operated.

Example #2–The Telegraph

Almost everyone knows than the telegraph was invented by Samuel Morse after whom the Morse Code was named. What’s interesting, however, is that the the idea of the telegraph didn’t come in one blinding flash of inspiration. Instead, the telegraph came about as a collaboration over an extended period of time among a number of different people. Here’s how it unfolded:

In 1832, Samuel Morse was on a ship sailing to New York after a three-year tour of Italy. Switzerland and France. He met Dr. Charles Jackson, who was active in the emerging science of electromagnetism. Morse quickly realized electricity could be used to send messages over large distances.

Morse was unaware that around 60 experimental telegraphs had already been built before he started on his own. He soon reached the same dead end everyone else had found: electrical signals weaken rapidly when sent over long wires.

While teaching to pay the bills, he bumped into a personal friend of a physicist who had discovered that the key to sending electrical signals long distances was to have a series of small betteries rather than a large one at either end. Morse redesigned his telegraph to incorporate this concept. He also found an investor who would fund construction of a working telegraph line between Washington D.C. and Baltimore. This was finally ready to go by 1844.

In spite of the successful demonstration of the telegraph in 1844, it took some time for the new technology to catch on. By 1846, there was 2,000 miles of wire. This increased to 12,000 miles in 1850, but it wasn’t until 1861 that there would be a transcontinental telegraph system.

Morse collaborated with so many people in the development of the telegraph that it becomes difficult to ascertain the true originator of any of the ideas involved. Morse drew on the expertise of a number of people, each of whom contributed a small piece of the puzzle. Some ideas were put forward and then dropped, while other ideas became the spark for better ideas that ended up being used.

The way the development of the cash machine and the telegraph unfolded over an extended period of time is normal for most business innovations. There is always so much stuff that needs to be factored in that the idea of a single flash of inspiration is next to impossible. Instead, small breakthroughs and interesting concepts feed off each other until a workable idea finally comes to the surface.

There are actually a number of different mental processes that lie at the very core of creative thinking:

Conceptual transfer: taking an idea that works in one application and applying it to a completely different setting. This is what happened when Thomas Edison’s lab team was trying to figure out how to secure light bulbs in sockets. One of Edison’s assistants saw Thomas Edison cleaning his hands with turpentine and suggested a similar arrangement to the metal can might be used for securing light bulbs. This subsequently became the screw-in lamp base.

Conceptual combination: taking an idea from one field and combining it with a second idea from a completely different field altogether. This may have been what happened when Reese’s candies were developed–peanut butter and chocolate. These candies combined two snack foods in a different way to come up with something quite unique.

Conceptual elaboration: taking an existing concept and modifying it in such a way that something entirely new results. John Dwight, Austin Church and James Church built a very successful business in the late 1800s supplying baking soda. By 1970, however, most people were buying box mix and didn’t need baking soda anymore. As people started putting their unused boxes of baking soda in their refrigerators, it was found that baking soda actually absorbed odors. Church & Dwight therefore launched a new marketing campaign that stressed the use of their product to “keep food tasting fresh.” They also found ways to incorporate baking soda into deodorizers and laundry detergents.

Concept creation: a conscious attempt to come up with something entirely new. More often that not, concept creation occurs of necessity when unusual circumstances arise. For example, if your home is hit by a hurricane, you will probably create a list you’ve never really though about before: “Things to take when forced to evacuate my home.” These ad-hoc concepts are created on the fly in response to external conditions and circumstances.

The more familiar you are with a topic, the easier it becomes to think creatively. Many times, filling your mind with information and then turning your attention to something entirely different will generate a spark of insight. It you then collaborate with others to refine and expand your insights, some very interesting and wothwhile ideas can result.

Collaboration with others in a group enhances your own levels of creativity because:

Interacting with others introduces different perspectives and background competencies into the mix.

You can take advantage of the creative abilities and thinking of others.

Other people can help you select your best ideas and kill off your weadest ideas readily.

The conversations you engage in while collaborating can spark moments of collective insight.

Yoy get a high degree of cross-fertilization–where ideas and concepts from one field get applied n entirely different situations.

Unexpected connections and unplanned combinations can be suggested and fine-tuned.

Multiple connections can be made that cross organizational boundaries and areas of professional training or competence.

New ideas can be left open to multiple interpretations, which allows a number of new and potentially unique combinations to come about.

Conversational insights can arise that take existing ideas and apply them in completely different ways.

Collaboration brings distant concepts together; it makes each individual more creative; and, most important of all, the emergent results of group genius are greater than those any one individual could think of alone.

Hard work, collaboration, and deep familiarity with an area make you more creative. When you have more information about the creative domain, taking time off from a problem helps you to have a spark of insight because it frees your mind to play around in other conceptual spaces and to notice more potential analogies. When you’re working hard on a problem, your mind is fully absorbed with one associative cluster; the others are forced into the background. Sometimes, you need to take a break and free your mind for the right analogy to emerge. But it won’t happen if you haven’t worked with those analogies and solved those problems yourself. One of the most solid findings in creativity research is the ten-year rule: It takes a minimum of ten years of hard work and practice before attaining the high level of performance that results in great creativity.

In the collaborative organization, sparks that fail at their original purposes are often picked up and used elsewhere.

Most new ideas will never pan out. That’s why failure is a fact of life in the collaborative organization. But it’s a law of innovation that successes can’t go up unless failures go up, too.

–Keith Sawyer

Creative professionals in Hollywood know that the best way to great success is to generate lots of ideas and then select the best one. Successful Nobel Prize winning scientists tell us they do the same thing: They keep multiple projects on the back burner. In collaborative organizations, many projects are active at once. When the business environment changes, the best-selling product might become obsolete, but one of the back-burner ideas may suddenly emerge as the next new thing.

–Keith Sawyer