As I touched on in the introduction, the assertion that groups are more creative than individuals has been scientifically tested more often than a great many claims in social science. We know that it is controversial to argue that teams are less creative than individuals. There is not a person who has ever been on a team who has not had the feeling or the experience that creative magic has indeed happened in their group. Yet, the data are painfully clear on this all-important question. So, why are so many teams and their companies under the powerful illusion that they are more creative? Well, for most of us, it just feels good to be part of a team, and so we think that magical things like creativity must be present when we are working with our team.

This myth of team creativity all began when an enterprising businessman named Alex Osborn published a book, Applied Imagination, in which he coined the term brainstorming. Osborn was a staunch believer in the power of teams. He was convinced that if teams did four simple things—express ideas openly, not criticize others, focus on quantity, and build on the ideas of others—they would easily outperform individuals. Apparently, this sage advice was enough for most organizations to adopt his belief and institute it into their best practices.

Sometime later, the academics asked for proof. Since Osborn did not have data, much less conduct controlled experiments, a flurry of research programs were launched on the question of whether teams or individuals were more creative. As I noted in the introduction, hundreds of studies were conducted that compared intact, face-to-face brainstorming teams with the same number of people—nominal groups—working completely independently. Nominal groups outperformed real groups in terms of quantity as well as quality.

Many executives and managers reject these ideas outright. But as previously observed, this is akin to dismissing the surgeon general’s report that smoking causes cancer. In one recent simulation my colleagues and I conducted, the nominal groups generated over 20 percent more ideas and more than 42 percent more original ideas! It is nearly impossible to not get this effect.

The reason people think teams are more creative is that they believe in synergy. They believe that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But this does not appear to be the case—at least under typical conditions. It is certainly possible that synergy can take place in teams, but more often than not, it does not. For example, teams that build on each other’s ideas don’t create more ideas, and the ideas are not better.

What are the implications? Well, on nearly a daily basis, leaders and their companies make decisions as to whether to assign group projects or individual projects. This raises the question of whether we are efficiently using the talents of people in companies or whether we are falling far short of our potential by insisting that people work in groups when they might be well advised to work individually on a problem—at least for some period of time.

The solution, however, is not to dismantle teams, which are essential to reach organizational objectives. Rather, we need to rethink and restructure how teams work creatively. Left to their own devices, teams are usually poorly structured for the creative process. However, with a few key insights and simple best practices, teams can dramatically improve their performance and generate a creative conspiracy.

Let’s face it. Most adults don’t like rules. We got fed up with them in grade school and looked forward to the day when no one would tell us what to do or when to do it. We embraced the idea that no rules freed our minds. Well, unfortunately, we were probably better off in grade school—or at least more creative in grade school. The data in this case are unambiguous. Groups that don’t have rules or guidelines are distinctly less creative than those that have rules and guidelines.

How do we know? Paul Paulus and his team at University of Texas, Arlington, contrasted teams that followed guidelines with those that were set free to guide themselves. Teams with instructions and rules humbled the laissez-faire teams when it came to creative output.

There is also evidence that groups have difficulty functioning without rules. So, they often respond by making rules. For example, in one provocative field investigation, James Barker conducted a long-term study of the effects of removing rules and regulations in a team. The well-meaning CEO of ISE Communications made a commitment to restructure the organization into self-managing teams. Literally overnight, he reconfigured the physical workspace and created several work teams called Red, Blue, Green, Orange, and so on. Before the change, three levels of managerial hierarchy existed between the vice president and the manufacturing workers. After the restructuring, the reporting rules were removed with the idea that this would empower workers and ideas. However, over the following four years, a curious thing happened: the teams spontaneously developed more rules similar to ISE’s old bureaucratic structure (e.g., if you are more than five minutes late, you’re docked a day’s pay). The social rules were even more rigid. And workers nostalgically recalled the good old days of bureaucracy. Barker’s groundbreaking study points to two simple truths about rules and creativity: first, removing rules in no way liberates people; and second, some rules are actually adaptive for groups.

The principle seems to hold for individuals, as well. Lilach Sagiv and colleagues compared how “intuitive” people and “systematic” people behaved under “structured” versus “free” conditions. Structured conditions involved presenting people with a form and challenging participants to find a creative way to use it; in contrast, others were given complete freedom to generate a creative form. Overall, creativity was higher under “structured” task conditions.

