How a team thinks and acts collectively has a greater effect on its performance than the individual brilliance of its members. The methodology of ‘collaborative creativity’ affects team performance positively, according to Peter John Comber
Julia Rozovsky is an analyst with Google People Operations who spent two years studying more than 250 attributes of 180 high-performing teams and conducting more than 200 interviews with Google employees.
Her conclusion: ‘Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.’
Traditional, hierarchical, command-and-control organisations guide their flocks and expect them to move in compact unison. This approach is effective in situations where the workflow is predictable and common actions and interactions are repetitive.
Groups of people with appropriate skills follow a rigid set of rules and protocols, producing reliable results.
Modern, disruptive, fluid organisations allow the individuals in their clowders to pursue objectives with greater individual agency. This approach is effective in situations where change is constant and significant.
A heterogeneous group engages in constant experimentation and transforms its methods and products, guaranteeing adaptability.
Is your team a flock, a clowder, or a pod?
Both flocks and clowders have not only strengths but also weaknesses. The flock is inflexible, slow to adopt changes and scarcely innovative. The clowder is inconsistent, less predictable and more prone to failure. The pod has temporary autonomy within a framework that promotes collective focus on a specific goal. Before we examine the framework, I want to explore the idea of temporary autonomy.
Business-as-usual is vital, irrespective of the organisational style of the company – it’s what keeps things functioning, even when they aren’t functioning perfectly. Temporary autonomy gives teams the licence to explore different mindsets and approaches in specific moments while continuing, the rest of the time, to be immersed in the status quo of their organisation for ongoing business tasks.
Temporary autonomy provides a psychological distance from day-to-day routines that facilitates a change of speed and approach in the workplace. However, without a framework, temporary autonomy can quickly become either anarchy or polite group think – neither of which are desirable. The framework serves two purposes: give the team a clear focus and challenge them to approach the objective indirectly. A clear focus is needed to achieve productive outcomes. An indirect approach is required to avoid obvious solutions and the process being dominated by a minority of strong personalities.
Collaborative creativity
Collaborative creativity is a methodology that allows us to achieve this balance. Collaborative creativity uses creative exercises that are performed contemporarily by multiple small groups with the results of the work then shared and examined by the whole team. Collaborative creativity uses multiple creative exercises in each session to guide the team to look at a problem from different perspectives. The creative exercises are always bespoke, designed for a specific group of participants and the problem they aim to solve. The different exercises in a session are distinct but the sum of their outputs and the creative journey they define help the team to examine and resolve a problem collectively.
Collaborative creativity produces five forces that influence how a team performs in the session and beyond. Creativities most obvious force is invention. The value of invention lies in the proven correlation between new ideas and value creation. Collaborative creativity certainly produces new ideas but it also recognises that the power of creativity lies in other forces, in particular: empathy, self-discovery, realisation and cohesion.
Empathy
Understanding the point of view of others is vital for effective teamwork, learning from diversity and identifying commonalities has a lasting effect on team chemistry. Empathy is equally important outside the team – a shared comprehension of the mindset and attitudes of clients and other external actors can vastly improve the quality and consistency of a team’s actions.
Self-discovery
Related to empathy is the idea of oneself and our relationship with others. Creativity is an exploration of the mind that can be cathartic and revealing; allowing us to experience different situations and our relationship to them altering our knowledge, beliefs, emotions and attitudes.
Rewarding
Creative activities are inherently rewarding – children are spontaneously creative because it makes them feel good. Group creativity can help a team find meaning and purpose. People who consider their work meaningful are more productive and attentive while a team with a shared purpose is more focused and effective.
Cohesion
Creativity can help deal with friction and ambiguity in a group. Sharing a thought process and the genesis of ideas is an experience that cultivates intellectual intimacy and trust.
The five forces of Collaborative creativity help teams to solve problems and, in doing so, cement a collective identity, purpose and deepen human connections. The temporary nature of the format allows teams to experiment in a relatively low-risk environment but, thanks to the fact that it produces co-authored solutions, the outcomes are far from temporary. Everyone loves the things they create, and all those who participate in the creation of a solution instinctively want to see it succeed. This increases the likelihood of a new idea surviving the natural resistance to change of the status quo that exists to varying degrees in all organisations.
When all the key actors share a deep understanding of the context and spirit in which an idea was formed, it increases the coherence with which subsequently it is developed and delivered – translating into gains in efficiency, efficacy and speed. In times of unprecedented change (this year, for example) the speed with which an organisation reacts is a key indicator of overall performance. However, speed without control precedes disaster. The five forces of Collaborative creativity help avoid the effects of catastrophic disconnects between and within teams, making them more resilient and adaptive.
Mindsets tend to change slowly if at all and in groups the small changes within individuals are diluted by collective inertia. Creativity is a catalyst for change and group creativity is a catalyst for change within a group. Importantly, it can usher in synchronised change within a team and contribute to a choral focus. Individual attitudes and aptitudes are undeniably a contributing factor however, I believe that the main reason people act like sheep, cats or dolphins is how the environment they operate in expects them to behave. Collaborative Creativity can change those expectations.
Peter John Comber is an expert in applied creativity and author of The Forces of Collaborative Creativity.
With 36 years of professional experience he is a founding partner of Atstrat, a company providing Collaborative creativity services to the healthcare industry.
