Are we more creative in groups?

Brainstorming, innovation workshops, agile working – creativity, and innovation seem to happen in teams nowadays only.Gone are the days of the lone geniuses, like Archimedes, Newton, The Wright brothers, Edison, etc., fiddling around night after night in his and her labs waiting for the ‘eureka’ moment to suddenly come about. We read of assistants and other helpers to build stuff and provide support, we never hear of them spending time in team workshops or brainstorming sessions.

To be creative today, we often meet in places full of colourful furniture, ball bathes, and slides, free drinks and snacks, felt tip pencils, brown paper walls, and so forth.

Is this the perfect pathway to ‘effective’ creativity? Will this maximize the number of ideas and the outcome towards the purpose of our company, department, or our organisation as a whole?

In history, disruptive innovation and ideas often have been brought about by individuals, often rather introverted, working mainly on their own and only scarcely reaching out to others (like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein or Steve Wozniak). Is this different now? Are we more creative in teams than in groups of individuals?

Science seems to be pretty much split over this question. When A.F. Osborn developed the concept of brainstorming, his technique promised to double the number of ideas that a given number of people could produce. However, research subsequently showed, that the number of ideas produced by a group in brainstorming sessions was actually lower than the number of ideas the same number of people would produce when thinking up ideas individually. Why is that? On the other hand, breakthrough innovations more often could be attributed to teams than to individual inventors, when patents on breaktrhough innovation were analyzed.

What is creativity, after all? Common definitions define creativity as the production of ideas that are novel and useful a the same time . Ideas are created in the brain as recombinations and assióciations of existing thoughts and concepts. According to Steve Jobs, “creativity is just connecting things.” Creativity builds upon elements that are already available in the brain. The more dots you have available the more possibilities you have to connect them in different ways. Also, ideas build one upon the other. Once an idea is thrown out into the world, it can be used to build new ideas upon. The space within which new ideas are born into is the space of the adjacent possible. It is nearly impossible to create an idea in thin air without any link to any other idea.

While you can consciously generate new ideas, e.g. by using creativity techniques like divergent or lateral thinking, or creativity matrices, etc. — all of them are tools that you use to put yourself consciously into a different perspective and way of thinking — the mind-wandering mode of your brain is where much of the creativity happens. In the mind-wandering mode, the so-called default mode network becomes active and starts to spontaneously recombine bits and pieces into new ideas and plays them through in various ways, the salience network is picking up promising ideas and presents them to you executive system, which where and when you start to consciously evaluate, elaborate or revise those ideas and also try to steer you default mode network into the right direction. 

The default mode network and the executive network are working in an opposing manner.  While in mind-wandering mode the conscious thinking is suppressed, the executive network prevents you from immersing yourself in the mind-wandering mode. To have the right share of novelty and of usefulness, the right share of each mode in your idea creation process is what can put you onto the right path to creativity

How are these processes working when we pull together a group to generate ideas? When people come together to be creative as a group, several factors influence how creative this group will be.

Whenever several people are interacting, group effects come into play. Once we are in a group, we are aware that other group members will evaluate and judge what we are saying, whatever we say in such a group will be guided in some way by what evaluation we expect or desire or even prevent us from saying what we think (evaluation apprehension). Within teams, we often find some members rushing ahead throwing out idea after idea while others seem to be avoiding to draw any attention and contribute only a little or no ideas at all, hiding behind the outcome of the overall team (free-riding or social loafing). Last but not least, an intense discussion about the ideas of the individual group members results in people speaking and even more listening much of the time to the ideas, thoughts, and stimuli of the others. This might block the individuals from letting their thinking process flow and shooting out their idea immediately once it materializes. Instead, they need to wait for their talking slot which reduces the speed at which ideas are conceived (blocking).

All creativity and all thinking happen in the brain. If we try to think as a group or to be creative in our team, we need to link and coordinate the thinking processes of the individual group members’ brains. To do so, we must communicate our thoughts, we must e.g., speak to others and listen to them in turn. Unfortunately, thinking and communication of our thoughts draw upon the same resource of cognition, it comes with communication cost.

The overall cognitive capacity is a fixed resource that only can be used on one activity at a time. Therefore all the sharing of information on thoughts, inspiring and listening to others, uses up capacity and thus is reducing the time that individuals can be producing ideas. On top of that, communication as a conscious act, suppresses the activity of the wandering mind, the default mode network in the brain. Yet the wandering mind is where spontaneous and flexible recombination of thoughts and experiences into ideas is happening.

The compositon of a group has an important influence on how it can be creative together. While diversity of experiences, background and thought can produce a broader range of ideas, too much diverstity, especially when it comes to the style of working or interacting can produce conflict that hinders creative work. Autonomy in the work, encouragement of creativity, mutual openness to ideas, constructive challenge to new ideas, and shared goals and commitments foster a creative interaction.

Group dynamics, especially the fear of non-conformity also have been shown to alter the perception of the team members. Instead of consciously avoiding comments and activities that could conflict with the rest of the team, the perception of people often changes so they avoid conflict without even knowing it. This can lead to groups moving their creative efforts into a completely false direction without even recognizing it.

One important differentiator for the creativity of teams vs the consolidated creativity of a group of individuals is the kind of invention that is worked on. If the task to come up with ideas can be easily split up between the team members, such as constructing a machine or a complex system, teams seem to perform better than groups of individuals. If the task to come up with ideas can be easily split up between the team members, such as constructing a machine or a complex system, teams seem to perform better than groups of individuals. For more holistic acts of creativity, such as the design of systems that have highly interdependent parts that need to be considered all at once, the individualistic approach is more promising.

Now – what is the best way to let all your people be creative and innovate to bring your organisation further?

The central notion is that creativity happens in the brains of individuals. The task is to have many individual brains working together on a common task, making the best use of their thinking capacities and spend only a little amount on coordination. From here, we can derive a couple of recommendations to optimize the overall process:

• have people who have a broad experience across many dimensions, who have many dots that they can connect in new ways. They require fewer stimuli from others and can spend more time on thinking.
• have people who have different sets of experience between them, but not too much to avoid an overdose of conflict being introduced
• give people time and space to think on their own. This lets ideas come about and ripen (and avoids group effects)
• when meeting in groups to exchange thoughts , remember : smaller groups are better (more efficient) as they spend less time listening to each other
• be conscious about the communication mode you choose for the exchange of thoughts. Asynchronous communication allows people to communicate whenever it fits their thinking process, while synchronous communication allows for a dynamic discussion and stimulation.
• break up creativity tasks whenever possible, don’t try to work on the complete task with everybody at the same time – but be aware that the division of labour comes with communication cost
• make sure that the tasks are clear to everybody, individually and as a team. This avoids spending time on clarification needs and conflict.