We’ve been told all our lives by everyone—teachers, employers, friends, and family—that quality trumps quantity. To test this assumption, one study examined four different types of instructions: no stated goal, a quality goal, a quantity goal, as well as a joint quantity and quality goal. The results? Those who had the quantity goal generated more ideas and better ideas than any other goal.

What’s the problem with focusing on quality to the exclusion of quantity? Several. First, quality requirements lead to self-censoring—people do not suggest ideas because they worry that the ideas don’t meet the imposed quality criterion. They fear others will ridicule their ideas—this is known as jeering. We’ve all seen how this creates an uncomfortable silence and can also be demoralizing. So, people play it safe and don’t say anything. Instead of ridiculing or badgering others, team members must find ways to stimulate and encourage others. Team members don’t need to be criticized, rather they need ideas to stimulate the next idea, and so on. This is called priming: the act of stimulating new ideas and thoughts with a phrase, suggestion, picture, or idea. For example, the other day, I was facilitating a brainstorming session, and the group came to a grinding halt after about five minutes. With five more minutes left to work, they were at a loss for how to reinvigorate themselves. So we decided to look for inspiration in the environment. We raided briefcases and found various items—magazines, iPhones, personal photos, and so on—that the team spread out on the work table in front of them. Suddenly, new ideas started sprouting! Priming is like social popcorn—it stimulates others to suggest ideas.

A strict, or even loose, quality focus narrows the options. Quality requirements create smaller sets of ideas from which to choose. The smaller the set of ideas from which to develop and choose, the less likely it is that a truly great idea will emerge.

A related problem is the primacy effect: the strong tendency to be attracted to the first option that is suggested. There is a pervasive belief that the first idea is mission-critical for the creative enterprise—a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in developing a product. But Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios could not disagree more. According to Catmull, it is important to generate and sort through a mass of ideas—“it’s like an archaeological dig where you don’t know what you’re looking for or whether you will even find anything. The process is downright scary.” For that reason, I often try to get companies to avoid choosing the very first idea that is brainstormed.

Idea exchange is a crucial part of creativity, and we sometimes lose sight of the fact that there are two key elements. First, people need to carefully process and understand the ideas in the group—this is known as attention. Second, they need to reflect on the ideas—this is known as incubation. Incubation refers to how our unconscious mind often works on a problem when we just can’t think about it anymore. This is why sometimes people think of a solution to a problem when they are in the shower or taking a walk—they are not thinking consciously about a problem, but unconsciously, they are solving it. This is important, because incubation gets shut out by another dynamic that affects brainstorming—fixation. This is the tendency to focus on a limited number of domains or kinds of ideas. Fixation is thinking inside the box! Unfortunately, the very act of brainstorming with other people tends to lead to fixation, as compared with brainstorming independently. Indeed, over time, the quality, variety, novelty, and quantity of ideas starts to decline in a group. However, taking a break can stop this slide.

Engineers Paul Horowitz and Alan Huang were both facing extremely vexing problems concerning designs for laser telescope controls and laser computing. After struggling with the problem for months, they both visualized a solution in their sleep. Similarly, in the 1950s, Don Newman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was trying to solve a troublesome math problem. “I was … trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t.” One night, he dreamed of the solution in his sleep and turned his dream into a published paper.

Studies of problem solving and incubation reveal that temporarily putting a problem aside and returning to it later can lead to more breakthroughs and superior performance than continuing to actively focus on the problem. Why? Steven Smith and Steven Blankenship of Texas A&M University argue in their forgetting-fixation hypothesis that correct solutions are made inaccessible during initial problem solving because we keep retrieving incorrect solutions. Thus, forgetting about a problem and focusing on something else can make correct (but dormant) solutions more accessible.

Private space and solitude are out of fashion. In some companies, requesting private space might even raise concerns about your teamwork ability or whether you are a “team player.” Nearly all US workers spend significant time in teams, and 70 percent of us inhabit open-plan offices. Furthermore, in recent decades, the average amount of space allocated to each employee has shriveled—from five hundred square feet in the 1970s to two hundred square feet in 2010. When I went to primary school, our desks were in neat rows, and all my gear was loaded into my own space and sacks that hung on my desk; today, primary school classrooms are arranged in pods and rotated regularly. Yet, working physically close to others and removing all boundaries is in no way conducive to creativity.

