Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (Hardcover)

~ Keith Sawyer (Author)
Key Phrases: improvised innovation, group genius, collaborative web, New York, United States, Silicon Valley (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Forget about the myth of the solitary genius: collaborative effort generates ideas and inventions, says this useful, upbeat book about how innovation always emerges from a series of sparks—never a single flash of insight. Judiciously wielding exercises and dozens of examples, Sawyer (Explaining Creativity) helps the reader understand how people think and function in and out of groups. He looks at how J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis composed their epic novels in concert, how unorganized individuals can come together to provide disaster relief more efficiently than government planners, how Charles Darwin and Samuel Morse built their work on others' discoveries, how information sharing helped Silicon Valley beat out Boston's computer startups. (Sawyer's riffs on jazz ensembles and improv comedy as sites of ingenuity are less convincing.) Basing much of his work on that of mentor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—who writes about reaching the state of heightened consciousness he calls flow—Sawyer offers guidelines for creating group flow. Insisting that collaborative webs are more important than creative people, he calls for an organizational culture that fosters equivocality, improvised innovation, and constant conversation—that's a recipe for group genius. Even if few readers are in a position to do away with their organizational chart, this is a solid recipe for unexpected innovation. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description

A pioneering expert on creativity and innovation shows the power of collaboration for individual organizational creativity.

Creativity has long been thought to be an individual gift, best pursued alone; schools, organizations, and whole industries are built on this idea. But what if the most common beliefs about how creativity works are wrong?

In this authoritative and fascinating new book, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative--even when you're alone. (That "eureka" moment in the bathtub couldn't have come to Archimedes if he hadn't spent so many hours arguing and comparing notes with his fellow mathematicians and philosophers.)

Sawyer draws on compelling stories of inventions and innovations: the inventors of the ATM, the mountain bike, and open source operating systems, among others, to demonstrate the freewheeling ways of true innovation.

He shares the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz groups, theater ensembles, and conversation analysis, to show 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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (June 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465071929
• ISBN-13: 978-0465071920
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #376,256 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jazz up your groups for breakthrough genius, June 30, 2007

By	K. Sampanthar "Inventor of ThinkCube" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

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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 interconnected web that surrounded them to facilitate the breakthrough. Sawyer doesn't fully explore this idea, since his focus is on explaining collaboration, but it is easily translated to how individuals can leverage this network of people and ideas and use the power of collaboration to generate breakthrough ideas.

Sawyer, who started his life developing computer games for Atari and as a management consultant, uses his research to develop advice for businesses on how to build genius groups and get out of the standard `group think mentality'. He shows how to build an innovation lab and how to permeate an innovative culture through an organization. His advice will be hard to execute for most companies since they need to overcome some of the paradoxes of innovation. Innovation is predominantly inefficient, not something most managers want to hear. He even explores a lot of research from the original work on brainstorming by Alex Osborn and studies that followed that challenged the findings. He doesn't gloss over the fact that not all tasks need an innovative methodology and are better handled `solo' than in groups. He does explain that the studies that challenged Osborn's findings on brainstorming were using it for the wrong types of work. Sawyer shows that for companies that want to develop breakthrough ideas, they need to bite the bullet of inefficiency and develop genius groups.


The Take-Aways:
- Collaboration is the secret to breakthrough innovation
- Group Genius is best suited for breakthrough ideas and not for pedestrian improvement projects, where individuals perform far better
- Innovation is inefficient and companies need to embrace the risk of failure
- Even when individuals come up with a breakthrough, they are normally at the center of a web of people and ideas that came together

Innovation will never be routine and it comes with many challenges; Sawyer has written a great book that provides a good roadmap for a company that wants to infuse a creative culture throughout their organization.

Kes Sampanthar
Inventor of ThinkCube

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How "ordinary" people - working together -- can achieve extraordinary innovation, July 17, 2007

By	Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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, senior managers must provide full support (including sufficient resources, especially time) of a collaborative team. Next, they must be patient rather than committing the common mistake of "ripping out a seedling to see how well it's growing." Also, they must understand - really understand - the meaning and especially the implications of the aforementioned seven key characteristics of effective creative teams. Finally, they must recognize that each "failure" (however defined) is a unique learning opportunity for them as well as for team members.

Credit Keith Sawyer with a brilliant achievement, especially at a time when the need for innovative thinking and creative collaboration is greater now than ever before.

