Group Genius
Let’s brainstorm. Or so I thought.
Open brainstorming sessions, as explained by Keith Sawyer in Group Genius, achieve less than we might think. When a group’s focus is on simply getting ideas onto paper, their output is less effective than if led with a strict instruction to focus on generating quality ideas. A creative group needs a facilitator, someone to define the problem and direct people to come up with solutions, someone who says, “No idea is ever worth anything unless it has been well thought out… We want good, practical ideas. Let’s try to avoid stupid or silly ones… the emphasis is on quality not on quantity.”
But, after all, this is a book about collaboration. Sawyer wants to destroy the myth of the “solitary flash of insight” and demonstrate that true creativity is a process of small sparks linked together over time. He uses the telegraph as an example. Henry Morse didn’t invent the telegraph overnight, or even in a year. It took over a decade:
“His 1844 telegraph line depended on many insights contributed over time by many people. At every stage, Morse worked with others—Jackson, Gale, Vail—drawing on their expertise and collaboratively developing the next link in the chain. What made Morse successful was the twelve years of hard work required to iron out the technical problems, and the many small subsequent ideas that made the original idea possible.”
This concept of a steady flow of progress underlies Sawyer’s primary thesis on creativity. “Creativity isn’t about rejecting convention and forgetting what we know. Instead, it’s based on past experience and existing concepts.”
Creativity emerges as one gains a greater understanding of how different people, ideas, and technology link together. Put another way, Sawyer suggests that creativity is about applying past experience to the present. “To be creative, you need to be aware of as many potential analogies as possible; and when faced with a problem, you should try as many analogies as possible.”
In the most convincing section of the book, Sawyer delves into studies that test the solvability rates of certain puzzles. As background social clues and hints were introduced to the test subjects, they solved the problems at much higher rates. Additionally, the more people were exposed to difficult problems, the better they became at solving similar problems in the future. While the studies suggested that people derive their answers from social contexts, almost all the subjects from these studies, when asked how they reached the solutions, referenced a solitary insight. “This is a perfect example of the phenomenon psychologists call confabulation,” Sawyer explains. “People have no trouble coming up with explanations for behavior after the fact. They believe they had a solitary insight, but the real story is that a social encounter was responsible for the idea.”
These findings lead Sawyer to the conclusion that because “innovation emerges from the bottom up, unpredictably and improvisationally,” institutions must be structured to best capture and combine the sparks that end up changing the world. Here he begins to lose himself. He champions Linux and Wikipedia as models of open collaboration. In spirit, the examples may be adequate, but in reality, Linux has yet to conquer Microsoft, and Wikipedia struggles to maintain a level of quality deemed acceptable for scholarly and professional work. Linux and Wikipedia are like open ended brain storming sessions. Linux comes up with more features at the cost of many mediocre ones. Wikipedia presents good information at the expense of erroneous entries. Quality monitoring and filtering out the good from the bad is the cost that will continue to hold each of them back from conquering their for profit competitors.