The Highly Impressive Creative Power of Group Collaboration

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Although crediting an individual for an innovation is a tidy and simple way to do things, the reality is that most significant innovations that come about are actually an amalgamation of the thoughts and ideas of lots of different people. When people pool their talents and ideas in a group setting, some highly creative ideas can be generated. If the group is allowed to improvise by having the goal specified but the means left entirely open, it’s not at all unusual for some exceptionally creative approaches to get suggested and ultimately implemented.

Group collaboration has loads of untapped potential. You just have to develop some workable ways to channel this creative force in the right direction.

On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright flew an airplane in a 12-second flight that landed him around 100 feet from where he took off from a beach in North Carolina. In doing so, Orville and his brother Wilbur beat leading scientists who bad invested fortunes in funding and trying to win an international race to build the first airplane. Their achievement is typically cast as a breakthrough that the two brothers came up with alone, but in reality the Wrights achieved their feat by drawing on the power of collaboration rather than being limited by their own thinking.

To be more specific:

The Wrights started their project by spending four years reading everything that had ever been published on bird flihgt and glider design.

Their 1903 trip to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina was actually their fourth. On their first trip in 1900, they took their glider and kept modifying it to extend its range. On their second trip in 1901, they realized the glider didn’t have enough lift to carry an engine as well. They built a home wind tunnel and tested 200 wing designs before they came up with a better idea. This high-lift wing was then tested on their third trip in 1902. It was on this third trip that they also came up with the idea of a movable tail linked to the pilot’s wheel to retain comtrol of the airplane. Then, on their fourth trip in 1903, all they had to do was scale up their glider and add their own engine that they had built at home.

Since they were brothers who shared the same passion, Orville and Wilbur Wright literally ate, slept and discussed their project every day. It was their obsession. By working together and documenting all of their thoughts in their diaries, they had a string of successive ideas, each of which allowed them to move a small step cloesr to powered flight. They didn’t necessarily have any single moments of insight where a lightbulb went off over their heads, but they gradually came up with a string of ideas, each of which sparked the next idea in succession. In this way, they systematically worked through all the problems that prevented from flying.

This is a perfect illustration of the fact that although we’re drawn to the idea of a lone genius, in the real world it’s actually group thinking or a collective group genius that ends up generating all of the real breakthoughs. Great new ideas always emerge from such a series of small sparks that it’s usually impossible to state definitively what the source of the new idea was. When humans collaborate, synergy is created that is greater than the sum of all the inputs originally provided. True innovation is more of a group exercise than we give it credit for.

7 key characteristics of effective creative teams

In fact, real world innovation as generated by teams of people working together has seven key characteristics:

The innovation emerges over time: so that it becomes ompossible to say it was generated by one individual because there are so many little tweaks involved.

People spend as much time listening to others as they do contributing themselves: allowing everyone in the group to pick and choose the best ideas rather than defend their own.

Team members feel free to build on each other’s ideas: and come up with natural extensions and embellishments. There is no feeling that only the first person who suggests an idea is entitled to think about it more.

Judgment is suspended to some degree: because it’s often only in hindsight that the value and meaning of each idea becomes clearer. People need to contribute without having a full picture of what that idea will ultimately end up as.

Unexpected questions arise: as the group thinks of new ways to frame problems or even identifies an entirely new problem to solve.

The innovation process itself is highly inefficient: it meanders down dead ends that turn out to be pointless, and loads of time gets chewed up considering ideas that never amount to much.

Good innovations tend to emerge from the bottom up rather than the top down: as the team restructures itself to deal with the most pressing problems. Effective innovation teams aren’t told what to do by a leader. Instead, like-minded people find each other and put together a team to solve some problem that has a daily impact of one kind or another.

There are actually close links between improvisation and innovation. When people within an organization are forced to improvise, they often come up with some very creative and original approaches. Often the very best ideas come from ad-hoc teams that have formed themselves rather than being dictated to act by the management. The more skilled a company becomes at improvising, the better innovations it will also tend to generate elsewhere.