Susan Cain notes in a 2012 New York Times article that Backbone Entertainment, a video game company in California, initially used an open-plan office, but soon realized that its game developers—the creative think tank of the organization—were not happy. So Backbone converted to cubicles, and those nooks and crannies soon allowed the game developers to think creatively.

Consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister studied the Coding War Games, a series of competitions that test software engineers’ abilities, and compared the output of more than six hundred computer programmers at ninety-two companies. DeMarco and Lister discovered that the enormous performance gap between highly productive companies and less-productive companies was driven by how much privacy, personal workspace, and freedom from interruption that programmers had. Statistically, 62 percent of the best performers described their workspace as private, compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. And 76 percent of the worst programmers said they were often “needlessly” interrupted, compared with only 38 percent of the best performers.

For all these reasons, the cave-and-commons workplace design may be ideal for team-based companies. In the cave-and-commons setup, people have common space to meet when needed and necessary, but they have their own private “caves” that they can retreat to for creative idea generation, which usually happens in solitude. This hybrid structure perfectly reflects the fact that the creative process is a fine orchestration of individual and group work. Let individuals think in their caves. Then let the team debate which of the ideas is the most valuable (this is when to bring the teams into the commons).

There is also a widely held related notion that the more time groups spend together, the more they will bond and perform well together. Think again. Karen Girotra, professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD, examined hybrid teams, in which individuals first worked independently and then together, and compared them with teams that worked only together. She found that hybrid structures led to more ideas, better ideas, and increased ability to discern the best-quality ideas.

People are under the mistaken impression that being in a group will supercharge idea generation and motivate them to think creatively. In fact, the opposite is true! It is nearly always better for people to work independently before moving into a group. Paul Paulus and his research team put this idea to the test by training people in several different modalities. Some people worked alone on a brainstorming problem and then moved into groups. Other people worked with groups and then moved to independent brainstorming.

The results were quite clear: those who worked independently before moving into groups had much better group brainstorming sessions! Why? The people who were alone initially in their own thoughts before moving into a team experienced much greater group creativity. When we are brainstorming alone, we are in a state of thought, not in a state of action. Conversely, when we work in teams, we start getting busy, making plans, and setting agendas—and this does not serve us well. By brainstorming alone first, the individual is not under the peer pressure of others. Moreover the individual does not have to pay attention to social cues or for that matter even listen to others. Rather, that person can think in a completely unfettered fashion.

I warned you that some of the ideas in this book would not be politically or organizationally correct. This is one of them. For years, we’ve been told to act more like team players and put self-interest aside. In fact, that advice does not make sense for creative teamwork. People who are pro-self and have a high concern for their own interests are actually more creative than people who are pro-social.

How do you know if you are pro-self or pro-social? Well, as a start, do you resonate more with the statements like, “I enjoy being unique and different from others in many respects” or statements like, “Even when I strongly disagree with group members, I avoid an argument”? Are you more likely to state, “I do my own thing, regardless of what others think” or “It is important to maintain harmony within my own group”? What about, “I prefer to be direct and forthright when dealing with people I’ve just met” versus “I usually go along with what others want to do, even when I would rather do something different”? If you tended to agree with the first statement in each pair, chances are you are primarily pro-self. If you tended to agree with the second statement in each pair, chances are you are primarily pro-social. Don’t misunderstand me—being pro-social is very advantageous in many, if not most, of life’s situations. It is just not conducive to thinking creatively.

However, this book doesn’t advocate creating a culture of self-centeredness. Rather, it points to ways of temporarily putting pro-social, communal concerns aside during a focused brainstorming session in order to activate or ignite a pro-self orientation for increased creativity. In my research with social psychologists Wendi Gardner at Northwestern University and Elizabeth Seeley at New York University, we’ve used a technique to temporarily engage pro-self views. To prompt people to be self-absorbed, we have them write or read statements that contain a lot of personal pronouns such as I, me, and mine. Conversely, to get people to focus on others, we have them read or write statements that contain pronouns such as we, us, and ours. We find that this simple mind exercise can temporarily activate either pro-self or pro-social concerns.

