Great creative teams — what do they all have in common? What can we learn from them?
Keith Sawyer got his PhD studying under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the researcher who coined the idea of Flow. Sawyer looked at how creativity came about in collaborations vs. individuals. He analyzed jazz ensembles, improv comedy groups and other great creative teams to see what worked.What did he find?
Via Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:
1. Innovation Emerges over Time
No single actor comes up with the big picture, the whole plot. The play emerges bit by bit.
Each actor, in each line of dialogue, contributes a small idea. In
theater, we can see this process on stage; but with an innovative team,
outsiders never see the long chain of small, incremental ideas that lead
to the final innovation. Without scientific analysis, the collaboration
remains invisible. Successful innovations happen when organizations
combine just the right ideas in just the right structure.
2. Successful Collaborative Teams Practice Deep Listening
Trained improv actors listen for the new
ideas that the other actors offer in their improvised lines, at the same
time that they’re coming up with their own ideas. This difficult
balancing act is essential to group genius. Most people spend too much time planning their own actions and not enough time listening and observing others.
3. 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.
The Wright brothers couldn’t have thought of a moving vertical tail
until after they discovered adverse yaw, and that discovery emerged from
their experiments with wing warping. Although a single person may get
credit for a specific idea, it’s hard to imagine that person having that
idea apart from the hard work, in close quarters, of a dedicated team
of like-minded individuals. Russ Mahon— one of the Morrow Dirt Club
bikers from Cupertino— usually gets credit for putting the first
derailleur on a fat-tired bike, but all ten members of the club played a
role.
4. Only Afterwards Does the Meaning of Each Idea Become Clear
Even a single idea can’t be attributed to one person because ideas don’t take on their full importance until they’re taken up, reinterpreted, and applied by others.
At the beginning of Jazz Freddy’s performance, we don’t know what John
is doing: Is he studying for a test? Is he balancing the books of a
criminal organization? Although he was the first actor to think of
“studying,” the others decided that he would be a struggling umpire, a
man stubbornly refusing to admit that he needed glasses. Individual
creative actions take on meaning only later, after they are woven into
other ideas, created by other actors. In a creative collaboration, each
person acts without knowing what his or her action means. Participants
are willing to allow other people to give their action meaning by
building on it later.
5. Surprising Questions Emerge
The 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. When teams work this
way, ideas are often transformed into questions and problems. That’s
critical, because creativity researchers have discovered that
the most creative groups are good at finding new problems rather than
simply solving old ones.
6. Innovation Is Inefficient
In improvisation, actors have no time to
evaluate new ideas before they speak. But without evaluation, how can
they make sure it’ll be good? Improvised innovation makes more
mistakes, and has as many misses as hits. But the hits can be
phenomenal; they’ll make up for the inefficiency and the failures.
After the full hourlong Jazz Freddy performance, we never do learn why
Bill and Mary are making copies for John— that idea doesn’t go anywhere.
In the second act, a brief subplot in which two actors are in the
witness protection program also is never developed. Some ideas are just
bad ideas; some of them are good in themselves, but the other ideas that
would be necessary to turn them into an innovation just haven’t
happened yet. In a sixty-minute improvisation, many ideas are proposed
that are never used. When we look at an innovation after the
fact, all we remember is the chain of good ideas that made it into the
innovation; we don’t notice the many dead ends.
7. Innovation Emerges from the Bottom Up
Improvisational performances are
self-organizing. With no director and no script, the performance emerges
from the joint actions of the actors. In the same way, the most innovative teams are those that can restructure themselves in response to unexpected shifts in the environment;
they don’t need a strong leader to tell them what to do. Moreover, they
tend to form spontaneously; when like-minded people find each other, a
group emerges. The improvisational collaboration of the entire group
translates moments of individual creativity into group innovation.
Allowing the space for this self-organizing emergence to occur is
difficult for many managers because the outcome is not controlled by the
management team’s agenda and is therefore less predictable. Most
business executives like to start with the big picture and then work
out the details. In improvisational innovation, teams start with the
details and then work up to the big picture. It’s riskier and less
efficient, but when a successful innovation emerges, it’s often so
surprising and imaginative that no single individual could have thought
of it.
Read more: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/05/creative-teams/#ixzz2ZAQ6YUXg
Upcoming: Feuerman at ArtHamptons with Mark Borghi Fine Art
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Mark Borghi Fine Art is proud to showcase Carole Feuerman in Art Hamptons, July 11-14, 2013
at the Sculpture Fields of Nova’s Ark in Bridgehampton, NY. A
selection of sculptures and prints by the world-renowned hyperrealist
will collectively be on view in Booth 300. Following Art Hamptons, MBFA
will feature Feuerman’s work during a solo exhibition in their
Bridgehampton gallery, located at 2426 Main Street.Feuerman is widely recognized for her series of bathers and swimmers, which she began in the late seventies. Rendered with exquisite detail from every eyelash, freckle, and water drop, her figures exude an inner sense of life, peace and sensuality. A selection of sculptural works, ranging from miniature to monumental size, as well as Feuerman’s latest diamond dust silkscreens Shower and limited edition Serena silkscreens on canvas are on view with MBFA through the summer.
Join us for an Artist Meet & Greet on July 12th from 5-6pm at ArtHamptons Booth 300.
For more information, please visit borghi.org or arthamptons.com.