Professional athletes often talk about getting into a heightened state of consciousness during a game. When they’re in this state–which has been termed the “flow”–everything seems to happen in slow speed and there is enhanced ability to perform. Athletes try to get into this state as often as possible because while there, they can play their sport exceptionally well. A similar kind of phenomenon also occurs with group innovation. When the people within a workgroup experience what can be termed “group flow,” some highly creative ideas can be generated by the group as a whole. This usually happens when people are engaged in tightly focused conversations or in other forums where people get together. Great conversations leads to flow, and flow lead to the kind of creativity that ultimately underpins group genius. When everything comes together to create a state of group flow, some impressive innovations can result.

10 essential conditions for creativity to naturally flow

The foster more innovation, try and work on creating the conditions that generate group flow at your workplace. The ten preconditions for group flow of this kind to come about are:

A common group goal: everone must know the specific goal the group is trying to achieve, or the specific problem everyone is focused on solving. A good goal should be explicit enough for everyone to understand but also open-ended that so some creative solution options can emerge.

A willingness for group members to listen to each other: so everyone can take the ideas others are suggesting and help refine them. This won’t happen when people are bust thinking about what they’re going to say next rather than listening carefully to the ideas of others.

Complete concentration: the absebce of external distractions or even strict high-pressure deadlines. Creativity flourishes in a lowpressure work environment where a group concentrates on the task at hand and forgets everything else.

The feeling of being in control: having the autonomy to take any ideas that come out and run with them based on their merits rather than on being granted permission.

A true blending of egos: meaning everyone is willing to build on the ideas of others in the group regardless of who made the original suggestion. Everyone needs to de willing to listen and react to all the ideas suggested by others.

Equal participation: helping everyone feel comfortable about participating rather than having a few superstars who are expected to do everything. For this to happen, in the group must have roughly comparable skills, otherwise those with more skills will get bored and those with less will get frustrated. When one person dominates, group flow generally dissipates.

Familiarity: everyone must have mastered the basic knowledge required and add to that a feel for how others in the group will perform. Group flow increases substantially and is enhanced when everyone acknowledges and appreciates what others bring to the party.

Communicaton: because constant communication is the lifeblood of workplace flow. Everyone needs to be able to engage in spontaneous and freewheeling conversations about new ideas for flow to increase.

A desire to keep moving the conversation forward: to make progress towards meeting the objective rather than rehashing the same issues over and over. Sometimes this will involve accepting an interim solution that works reasonably well rather than staying at development until a perfect solution is forthcoming.

An acknowledgment of the potential for failure: using the potential for failure to push the group towards the flow state rather than being intimdated by it. Many companies minimize risks and actively punish failures, which actually tends to reduce the likelihood of workplace flow. Instead, there needs to be a healthy appetite for the early failures that always accompany breakthrough creativity. There can be on genuine creativity without failure, which means in turn that there can be no group flow without the risk of failure. As long as everyone is learning from their failures and integrating what has been learnt into whatever they do next, everything will work out fine.

Group flow happens when many tensions are in perfect balance: the tension between convention and novelty; between structure and improvisation; between the critical, analytic mind and the freewheeling out-of-the-box mind; between listening to the rest of the group and speaking out in individual voices. The paradox of improvisation is that it can happen only when there are rules and the players share tacit understandings, but with too many rules or too much cohesion, the potential for innovation is lost. The key question facing groups that have to innovate is finding just the right amount of structure to support improvisation, but not so much structure that it smothers creativity.

–Keith Sawyer

It’s hard to find group flow experiences in a large corporaton, which tends to reward closing up communication, narrowing the channels, and minimizing risk. That’s why people who seek out group flow often avoid big companies and join small start-ups or work for themslves. Serial entreneurs keep starting new businesses as much for the flow experience as for additional success. In the global war for talent, organizations that need to innovate cannot afford to let good improvisers go; they need to create the conditions for group flow and allow group genius to thrive.

–Keith Sawyer

Putting people into groups isn’t a magical dust that makes everyone creative. It has to be the right kind of group, and the group has to match the nature of the task. It’s true that the individual mind plays a special role at the center of the creative process. But your own mind is more social than you realize.

–Keith Sawyer

Only certain kinds of collaboration work in the real world–improvisations that are guided and planned, but in a way that doesn’t kill the power of improvisation to generate unexpected insights. Brainstorming is a good example: Numerous studies have shown that this popular technique is usually a waste of time. The truth is that despite the proliferation of advice in the business press, many companies don’t know how to foster creative collaboration. Fortunately, today’s research tells us how.

–Keith Sawyer