There is a widespread belief that creativity is best served through inner peace, serenity, and calmness. One of my colleagues was convinced that her own creative writing was best when she had no distractions, quietly sipping tea in a peaceful setting. However, after three months of such languid writing days, she produced nothing that she was proud of. Shortly thereafter, her first baby was born and her schedule went from long, open, peaceful, unstructured days to tightly orchestrated, minute-by-minute slots, punctuated by extreme activity. The result? She became prolifically productive. In her words, she was “wired.” The way she put it to me was, “I have ninety minutes when Sam is napping, and I run to the computer and write like crazy. I’m totally focused.” Turns out, my colleague is onto something. In fact, it is better to be aroused when attempting to think creatively.

In my research with Brian Lucas, we interviewed people about how they structure their environment when they want to be creative. Common responses included doing yoga, meditating, taking a nature walk, and looking at pleasant art. So, we put this to the test: we had some people listen to their favorite music, but we made others listen to a (boring) political speech. As you might expect, when people were listening to the speech, they became annoyed, frustrated, and agitated. Those listening to their favorite songs grew more relaxed and serene. We then examined their behavior in a creativity challenge and found that those who had listened to music dramatically underperformed in comparison with those who had been frustrated by the annoying political speeches!

The guts of this book—the chapters that follow—speak closely to the questions on the Creative Collaboration Assessment. What’s the bottom line on each one of the questions you just answered? Here’s a lineup of some of the key issues and themes I’ll cover in the rest of the book, mapped to the chapters in which they’ll appear.

• Who needs ground rules? It is a common fallacy to believe that creative teams should throw out all the rules. The right rules and norms actually liberate groups! However, not all rules are conducive for the creative conspiracy. The right brainstorming rules catalyze the creative effort and improve performance. The wrong rules lead to self-censoring behavior and frustration. Another problem is that teams often violate the very rules that they sought to put into place! I call this team drift—the tendency for organizations to slowly revert back to business as usual. This book is about staying on course and sometimes that means going into a headwind. This is why meeting facilitators are key. Chapter 7 provides a review of the original four rules of brainstorming and then supplements these with additional rules.
  
• Conflict: can’t live with it, can’t live without it. On the one hand, most people don’t like conflict they seek to avoid it, and associate it with dysfunction. But teams that avoid conflict don’t get a lot of creative work done. On the other hand, teams that embrace the wrong kind of conflict—engage in open confrontation, rudeness, or take-no-prisoners battle—have their own problems. Chapter 6 distinguishes two types of conflict in teams: conflict about the task (what should be done) and conflict about the people, often referred to as task conflict versus relationship conflict. The key is to be hard on the problem, not the people. This chapter teaches teams how to have a good fight.
  
• The who and how of group facilitation. Most team meetings are either facilitated by no one in particular or a leader who may have his or her own agenda. People who may not have group facilitation skills may do more harm than good. That’s a waste of the group’s time. It is important that someone take control of the process and engineer the meeting in a way to suit the goal. Creative teamwork is one type of work that teams do and setting the stage for creativity is anything but intuitive. Chapter 7 reviews the best practices for the creative conspiracy.
  
• Aids, props, stimulation. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that business meetings should be dull and people should not have fun. These same people decided that an eight-point font and a seventy-five-slide PowerPoint deck is also good for meetings. So most meetings take place with people seated around a table in a room with blank walls. Most people don’t realize how much of their behavior and mood is affected by the environment, for example, by color. Seating behavior influences who emerges as a leader. Teams that have committed to the creative conspiracy carefully design their meeting spaces to invite and capture ideas. In Chapter 7, the challenge is how you would allocate a significant budget to organize the optimal creative retreat.
  
• Mood. Team leaders are extremely contagious. Mood is a temporary state that is either positive or negative and either high in energy or low in energy. Mood can be affected by a number of factors and mood strongly influences creativity. Chapter 5 discusses mood in detail and describes its role in motivating the creative team.
  
• Goal setting. Goal setting is hugely important for creative teamwork. Alex Osborn, the father of brainstorming, wisely realized that quality goals can stymie a team; in contrast, quantity goals liberate a team. Chapter 7 discusses the importance of setting stretch goals.
  
• Diversity. Diversity is like an onion, meaning that on a very superficial level, we might diversify, say, on skin or eye color or dress. On a deeper level, we might diversify on the basis of education and experience. And still deeper, there are differences in values and morals. There’s a lot of evidence that diverse teams are more creative, but also experience more conflict. Chapter 3 takes up the question of diversity and how to build a heterogeneous team.
  
