Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

By: Keith Sawyer  

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Average Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5

Group Genius tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity, revealing that creativity is always collaborative--even when you're alone. Sharing the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz groups, theater ensembles, and conversation analysis, Keith Sawyer shows us how to be more creative in collaborative group settings, how to change organizational dynamics for the better, and how to tap into our own reserves of creativity.

Publisher: Basic Books

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Top tips found here - This is a GREAT book with top tips that grow from earlier research in creative collaboration to add extremely useful advice that facilitators like me can put into immediate action with diverse groups.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Arrived on time and in excellent condition - The book's condition was exactly how it was described. It was very reasonably priced, and arrived on time. Great service, thank you very much.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Group Improvisation is more important than individual talent - 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'

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Myth Busting... - `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.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Getting more out of more people,other things being equal - Ever thought that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane? Or that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, James Watt invented the steam engine, John Logie Baird did likewise for television and Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin (all from Scotland, by the way, the land of genius)? Sir Isaac Newton invented the calculus. Right! C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia entirely from the spark of genius from within? Well, after reading this book you will see that these various stories of geniuses inventing things single-handedly, while warding off the depredations of jealous and rival others, are all myths, perpetuated by the believers in the importance of the individual and the notion that creativity can reside only within the single person.

This book makes a strong case for the view that inventions are, more likely than not, the outcome of collaboration or at least the use by individuals of information provided by a web of informants, friends, rivals, students, writers and a further miscellany of people, who provide the wherewithal that the "inventor" can use at the right time and the right place.

This book fulfils three purposes. The first is that it provides a free flowing and exciting account of how we think about the process of creativity. We can understand that how people produce the ideas and actions that lead to great works of art, scientific breakthroughs and the technology that we have all become so dependent upon in everyday living , have progressed from attempts to understand the thought processes of the lone genius to the realisation that creativity stems from teams of co-workers and collaborative webs of participants. As someone whose early research was concerned with the associative processes underlying creativity within the individual and who later worked through an understanding of the dynamics of group interaction to see the potential of collaboration, I can vouch that this book provides a good primer of work in the area and it does so with flair and humour.

The second is that it gives, in Part 2, a set of puzzles and tasks that can be used by individuals, but more importantly groups and organizations, to experience the insight that alerts them to the possibility of creative collaboration and which can also enhance that creativity. It is a primer and also a training manual.

The third benefit of reading this book is that it provides a series of case studies of successful modern companies that have benefited society through creative collaboration and many organizations, large and small, can take courage from these stories and consider breaking out of their current structures and practices and try the new.

A central premise of the book is that creativity and problem solving are dependent upon the utilisation of knowledge, distributed most effectively across many people and not only resident within an individual. This has always been the premise upon which the idea that distributed knowledge should be superior to individual knowledge. The problem until recently has been that the barriers to the sharing of knowledge have been difficult to overcome and groups of people share more than knowledge; they share inhibitions and past experiences which prevent the utilisation of knowledge that comes from other people. This book, like several others that have been recently published, is based upon the notion that with the internet and the development of network theory, the sharing and utilisation of knowledge have become more democratic and practical.

Sawyer looks at the literature on group problem solving and creativity in this light, and looks at what is emerging in work on webs of collaboration and networks of associations. There are many thoughts on how the utilisation of networks can facilitate thinking and problem solving and chapters 8 and 9 repay close attention and are rewarding.

As a social psychologist, however,one can take a more critical position. While Sawyer does acknowledge that there are lots of conditions that will produce quite the opposite state of affairs, he does not give this material much room. Individuals in many settings are far superior to groups in the quality of thinking that they produce. One can add countless examples of studies where it can be demonstrated that, in fact, groups are "dangerous to your mental health". Sawyer's book is one of several which have appeared recently with the same message. It is, however, more accessible than James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few", and more balanced in its presentation of contrary evidence than Howe's "Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business". It is as optimistic as Sunstein's "Infotopia: How many minds produce knowledge" and one should not perhaps "rain on the parade" too liberally. But it would be foolish to take the contents of this book and apply the nostrums will-nilly to the all the tasks all organizations have to face. Like most insights which are used to generate formulae for practice, in this book, as in many others written today,one has to add "it depends" as a limiting statement after most observations and inferences.

Sawyer does add another important ingredient which does differentiate the book from these others,however, a set of core ideas concerned with the creative process that can be simply stated here and which can give a foretaste for the book. The first set of concepts stems from the idea of "flow", the notion that, when we are engaged in a task which entirely occupies our talents and we are concentrating on achieving our goal, we can attain a new state of consciousness where past, present and future seem to merge into one and we are almost outside of the environment. Sawyer applies this idea of individual consciousness to the experience we can attain within a successful operating group.

"Flow" in a group can be created when there at least five conditions in existence simultaneously. The group must have a clear goal, in the case of the dynamic tertiary education organization, a goal of solving specific problems within that environment. The group members must engage with each other completely, that is they demonstrate "close listening" where members are totally open to the ideas and suggestions of others, with no preconceptions. They are also concentrating only on the task, excluding intruding and distracting tasks and messages. They are given autonomy to address the task and have accepted that responsibility, and they subsume their own egos to the group, so that no one individual has individual leadership responsibility. If these conditions can be achieved, then the group is in a state of readiness to address the problems innovatively and to achieve novel solutions of high quality.

Of course, the achievement of this state of group consciousness is not easy and cannot be guaranteed, even if many of the conditions are in place. The group members need themselves to be skilled and knowledgeable, able to contribute and respond to others. But many people can report having experienced this state. Sawyer, while a psychologist, really formulated his ideas from his experience as a jazz musician, where collaboration and improvisation by the band members must predate the demonstration to the audience of a successful performance. If you are a musician or have played group sports, then you may well have experienced "flow" at some level, even if it has not been as an elite. The metaphor of music collaboration and sport makes an interesting comparison with the metaphor of the organisation as a military team prevalent today.

Setting aside any provisos, however, in the spirit of engaging creatively with an issue or problem, this book should be studied in the context in which it is written, to be seen as a creative solution to a pervasive issue in organisational behaviour. As a "Beginner's Guide" to the tribulations of group and organisational problem solving, this book on Group Genius, is certainly worth reading and studying. For an organization which has several teams, sometimes with goals and modes of operation which appear different, but which are, however, all seeking to achieve an overall goal within a particularly constrained market, this would be a good start to achieve a consensus that is, at the same time and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, creative.
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce KnowledgeThe Wisdom of CrowdsCrowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

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