I’ve been reading Keith Sawyer’s great book on Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

It’s renewed my faith in the power of group discussions and co creation in helping develop new ideas and it’s reminded me about the limitations of groups in new idea generation too.

Starting with the positives…

Conversation leads to flow and peak experience

Talking about ideas and how to make them better is likely to lead to ‘flow’ where the brain gets into the ideal state to generate creative solutions.

This is linked to the benefits of improvisation where we ‘rap’ with one another to build and develop solutions that deliver richer outcomes than a solo effort could.

Groups are better at evaluating ideas than solitary individuals

They can adapt and re-align ideas better than the individual who might be stuck in their own narrow mind-set. And different thinkers can make ideas go boom! when their own experiences bring different perspectives collide to bring different perspectives. So…the group is a more creative set-up…

But there are lots of limitations to groups and when they work best – these feedback into research and idea generation sessions…

Groups really only work optimally when they have been properly formed

Ideally groups will have shared goals, and a shared sense of identity – which means ad-hoc focus groups, workshops and co creation sessions may always have limitations. Moderators and facilitators need to work especially hard at ‘forming’ groups and setting them up so that they really do have a sense of purpose.

Sawyer also points out that goals need to be ‘loosely specific’ for innovative ideas to flourish – there needs to be room for creative thinking. That means that group discussions and workshops can’t be too goal-centric and facilitators need to be willing to let solutions develop to problems that might not been identified at the beginning of a workshop or group discussion.

Participants also need to be the ‘right’ type of people

A lack of creativity in groups is caused by ‘production blocking’ – via poor listening skills, idea fixation, social loafing and social inhibition. Sawyers suggests that creative groups will always have a good mix of people from different backgrounds and disciplines. Businesses need to think hard about getting a good mix in their co creation sessions – the man from accounts, the engineer, the r&d specialist, and not too many people from a marketing function… equally we need a good mix of brand users and consumers to deliver creative outcomes.

New thinking and innovation takes time

It’s unlikely that half day brainstorming sessions will lead to lots of innovation and new thinking as groups need to work together over long periods of time to come up with new ideas (according to Sawyer). Sawyer’s research has been inspired and informed by his study of improv jazz musicians and actors who have worked together over the years, and know how to gel as a group. Maybe that means that research can only contribute to the innovation process – and not drive it – so that group discussions, workshops and co creation can provide fresh thinking and new ideas within an innovation ‘process’, but ultimately businesses need to be set up for innovation in a much broader sense to succeed at NPD.

Maybe ‘classic’ brainstorming isn’t that effective at creative thinking

Sawyer takes time to demonstrate that some ideas are best generated solo, – a number of individuals will generate more ideas than the same people grouped together – so the group needs to come together for tasks that are appropriate to group dynamics. Sawyer argues that groups work better where new ideas are complex, tasks are new and unfamiliar and new ideas are dependent on abstract and thinking and visualisation of solutions.

Ultimately the real strength in groups seem to be around identifying good ideas and specifically identifying what their application or benefit might be – and this takes a broad range of people from different backgrounds to see how an idea might just work in their world. Sawyer (like Ricky Gervais!) stresses that creativity is about identifying which is the good idea from a range of many – and groups can help us do that…