Creativity requires us to collaborate with others. This course is designed to make you a better creative collaborator. Creativity can require us to bring together knowledge from different areas, often known by different people. We need to foster effective collaboration rather than have those differences lead to misunderstandings and conflict. The ideas that we generate, individually or collectively, will be evaluated by others, such as bosses, funders, and customers. These audiences will likely have different concerns when they hear about your ideas and are likely to evaluate ideas differently than you do. We need to pitch our ideas in ways that get others excited about them, rather than bored or confused, so that we can expand the group of collaborators in our creative efforts.
3-2.1 Teams Put Up Barriers
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Do curso por University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Creativity Toolkit II: Creative Collaboration
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
46 ratings
Curso 4 de 7 em Specialization Innovation: From Creativity to Entrepreneurship
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Jeffrey LoewensteinAssociate Professor of Organizational Behavior
Department of Business Administration
Jack GoncaloProfessor
Department of Business Administration
The members of a team all bring ideas to the table,
but those ideas aren't very helpful if nobody says anything, right?
So, the key to creativity in teams is that people talk to each other,
and that is not just about people having ideas,
it's about being willing to say something to someone else, right?
And so, the question is now that we've got our groups together,
we're not alone anymore,
what are the barriers to people speaking up and giving voice to new ideas?
So, one of the most straightforward problems that happen in teams is simply that
when you bring people together for a conversation face to face,
you can't really talk over each other,
you have to wait and take your turn, right?
And so, this just creates a conversational bottleneck
which introduces all kinds of problems.
I mean for one, I have to sit and sort
of wait for you to drone on about your idea, right?
Then maybe, I forget the idea I had in my head which actually happens a lot.
So this conversational bottleneck really prevents all of the ideas that people have in
their heads from coming out onto the table and being discussed
and being the basis for a potential change in perspective.
And also, it's not just that people forget and fail to share,
but also, the conversation moves on, right?
And suddenly, what you had to say is no longer relevant.
And so, people figure,
well, that ship's sailed.
And what ends up happening is that through this process you
lose all kinds of interesting ideas that you would have
had come to the fore if people were working alone
where they could just write down everything they are thinking with no constraints.
So, if you just gave more time,
that wouldn't even solve the problem.
I think, what you're saying is, even if we took more time so
that you could say your piece and I could say my piece and everything,
the fact of the matter is,
while you're saying your piece,
I'm listening and therefore I'm not generating my own piece.
Right.
And I've forgotten it by the time it comes back around to me.
Right. So, more time isn't an easy fix.
But there is some solutions that involve really just giving people
the problem beforehand and letting them think and write
their own ideas and come to the meeting prepared.
And a lot of times, people sort of forget to do that simple step,
and everyone comes to it as it's a new problem, right?
If you give people the opportunity to think in advance it really helps.
So, in effect, de-team, right?
So let's reduce teams for a moment,
let us all get our ideas down,
and then we'll come back together,
and we can circulate them and build and et cetera.
But if we're just in a team right here right now while
I'm talking, you're listening maybe.
You think? Sorry what was that?
And there you go, we've lost ideas.
And so, people tend to form teams too quickly without doing their homework.
So we sort of talked about an optimistic scenario which everyone's dying to participate,
and we are like jumping in, right?
But you're blocking me because we have so much to say that we can't all speak at once,
but that doesn't always happen, right?
This is easy, keep going,
and I'll just stand here and smile. I love it.
Right. So psychologists call that free riding or social loafing, right?
I'll call it laziness.
Laziness? I love that, too.
But that often is a consequence of putting people into groups.
When you're in a group, you're like,
okay, there's five or six other people,
I know they can't really track every single idea I'm saying.
And so, I can just kind of hide out a little bit, right?
And it's like the old saying,
many hands make light work.
Right.
And so in groups, you feel lazy and that's actually a good thing, right?
You feel like I can rely on everyone else.
The problem is that you get fewer ideas out on the table,
so there's just less raw material to work with in terms of being creative.
