Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

Keith Sawyer's book does not travel down the well worn road of exploring individual genius. Instead he explores the much more important issue of how group genius works. Organisations need to learn how to play together - all too often intelligent people work alone in knowledge based organisations and thus individual expertise does not translate into corporate intelligence. As a musician and university business academic I find his use of music analogies particularly interesting - exploring ideas such as flow in the context of jazz. Great musicians are BOTH immersed in their own performance, but also tuned in to what is going on around their - a hallmark of true emotional intelligence. Organisations can learn much from how group genius works in music. If we are to have organisations that thrive on intelligence, this is not a 'nice to have' quality, but an essential 'rite of passage' to staying alive in an ever changing business world. Peter Cook MBA, MRSC, C.Chem Author 'Sex, Leadership and Rock'n'Roll - Leadership Lessons from the Academy of Rock'

`Group Genius' is a myth busting work articulating the results of many studies into how the creative process works. It demonstrates the difference between how we perceive it working and how it actually works. In short: While we perceive that we have sudden moments of insight, the `eureka!' moment, in reality these moments are really achieved through lots of tiny steps usually strongly influenced by input from other people. This process is not an `assertion' it is the result of many objective studies which are detailed in the book. The really interesting aspect of this is that the people that experienced the creative `eureka!' moment almost always perceived the experience differently to what actually took place. What I learned: 1. That we cannot trust our subjective experiences to necessarily accurately reflect reality, at least not without objectively testing them. 2. There is not so much mystery nowadays regarding "Insight" or "Hunches" or "Instincts" and they are certainly not supernatural. They are understandable in practical ways. 3. If you study the latest developments and learnings in the field of neuroscience much of what used to be the realm of the `spiritual' and the `mystery of human existence' and `consciousness' is being understood in much the same way as we have learned why the sun comes up, why people get ill and why it rains. The question: Do you have the curiosity, drive and interest to learn about reality? Or like so many people nowadays do you prefer to sit inside of a protective shell of subjectivity and ignorance regarding the human experience? The knowledge is there for those interested in learning.

After reading Keith Sawyer's interesting work for years, I added Group Genius as a required text in an Organization Design MBA class I teach. Students are evening students, middle managers to above. They represent all domains, IT, Finance, Engineering, Law, Accounting, Real Estate/Construction and other sciences as well. Following the addition of Group Genius, students began to turn in truly innovative work, creative and original, beyond anything I've seen in years of teaching. They recognized that this was no ordinary text but one they could apply instantly to their own group and team work. They wrote about using it immediately in the workplace, with extraordinary results. That's what I found too, in the classroom, among working people, extraordinary results.

I have had a lifelong interest in etymology. Curious to know the origin of "genius," I checked several sources and here is what I learned. The Latin word "genius" originally meant "deity of generation and birth" and as its meaning evolved over time via various languages, it was used to describe "a person of outstanding intellectual ability." We do indeed view those of superior intellect (e.g. Plato and Aristotle, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein) as secular equivalents of religious deities and certainly admire their mental capabilities. We also tend to toss the word "genius" around somewhat carelessly when referring to entertainers, athletes, and business executives. That said, the fact remains that throughout human history, what Keith Sawyer characterizes as "collaborative genius" has made significant contributions in ways and to an extent few (if any) individuals have. In fact, the more I think about all this, the more I appreciate the meaning and significance of Bernard of Chartres' observation (incorrectly attributed to Isaac Newton) that "We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants." Here is a brief excerpt which correctly indicates one of Keith Sawyer's core concepts: "In both an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person's contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that's more responsive to the changing environment and [key point] better than what anyone could have developed alone. Improvisational teams are the building blocks of innovative organizations, and organizations that can successfully build improvisational teams will be more likely to innovate effectively." Make no mistake about it: although there can be indeed great creative power of collaboration, the process is necessarily messy, frustrating, at times perhaps discouraging. However, on the basis of his extensive research since the 1990s, Sawyer has identified seven key characteristics of effective creative teams: Innovation emerges over time, successful collaborative teams practice "deep listening," team members build on their collaborators' ideas, only over a period of time do the meaning and significance of each idea become clear, meanwhile "surprising" (i.e. unforeseen) ideas emerge, innovation is inefficient (trial and error, frequent false starts and detours, "dry wells," etc.), and innovation emerges "from the bottom up." Sawyer carefully organizes his material within three Parts: The Collaborative Team (Chapters 1-4), The Collaborative Mind (Chapters 5-7), and The Collaborative Organization (Chapters 8-11). One of Sawyer's most valuable insights, examined with both rigor and eloquence, is that people who are steadfastly convinced that they are not "creative" can nonetheless work effectively together to generate (albeit eventually) profoundly innovative ideas. There are some "ifs," of course. First,

The Summary: There have been a few books recently that have challenged the commonly held beliefs and myths of innovation. Keith Sawyer; professor of psychology at Washington University in St Louis; tackles probably the most prevalent innovation myth, the lone genius. He has written a fascinating book on the power of collaboration and how it is the secret to breakthrough creativity. This book joins a small group of my favorite books on innovation; How Breakthroughs Happen, Medici Effect, The Act of Creation and The Art of Innovation. Sawyer has written a very practical book that is based on some solid scientific research. The Audience: I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested innovation and wants a practical framework for infusing an innovative culture throughout their company. The book is definitely aimed at a general business audience but provides enough depth into the background research to make the practical advice more meaningful. It is a very fine line Sawyer has walked with the creation of this book and I applaud him on a job well done. This is by no means a simple `how to' book, it is far more. Great writing, great ideas and if you act upon it you will get great results!! The Details: Sawyer has spent the last 15 years researching and studying creativity, he worked with Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi on the research behind `Flow - the science of optimal experience'. He approached his research into creativity with a similar scientific approach using indirect and direct techniques to understand the brain in action. He focused on a subject close to his heart, Jazz. Sawyer has been playing Jazz since his college days and he realized that there was some real creativity at work in jazz performances. He quickly discovered that taking the standard approach of studying the individual seemed to miss an important piece of the experience. He realized he had to study how a whole jazz group collaborated to really understand what made one performance shine and another flop. When a group of jazz musicians found their `flow' they created something much more than the individual contributors. He used a technique called `interaction analysis' to study how a group collaborates in a dynamic environment. This is an intensive method where minute to minute interactions (gestures, body language and verbal cues) are analyzed. He expanded his research into another rich collaborative activity, improvisational theatre. This research is the bedrock of his theories on group genius, he combined his research with some insights from his work on `flow' and coined what he called `group flow' to describe when a group gets into the zone of creativity. Sawyer doesn't just show us the genius of groups, he takes it one step further to explain how when a lone genius generates a breakthrough idea, there is a web of people and ideas that are behind the breakthrough. He gives us examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Phil T. Farnsworth (TV) and shows the interconnecte