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Howard Gardner's studies of multiple intelligences, notably Creating Minds (i.e. those of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi) and his more recently published Five Minds for the Future. Also Andrew Hargadon's How Breakthroughs Happen, Michael Ray and Rochelle's Myers' Creativity in Business, Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect, Henry Chesbrough's Open Innovation and Open Business Models, Michael Michalko's Cracking Creativity, Richard Ogle's Smart World, and X-teams co-authored by Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Leveraging the Genius of the Group, November 19, 2007

By	Jeffrey Phillips "Innovation and Team Product... (Raleigh, NC) - See all my reviews

The path to becoming more innovative often requires debunking a number of myths or commonly held beliefs. For instance, the idea that a lone genius is often responsible for an invention or innovation. In fact, most innovations or inventions spring from the combination of the work of many people. Edison did not create the lightbulb alone, nor did Al Gore invent the internet by himself.

In his book, Group Genius, Keith Sawyer looks at the power of Group Genius, the impact of collaboration on creativity and innovation. Rather than rely on a single genius, we should be harnessing the power and knowledge of many people in our organizations. Through a number of interesting examples, Sawyer demonstrates how the power of collaboration increases the capability of the firm to generate more ideas and better ideas, and enhances the culture of innovation.

Sawyer starts off the book with a few characteristics of creative teams:

1. Innovation emerges over time
2. Successful collaborative teams practice deep listening
3. Team members build on their collaborators' ideas
4. The meaning of an idea becomes clear over time
5. Reframing the problem or solving a different problem
6. Recognizing that innovation is inefficient
7. Innovation emerges from the bottom up

Although he presents these ideas early on, they don't receive enough exposition throughout the book. These concepts alone, however, are enough to chew on for quite some time.

Sawyer divides the book into three sections, looking at how teams collaborate and how corporations collaborate. Yes, I know that's two sections. The third section is a little less defined and really looks at how we as individuals think and the mental models we use which provide frameworks which can limit our thinking and creativity.

In the first section, on team collaboration, Sawyer demonstrates the power of improvisation as a method to improve problem solving and innovation. His argument is that too many rules and too much planning tend to choke out creativity and innovative problem solving. He provides several examples where groups were faced with significant challenges and had to improvise solutions on the spot. While improvisation is often inefficient, it can lead to better ideas and better results in some cases. Sawyer also describes "flow" - a concept that originates from research by Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a heightened state of consciousness that occurs when:

* People are working on tasks that match their skills
* There's a clear goal
* There's constant feedback as to progress and attainment of the goal
* The person is free to fully engage in the task

Research shows that "flow" is essential to creativity. Sawyer moves on to describe a number of conditions that need to exist for a team to achieve flow, using examples from sports teams to improv to major corporations.

In the second section, the Collaborative Mind, Sawyer looks at successful innovators and people who were highly creative and seeks to determine how they got that way, and how "regular" people like you and me can become more creative. In this section there are a number of exercises to help you start reframing problems and step away from your usual perspectives and context.

In the third section of the book, Sawyer looks at using the concepts of collaboration and group genius within an organization - how to organize for improved collaboration and innovation, how to build collaborative webs and how to collaborate with customers. In this section he offers some very useful ideas and approaches to use within any team or organization.

Group Genius is an excellent book, because it combines theory with practice and practical guidelines. Too often, books about innovation and creativity are written from a purely academic viewpoint, with a lot of research and theory described, but not much information on how to put the information into practice, or from a very tactical perspective, suggesting a few tips or techniques or offering up some simple exercises. Sawyer does a good job of demonstrating the thinking behind his suggestions, but also presenting a number of actions that a team or corporation can take to become more innovative by tapping the collaborative genius of a team or the company. He uses a lot of examples, from improv actors to large corporations, but always within context. The section on the Collaborative Mind is interesting but really more focused on the individual and his or her creative capability, while the sections on team and organizational collaboration are focused on how your teams, groups and business units can harness the power of collaboration to achieve more creativity, better problem solving and generate better ideas.

Some books about creativity are read once and filed on the shelf for occasional reference. Group Genius is a book that will be so dog-eared and so heavily used you may need more than one copy for your own use, and a number of copies for your co-workers as well. This is a book that can be used by an individual, a team or a business unit, with relevance for all of them. This book is my first introduction to Keith Sawyer's work, and I look forward to reading his other books after reading this one. I highly recommend it to anyone who is searching for ways to improve the collaboration, creativity or innovative capability of a team or company.

Reposted from an original review on the Innovate on Purpose Blog.