One group simply gave up in frustration, convinced that the puzzle was impossible to solve. Another group persisted but got the wrong answer because of a faulty assumption. Yet another group disintegrated as the minutes ticked on, with various factions forming in the corners of room, arms folded, and a look of defeat on their faces.
Afterward, a young man in the group that gave up told me that his key takeaway from the exercise was that he never wanted to work in a team-based organization! He admitted that he was frustrated because no one approached the task in what he thought was a rational, organized fashion. He later confessed that all his life, he had been the guy that believed if you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself. If there was a class project, he not only took the lead, he did everything. Depending upon other people really bothered him. This was the first time he really needed to rely on others for team success. Obviously, that is not the takeaway that I was hoping for.
Another group embraced the goal, chose a leader, and physically organized the information using their bodies as props and symbols. They pushed the limits by creatively using candy, coffee mugs, keys, masking tape, and pens as contraband props to organize the information. They manufactured printed words using pasted-together nametags. In short, they sneaked around me because they had created a conspiracy to succeed! To be successful, this challenge involves a lot of collaboration skills—listening, a balance of roles, and a creative, rule-bending mind-set.
This challenge is not unlike one that many real teams face—dependence on one another for success, frustration, lack of clarity, time pressure, and ambiguity. My independent-minded manager could not solve the puzzle alone; he needed to depend on the group. Yet in his mind, the group was dysfunctional. Most of the time, we are in a similar position in our teams.
In this book, I argue that collaboration is anything but intuitive and that merely assigning people to teams and telling them to be good team players in no sense sets the stage for effective collaboration. Companies need to disentangle true collaboration from simply physically being in the same place at the same time. True collaboration often calls for periods of focused, independent work interspersed with periods of intense, structured team interaction. In this sense, teams need to embrace dynamic, hybrid collaborative structures rather than static, monotonous structures.
When teams do work together face-to-face, they need to engage differently and not rely on gut intuition. This is where the myth-busting comes in. Collaborative teams need rules, they need conflict, they need some healthy self-interest, they need serious stretch goals, and they need to take much more control of the physical and social environment than most of us are accustomed to doing. Ultimately, creative collaboration is like a good party—people prepare individually, the leader-host sets a good stage, and people arrive in party mode, equipped with essential props. People don’t show up hours early or too late, under- or overdressed, and with nothing in hand—nor do they stay too long.
This book is going to challenge your notions of what collaboration actually is. It is not 24/7 team cohabitation, it is not a long weekend retreat, and it is certainly not shared office space. Creative collaboration is characterized by thoughtful stage setting, complete with changes of scene, acts that open and close, and connection with the audience. It is not an anything-goes process. Unfortunately most organizations are not experts when it comes to creative collaboration; I’ll start chapter 1 by exposing the most common myths about creative teamwork. I’ll also reveal how to dispel faulty beliefs that give rise to ineffective strategies and introduce strategies and practices that will lead to creative success.
Setting the Stage for a Creative Conspiracy
While it might seem heretical to present data that teams are not nearly as creative as individuals in a book on creative collaboration, I can’t ignore the scientific facts. Just as surely as cigarettes cause lung cancer, groups are less creative than individuals—at least when left to their own devices. Stated another way, when the stage has not been properly set for a creative conspiracy, groups will most assuredly underperform.
Some background explanation is in order here. To meaningfully compare groups and individuals, researchers have devised the perfect “control” group—the nominal group. A nominal group is a group of people who never actually interact. For example, say we wanted to compare whether a real, interactive group was more or less creative than the same number of people working independently. The people working independently are the nominal group. To make sure there would be no systematic bias in terms of the people in one configuration being smarter, younger, more attractive, or politically different than the other group, participants would be randomly assigned to work with a team or a nominal group. Hundreds of studies have been conducted using this very simple, yet very powerful design. In these studies, duplicate ideas created by the nominal groups are not counted. Furthermore, an independent panel of judges evaluates the output and the judges are “blind” with respect to whose ideas they are evaluating. And the findings? Virtually all of the studies unambiguously reveal that individuals outperform teams in terms of both quantity and quality.
When team members are working independently rather than together, there is obviously a much greater likelihood that they will duplicate one another’s ideas. For this reason, teams and their organizations are often quick to criticize the wisdom of nominal teamwork. However, this concern may be overinflated or perhaps even a nonissue. Researchers Laura Kornish and Karl Ulrich measured undesirable repetition of ideas when teams generated ideas in parallel. In a substantial data set of over thirteen hundred opportunity spaces—ideas for an innovation that may have value after further investment of resources—they found little incidence of redundancy of ideas generated by aggregating parallel efforts, even in narrowly defined domains. Thus, this study suggests there is little reason to be concerned about team members working in parallel.
My point, however, is not that teams and individuals are mutually exclusive or should be pitted against each other, but rather that there needs to be an understanding of how teams and individuals operate and how individuals operate optimally within teams. By using hybrid, interactive meeting structures—characterized by periods of autonomous work punctuated by periods of intense collaborative work; clear goal setting and goal striving; a focus on quantity rather than quality; spirited and vigorous debating of ideas; and less talking and more doing, via brainwriting rather than brainstorming—teams can start reaching their creative potential.
A Word on What’s in This Book and How to Use It
This book contains two things: (1) a lot of concrete examples of collaboration (the good, the bad, and the ugly) based on my colleagues’ and my research and experience working with managers, leaders, and team members over sixteen years, as well as studies of creativity and teamwork conducted by the broader management science community; (2) a lot of prescriptive advice based on scientifically tested methods and strategies. Some of this will square with your intuition; much of it won’t. This is partly because scientists don’t do a good job of disseminating their research outside of the ivory tower. As a card-carrying member of the ivory tower, I see it as my duty to sift through the mass of research findings and bring the breakthroughs to the business world. Consequently, in this book, you will see some unsettling data and read about studies that suggest that we need to seriously rethink our creative team processes.
Besides the fact that, left to their own devices, teams are less creative than individuals, the body of research on collaboration has yielded many other surprising and counterintuitive findings, including:
Teams that have “no rules” are less creative than those that have rules.
Striving for quality results in less creativity than striving for quantity.
Unstable membership enhances team creativity.
Most companies cannot articulate, and routinely violate, the four cardinal rules of brainstorming.
Most leaders cannot articulate the rules of brainstorming.
Distrust