Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration [Paperback]

Keith Sawyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 2008

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?Group Geniustears down some of the most popular myths about creativity, revealing that creativity isalwayscollaborative-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.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Keith Sawyer is an associate professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the textbookExplaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, has designed video games for Atari, and lectures frequently to both academic and business audiences. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (March 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465071937
• ISBN-13: 978-0465071937
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #70 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Decision-Making & Problem Solving
  • #71 in Books > Self-Help > Creativity

More About the Author

Dr. Keith Sawyer, a professor of education, psychology, and business at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the country's leading scientific experts on creativity and innovation. After receiving his computer science degree from MIT in 1982, Dr. Sawyer began his career with a two-year stint designing videogames for Atari. He then worked for 6 years as a management consultant in Boston and New York, advising large corporations on the strategic use of information technology. Dr. Sawyer entered doctoral study at the University of Chicago in 1990 and attained his PhD in psychology in 1994. He is best known for his studies of jazz and improvisational theater groups. His twelve books include GROUP GENIUS and EXPLAINING CREATIVITY, and he has published over 80 scientific articles.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 48 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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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (Hardcover)

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

27 of 30 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
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This review is from: Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Collaborating multiplies your creativity, September 7, 2007

By 

Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (Hardcover)

As befits its subject matter, this is a lively and innovative book, which uses many examples drawn from the worlds of jazz and improvisational theater, as well as from creative writing, cycling, banking and computer technology. Keith Sawyer doesn't stop at telling stories, though; he also supports his ideas with solid evidence. In well-organized chapters, complete with summaries and checklists, he debunks common beliefs about the nature of creativity - primarily, the myth that you need to be an isolated genius to succeed. Instead, he argues that innovation is most often the result of collaboration. Sawyer overreaches in some instances: He does not fully explain why some individuals are so much more creative than others in the same "collaborative web," or why some individuals can produce revolutionary ideas in relative isolation. However, that's a quibble, since Sawyer tackles a complex and slippery topic and comes up with some genuinely new insights. We recommend this book to managers and members of workplace teams, and executives who wish to encourage creative thinking.