• Team size. Most team leaders make their teams too big, often by a factor of two or more! Consequently, meetings are often a waste of time, difficult to schedule, and hard to manage. As a general rule of thumb, I like Richard Hackman’s advice: keep the team in single digits. I discuss team size in our chapter 3.
  
• Incentives and rewards. Incentives and rewards form part of the discussion in chapter 5, on how to motivate the team. Most people regard themselves to be intrinsically motivated but think others are in it simply for the money. This disconnect creates problems when we work with others.
  
• Leadership. Who should lead the creative team? Chapter 4 considers the characteristics of the ideal leader.
  
• Brainstorming. Brainstorming is such a common practice that there is scarcely an organization that does not purport to use it. However, most companies cannot articulate the rules of brainstorming, much less follow them. In chapter 7, the four cardinal rules of brainstorming are reviewed, along with the evidence that supports their effectiveness today. The chapter also reviews new research that further improves brainstorming effectiveness. It is imperative to structure the brainstorming session differently than other meetings. Failure to do so will mean that people may remain in the same passive-aggressive mind-set that they take into other meetings. Part of the creative conspiracy is to set the mood so that people are lured into engaging in thoughts and behaviors that, quite frankly, will not be appropriate in other contexts, but that will pave the road toward success in the creative context.
  
• Team membership. Teams that have masterminded the creative conspiracy are marked by high levels of efficiency and productivity, but there is also a special character to their boundaries and membership. They’re very, very aware who’s part of the team and who’s not. They often have their own mystique—special names, inside jokes, and phrases that are usually not transparent to outsiders. However, nothing is forever and therefore, there is membership change in the creative team. The arrival of new members and departure of founder members instigates a self-reflective process in the team. Said simply, when people come and people go, that leads people to think about what the team is about. In chapter 7 I review some of my own research findings on the benefits of rotating team membership.
  
• Where does the work get done? The open floor plan was supposed to be a sign that we were team players and we could benefit more by socialization than by holing ourselves up. The open floor plan soon moved from the office space to the educational space. However, it just may not be the best thing for creativity. Groups who have crafted a creative conspiracy have private hideaways, and doors may be shut allowing individuals on the team to do what they need to do. Chapter 2 makes an argument for some degree of what might be viewed anti-social behavior in teams and chapter 7 focuses on the importance of hybrid meeting structures that balance team-time and alone-time.
  
• Time pressure. Is supposed to be bad, right? Lots of research suggests that groups simply work to fill their time. And whether teams meet for 1 hour, 90 minutes or 2 hours, there are no appreciable differences in group performance. Groups in the creative conspiracy meet without being bound by the meeting start and stop time. Chapter 7 presents evidence that as time pressure increases and the clock starts, creativity increases.
  
• Social networks. One interesting thing about creative conspiracies is that they often involve far-flung others. Thus, creative groups may very well not be pods of tightly knit friends; in fact, they may have little or no history of a working relationship. They are likely to be characterized as people who have disparate connections—clandestine ties to others who can help them. Chapter 3 focuses on how to compose the creative team and argues that odd bedfellows—as opposed to similarly minded buddies—make for the best creative teams.
  

Chapter Capstone

There are a lot of popular ideas on how to ignite creativity in teams. This chapter identified several plausible-sounding ideas that have gained popularity as best practices in organizational teams. These beliefs are so commonplace that they have achieved pseudo-scientific status. However, there is very little (or in some cases, absolutely no) scientific evidence to suggest that they work. In fact, some of these myths may even thwart creativity. The good news is that there are straightforward ways to fix most of the pernicious “best practices” that have crept into our organizations.

I hope this chapter has shaken the very foundations of how you think about creativity in your team. I’ve done my job if you are feeling somewhat rattled. Remember that complacency is the nemesis of the creative conspiracy. This chapter has challenged you to take a hard, critical look at the day-to-day practices of your creative team. If your score on the Creative Collaboration Assessment is low or lower than you desire, don’t despair. There are several steps you can take to dramatically improve the creativity of your team. After all, that’s the point of this book—to speak to the questions that the Creative Collaboration Assessment has raised and introduce the skills needed to spark a creative conspiracy. The next chapters introduce several best practices that are quite different than business as usual.