So, we produce less,
because I feel like,
well, I did my share.
Right. And so, again,
there's this theme of creativity requires effort and really
thinking through problems and sharing perspectives and really,
it's not going to happen just by,
the group isn't just going to roll over the next idea, right?
And so, everyone has to participate,
but to the extent that they feel lazy,
it just doesn't happen, right?
Right. Well, and there's probably also a social comparison process, right?
So, I'm thinking, well,
I said two things,
that guy only said one.
Yes.
So I'm doing fine, right?
And actually, those kinds of comparisons make people happy.
At least, I'm not that loser.
So, I can relax. And so,
when everyone does that, it's like a downward spiral, right?
Right, lowest common denominator.
I mean, literally. I mean, that's the logic, right?
Is that we're all get a little lazier
and then we compare ourselves to the person who's sleeping.
At least, we're not sleeping.
Another gift from teams, right?
But there is actually an easy way around this.
I'm just going to say, what do we do?
Right. So, one of the easy ways is just,
often, you have a brainstorming sheet in which people are writing down ideas.
If you simply make each person in the group have their own column,
and every time somebody says an idea,
you write it in a different column,
it just sends a signal that, oh,
my output is being tracked and I don't want to be the person
with no ideas at the end of discussion even if no one notices.
And I've seen data where just that simple intervention
boosts the number of ideas generated by as much as 30 percent.
So, it's just a really simple logistical thing.
We're starting off easy. This is one of the simpler problems to solve.
Right, absolutely.
So but we can go beyond.
I mean, some of it is,
I talk and you're not talking, and this one is,
I don't worry about my output because
we're all sort of sharing and that guy over there sleeping, so I'm better than him.
Right.
But these logistics fixes are still things that we stumble over, right?
We don't solve these kinds of problems.
And then the next one I think is maybe something about timidity, right?
Like I don't speak up.
So, even if I have a list with names,
maybe I'm not comfortable sharing that.
So, I mean part of it is that people want their ideas to be liked,
you want people to say like, "I love that idea."
They're probably creative ideas,
sometimes sound weird, they're unusual,
they make you look quirky,
and sometimes they generate conflict.
Do I want to put that next to my name?
Exactly right. And so, it's awkward.
It can be awkward to share ideas and so we often find is
that rather than sharing their boldest ideas,
people share their safest ones so that people are more likely to say like,
"Yeah, that sounds reasonable and good.
You're okay, right?" And so,
rather than really taking risks and
sharing ideas that they think are really path breaking.
I don't want to look dumb,
I don't want to look stupid,
I don't want to look irrelevant,
I don't want to look crazy.
Yeah, and so, these again aren't issues when
you're working alone unless you're really neurotic.
I take that back.
But in groups, there really is this very real potential for people to say like,
"Your ideas are terrible."
Absolutely.
And people are terrified of that.
And so, again, teams make people timid.
You're putting yourself out there. So we block each other.
Yes, it's terrible, right?
We get lazy and we get timid.
Yes and these are things that we could fix.
We could intervene, but they're going to happen pretty
naturally unless you're deliberately intervening.
Right. In the case that timidity,
some groups you'll find actually explicitly rule out criticism.
And so, there are cases where like, if you criticize my idea,
someone rings a bell, that's not allowed.
That gets around it a little bit but as we'll see,
there are some more difficult problems to get around. These are the easy ones.
Yes.
So, we learned that teams have the potential to be creative if
only individuals would voice their perspectives.
But it turns out, there are some problems that arise
that some of which are actually pretty simple to address,
things like, I can't talk over you.
I have to wait my turn and I can forget ideas.
I can also feel lazy in groups because I don't feel like anyone's really tracking me.
And I can also get timid because I'm worried that you won't like my ideas.
We offered some sort of preliminary suggestions for how to address those,
but it actually gets much more complicated from here.
So, these were the really easy problems and from here,
we're going to get to some of the more difficult issues that arise in teams.
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